The Trib (37 page)

We're sitting at a wooden table in the blue-walled cottage on Booterstown Avenue, a twenty-five-minute walk from UCD where he lectures in literature. All his writing is done on this table. The room opens out onto a patio and narrow garden of trees and bushes, an oasis of quiet. I drink coffee from a Nicholas Mosse mug with the face of a cat given to him by his niece Selina. ‘She loves cats, and so do I,' he says. ‘They're like small children. The grief when they die is appalling.' I try an organic chocolate cookie. ‘I got them for Philip, but he's not here.'

The couple celebrate their thirtieth anniversary next year. ‘It's been a flash, really,' he says. I remark that I've been forty-five years with my wife and we're still discovering each other: maybe relationships need mystery to survive. ‘It's the same with me and Philip,' he laughs. ‘There has to be some unknown.'

Although his 2002 play
Gates of Gold
deals with the love of two men who have been together a long time, it was inspired not by his life but by Micheál MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. He invariably draws on life but only to reimagine it. ‘If the facts lie, they are my lies,' he says. He gestures to an armchair piled with books on Guy Fawkes. ‘I did a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company called
Speaking Like Magpies
about the Gunpowder Plot, of which I knew nothing other than it didn't work, that Guy Fawkes was not the ringleader and I knew that James I was probably gay. That was the extent of my knowledge. So I read those books and then just threw them aside and wrote as if from scratch, as I always do. I have this anti-historical gene. I cannot see a fact without turning it on its head.

‘I loved Micheál MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards too much to do a documentary on them. I wanted to spin a strange haunted story, something exotic, dangerous and dark that they would have appreciated and staged.'

He never met MacLiammoir, but saw him perform his one-man show in the art deco bar of Lough Swilly Hotel in Buncrana. ‘It was one of those great nights. People were mesmerised by him. He was so disciplined, so absolutely focused. An extraordinary quiet spread across the place when he talked about Wilde. I was eighteen and I'll never forget it.'

While there were no books in his home in Buncrana, he steeped himself in Greek mythology and Shakespeare and modern drama courtesy of the BBC. ‘It became my encyclopaedia. Those were the glory days of British television with a whole new generation of anti-imperialists ruling the roost. They put enormous emphasis on broadening the horizons. I had this cosmopolitan education in the wilds of the Inishowen peninsula. We were lucky as well because we had Derry only fourteen miles away, where we could go to the ABC and see films without the censors crapping on them.

‘When I was fifteen or sixteen I saw
Midnight Cowboy
uncut – my god, the shock of that.' He was traumatised by the move to student digs in Dublin, just up the road from where he now lives. ‘I'd never been out of my home alone. I was so homesick I refused to warm to the city; but of course, unknown to myself, it was really becoming my territory.'

The first play he saw at the Abbey was Brian Friel's
The Gentle Island
in 1971. ‘It was ahead of its time in terms of sexual politics and sexuality,' he says. Several of the cast would later have roles in his emergence as a major playwright. Playing the little boy was David Herlihy, who subsequently portrayed Dido in
Carthaginians
, an elegy to the dead of Bloody Sunday. Maureen Toal would become his ‘glorious muse' in a tour de force
Baglady
monologue.

Bosco Hogan created the role of the loyalist volunteer Pyper, whose comrades were annihilated in the trenches but return to haunt him in
Observe The Sons of Ulster
.

‘I'd probably run a mile if I met them in the streets of Belfast but they wouldn't go away. They were eight young men full of energy and full of purpose there in the room in my head, coming out. They were good company for a while. They were in New York a couple of years ago. I went to visit them on their travels. I can talk very rationally about it now but when it was happening I certainly wasn't thinking rationally about it. I just went for it.

‘That's what we were encouraged to do in the early 1980s when Patrick Mason and Joe Dowling and Seán McCarthy were out to get fresh blood into the theatre, writers like Bernard Farrell, Graham Reid and Neil Donnelly. They moved hell and high water to make the Abbey what it should be, putting money into new productions and into young writers' pockets. Not much but it was great, believe me. When the Abbey neglects this, it is in decline.'

McGuinness has never lost this sense of daring. He has been a wonderfully subversive influence in Irish theatre, confronting political and sexual taboos with a poetic intensity that has undermined deep-rooted prejudices, not just with his original plays but in translations of classics. He enters into a creative dialogue with Ibsen, Chekhov, Lorca and Brecht undaunted by the fact that he's never been to Norway, Russia, Germany or Spain, nor speaks a word of any of the languages. ‘They come to me,' he says. His is a theatre of imagined worlds, not literal reality. ‘I loathe being predictable to myself even when I'm clearly mining a territory I've looked at before. I want to do something different with it. That's part of the joy of it. I've no notion where things are going, absolutely no notion.'

There Came A Gypsy Riding
, set in Connemara, is about suicide, a theme he will soon return to with a BBC screenplay
A Short Stay in Switzerland
. ‘I think one of the terrible consequences of suicide is that it confronts everyone else with the possibility that they might do the same,' he says.

‘There was a terrible tragedy in my own family. My cousin took his life, unexpectedly. I didn't want to exploit that, so he's radically transformed into a much younger man, a teenager. But there's no doubt that that event is the core of the play. I didn't want to examine the boy's decision, I wanted to look at its effect on his family. I'm not going to say it's a happy ending. It's not, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an ending where there's life afterwards. And that's as much as you can take from it.'

McGuinness doesn't do sentimentality. ‘There's too much Donegal ice in me for that. We're a very hard people. I'd like to think I'm a very violent mix of the rough and the courteous. That's what I like about the landscape of Donegal, its spectacular harshness with occasional signs of pleasantness. Not too much pleasantness, but enough to make it endurable. That's what my work tries to do.'

There are no plans for an Irish production of
There Came a Gypsy Riding
. ‘It's a long time since I've had anything new in Dublin. I've theatres I can go to in London. It means I'm not dependent on anyone here. I'm not dependent on their commissions or on their good will. I don't need to lick arse.

‘It's terribly dangerous to have a single outlet or a single working relationship. For everybody concerned, it can only end in tears. I wish the Abbey and the Gate all the best, but I think they would understand me when I say I have to go elsewhere at times to get the challenges and the shaking up that I need.'

The buzz around Fight Like Apes is building to a roar. The
Tribune
joined them on the road to observe the monkey business up close.

21 September 2008

Glastonbury, June:

F
ight Like Apes' bass player, the tall-and-skinny-with-an-afro-on-top Tom, stands victorious in front of the drum kit as his bandmates disappear to the wings following a storming set on the BBC 6 Music Stage. He holds a bottle of Buckfast aloft like a raucous prince might a sword, surveying a battlefield of conquered enemies.

Backstage, while loading her keyboard into the back of a van, lead singer MayKay hugs it momentarily and calls ‘hold me' to no-one in particular with hysterical humour. In the dissipating audience on the other side, journalists and industry people wander back to the press bar rather stunned, while a BBC radio reporter gathers vox pops on the gig – generally breathlessly excited appraisals of many people's new favourite band.

This is the world of FLApes, a band three-quarters Dublin, one-quarter Kildare, who have been touring the UK almost every day since February, making inroads in an indie music industry where the only way to do it is play live, play live, play live. It's working.

Oxegen, Punchestown, July:

The 2FM New Band tent is heaving, partly with the curious, looking to see the band everyone is talking about. As the Apes enter to a deafening roar, there are tears of delight in the eyes of their PR team. No-one now, not even them, can believe the rise of a band not even two years old, still to release an album. On that stage, like every stage, they kill it.

Afterwards, the keyboardist, Pockets, addled by adrenalin after what was probably the crucial gig of their just-happening careers, stomps towards the dressing room, sweeping back his Worzel Gummidge-meets-Robert-Smith hair, saying, ‘Let's go drink some vodka.' He readies the refreshments with the excited shakes of a housewife who has just been told her husband has been in an as-yet-unspecified accident.

Someone offers the mohawked drummer, Adrian, a drink and a cigarette, to which he replies, smiling, ‘I don't do either.' A short while later, Fight Like Apes begin to, well, fight like apes – all camaraderie, of course, wrestling, jumping about, trying to work off the impossible energy of what just happened. Other bands pass by, staring at the antics. The buzz around FLApes of possibilities, magic and talent is almost audible. Since Glastonbury, Jonathan Ross, Zane Lowe and other influential BBC DJs have been playing their tunes. It's all happening.

Birmingham, August:

In an airport car park, MayKay bundles herself out of the van wearing a pyjama ensemble and a half-on eye-mask. This week, the band is in the
NME
for the first time, under a headline that says ‘Everybody's talking about Fight Like Apes.' It's a big deal. Irish indie bands are generally ignored entirely by the British music press. Outside of the mainstream, there hasn't been a success story since Ash or JJ72. ‘Well, now that “everyone's talking about us”, you think they'd write about us more,' says Pockets wryly, as everyone settles down in the van to watch an episode of
King of the Hill
. As it happens, the
NME
does just that. The next week, they will be in a list of bands not to miss during the upcoming Reading and Leeds festivals. The week after that, the
NME
will make them No. 2 in a list of ‘hopes for the future'.

The next day, Green Man Festival, Wales:

After an evening of drinking vodka, wine, whiskey and beer on a fire escape outside their hotel and on top of their van (although MayKay and Adrian both went to bed rather early), the band arrive at a boutique festival in a valley in Wales. MayKay is annoyed that she mightn't be able to swear in her songs as BBC Radio One wants to record the gig. ‘They always do this,' she strops, ‘if I knew they were going to use it [the recording] straight away, I would be OK, but I don't.' When they go on stage, she swears in every song that has swears. BBC Radio One probably isn't pleased. Before they went on, she hung back behind the stage backdrop. She's wearing American Apparel disco hot pants. She doesn't like going out on stage until the last minute, rather cutely scared that she'll look like ‘an eejit' wandering around in sparkly shorts before the music kicks in.

She needn't really worry. Everyone who has seen MayKay play, worked with her, photographed her, will tell you the same thing. The woman is a star. But this band is not one person. MayKay may hold the visual key to Fight Like Apes' image, but their sound and attitude is very much a sum of its parts. They address each other as ‘friend' and ‘pal'. And although Adrian doesn't drink – something that can often be an alienating setback in rock and roll – he still gels, with the rest of the members nicknaming him ‘side-stage-drian', such is his interest in watching bands that play after them at festivals from the side of the stage.