interviews Working With Words: An Interview With Vincent Woods By Margaret M. Strain KAIROS

Transcription

1 KAIROS interviews 11.2 Fall Working With Words: An Interview With Vincent Woods By Margaret M. Strain Your professional achievements are impressive for their diversity. You seem quite comfortable moving in and out of different genres, engaging the written and spoken word as a radio broadcaster, interviewer, poet, and playwright. Can you provide a little background about how you got started in the language business? Almost the first time somebody read to me, I think I fell in love with words and with stories. I remember reading my first books and remember it doing something to me. From the time I was very young, I d say about seven or eight, I felt that I wanted to be a writer and that never really wavered through my later childhood and teen years. I think somewhere along the way, I slightly confused journalism and writing [i.e., creative] and so although I wrote poetry and some stories from the time I was about thirteen (and won various small awards and things), I couldn t see a way into writing as such without going via journalism. I studied mainly print journalism in what was then the only journalism school in Dublin in Rathmines, but found it somehow not satisfactory, and I didn t really suit it because I wasn t disciplined enough and I couldn t understand why one had to take particular formulae and work with them. At that stage, I would have been quite passionate about politics and I wouldn t have been objective at all. Then, almost by accident, I found myself working as a sub-editor in radio in our national broadcasting station, RTE. Somebody said, There s work as a freelance journalist here. NEWS RADIO I d done some reviewing for The Irish Times, some vaguely artistic things, but here was pure, practical news shaping--writing radio news. It was a completely new discipline for me and it was invaluable. I worked with some very old established journalists who d say, Oh, well, if nobody s dead, it s not a story or Oh, how many dead in the earthquake at such a place? Oh, well, you know, give it a line. And it was hard and it was cynical, but it was actually a window into the reality of news making and the approaches to news. At about twenty-two, twenty-three, I was doing these overnight shifts as a journalist in the newsroom at RTE, but I was the only person there, so I was kind of lord of the newsroom [laughs] for maybe eight hours at night preparing the morning news. And it was fantastic training. At that time, all the wires coming in were on rolls of paper, so you had this huge physical work of going through them. It was before computers. We were still using typewriters. And in 1984, I began to broadcast. I remember it was during the1984 Olympics, and I began to do news at night for the first time for one of our news channels. I did news on the hour through the night, and that was the start of a broadcasting career in front of the microphone, live, on-the-hour news and then with a few others. There was a terrific news service then called Radio 2 News, the second national channel. It was a popular

2 2 format with two- or three-minute news on the hour, but it was really fast, really up to the minute. We worked terribly hard, and it was great discipline because you had to learn how to condense a very long news story into thirty seconds, forty seconds, and it made you focus. It made you go for the kernel of what s important. I still look back at that with a certain amount of affection and gratitude for the training it gave me. Did you return to poetry after that? Somehow through those years, it was almost as if there was no time to write poetry. I was reading poetry. I was passionate about it, but this was like another line in life. I worked on all the main news programs on the major radio channel. I ended up presenting all of them and ended up for a few years being a reporter in Belfast, round the country, covering elections, doing various news stories. Eventually I co-presented what is still the most important news program on radio here called Morning Ireland. And that would have been seen as the height of radio journalism in Ireland, as high as one could go. I was twenty-nine then, and I d done it for a couple of years and something in me which had been eating at me a little bit more and more said, If you don t get out now, you never will. If you want to write, you d better do it now because otherwise you re not going to do it. HAVING A GO AT WRITING I remember it clearly on a Sunday evening driving back to Dublin from Cork. I decided I was going to resign on Friday and I did. All I knew was that I wanted to write. I didn t know what I wanted to write. I loved theater. I d been going to theater as much as I could in Dublin for the previous several years. Most people were really shocked at a decision to leave a good job: What are you going to do when you re sixty-five? You ll have no pension. But what do you do? [laughs] I might be dead by the time I m sixty-five. If I don t do this now, I ll never know. So I resigned, and a couple of months later I went off, and for various reasons, I ended up in New Zealand and there I wrote my first play, a little play called John Hughdy and Tom John (1991). I remember that when I sat down to write, I had no idea what would come out on this blank page. And I was quite surprised that a play began to emerge with characters and voices. I do think that sometimes we follow our own destiny. In Australia the following year, I met Maelíosa Stafford, who was coming back to Ireland to take over the Druid Theater Company as artistic director. We talked, I gave him the script to the play, and he phoned me a few months later to say the Druid really wanted to do it. Over ten years later, you revised John Hughdy and Tom John and restaged it as On the Way Out (2002). Yes. I slightly extended the first section, John Hughdy, and the second one, Tom John, I reworked because when I looked at it again I wasn t happy with the first version. I felt it was inadequate as a portrayal of character. I was giving voice to an idea rather than actually giving voice to a full character. As you wrote, did you keep a journal? Jot down notes? Start with a germ of an idea? No, not consciously. It was 1990 when I wrote that first play. But early in 1989, I d taken a few months leave from RTE and I went back to County Leitrim where I grew up and I spent a few months there talking to old people, making recordings, talking to my parents, writing things down, but not consciously with a plan to use it for writing. It was mainly to record, to set it down. When I look back at what I wrote in New Zealand, I realize it was probably influenced

3 3 by that time, but mostly what you write comes out of your whole life. In a sense, every play has been a part of me, and the language of that first play is very much out of my childhood. It s filled with those voices of the people around Leitrim with this very rich mixture of standard English, Irish English, and words from Irish a very, very rich way of speaking and thinking. Do you share drafts with someone as you write or is it a solitary process? It s solitary. I mean, I have one or two people I show work to but mostly that s with poetry. With plays, I tend to work at, put the script away, and go back myself--though in A Cry from Heaven, I did work fairly consistently with Jocelyn Clarke, the dramaturg at the Abbey Theatre in shaping the play. PLAYING WITH FORMS You ve completed a number of adaptations for the stage. You revised Jon Fosse s play Winter for the Project Arts Centre (2005), adapted Ignazio Silone s novel Fontamara for the Vesuvius Theatre Company (1998), and in the case of A Cry From Heaven, reenvisioned an old story. Does the process of translating one genre into another present particular kinds of writerly challenges? I see them as very different, and I would be limited, very limited in terms of the translations I would do because the only language I would feel confident to work from in terms of translating into English would be French. Jon Fosse s Winter is called a version because it is actually working from Fosse s own Norwegian with a German version of it and then working on an existing English language translation for a specific production. Fontamara, Ignazio Silone s novel, is from the English translation of the novel, and that was a commission. In a sense, that was a practical response to somebody saying, Would you do this? And I was interested enough in the novel to feel I wanted to do it, but without the commission, I wouldn t have been doing it. How did you decide what material to take from the original work and what to omit? Some of it seemed fairly obvious in terms of staging. You look at a novel and you see what might work on stage and what won t, what characters seem most striking. You also see things that are impossible to translate onto the stage. I see then A Cry from Heaven in a totally different character, a totally different category. For me, it s just taking the kernel of the myth and building a completely new play around it. There is this heart of the play which is the legend, but the rest of it is me completely. I see it as a wholly original work based on an old idea. I have also adapted a series of my own poems as radio plays from a collection called Lives and Miracles (2002). There s a long poem in that called The Life and Miracles of Christy McGaddy and that became The Gospels of Aughamore, four half-hour radio plays. I suppose I love playing with different forms and things crossing over from one form to another. In the same way, I often use rhyme or poetry in the plays, and some of my poems (even when they re short), so they have this taut, dramatic quality to them. A series of narrative poems like Christy McGaddy has a dramatic sweep and I could see that as a stage play, and at some time it may become one. I haven t done anything for film, but in some of the poetry especially there is a strong cinematic feel. And I d love to use--which nobody s doing

4 4 here and probably hardly anywhere anymore--poetry and rhyme in a film narrative because when that works it can be so wonderful. A DIFFERENT DEIRDRE: COMPOSING A CRY FROM HEAVEN During his lecture, Different Deirdres, Declan Kiberd observed that playwrights return to ancient stories because there s some new vision or version to tell. What did you see as the vision of A Cry from Heaven? Two things, and I d make a clear distinction between them. I wanted to retell the story of Deirdre and the Sons of Usna because I felt that many people here have not forgotten the story and many, many people outside of Ireland would never have heard the story. So I wanted to tell the story for its own sake, in the first instance, because it s a great story and because it s a story that fascinated me from the time that I was very small and it lodged deep in me. But I also wanted to do something new with it and that s where the ending of the play comes in. I wasn t satisfied with the traditional end in which Naoise and his brothers are killed and Deirdre eventually kills herself. I wanted the play to address what I perceive as the end of something in Ireland--almost the end of mythology, the end of legend. For me, it ties in with the destruction of landscape around Tara and with what society has become. I wanted this play to perhaps indirectly speak to that, and therefore you have this short lived new generation out of the legend. You have a child who s born, Deirdre and Naoise s child, who is only allowed to live a short time. It s not there in the legend. I know that different people will interpret that in many different ways. Some already have in what they ve said to me. There is also Naoise s last love speech to Deirdre before he goes to battle which is a description of the landscape and the journey to Tara, a journey she will never make, but he s evoking it for her and that was written very deliberately to sound bells in people s minds here about the motorway that is being bulldozed through that landscape now. And maybe to get people to think about the country, the society we have created--our attitudes towards the present and the past. Referring to William Butler Yeats Deirdre (1907) and John M. Synge s Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), Kiberd pointed out the motif of the hero warrior, the importance of nationality, and the ultimate sacrifice an individual makes on behalf of a greater good. This reading focuses upon the male characters of the narrative, namely, Naoise, Fergus, and Conor. A Cry from Heaven certainly doesn t ignore these themes; however, in contrast to previous adaptations, you ve foregrounded female figures of the legend. For example, Leabharcham, an old woman in the legend, is younger and becomes a mother to Deirdre. Ness, a marginal character the myth, orchestrates much of the action in the play. Finally, Kiberd regards Deirdre as a pawn of male desire. Here she has wit, intelligence, and presence. She is a woman to be reckoned with. In A Cry from Heaven, women are every bit as capable of agency, of seeking vengeance, as the men. It s a very accurate reading of the play. Yes, Deirdre is indeed a very strong character in her own right and deliberately so. Leabharcham is younger, and Ness is all present. Again this is what I mean about the play being an original play created around an idea. It s actually taking the whole notion of the Ulster cycle and the material in it and threading more of that around the story of Deirdre. When I began to think about Conor, I found myself thinking a lot about his name Conor McNessa and his mother Nessa, or Ness, and about the various powerful women that we see in Irish mythology. Anything I ve read about the Ulster cycle suggests that strength. At the heart again of the poem is this kind of sexual politics and male-female

5 5 struggle. I wanted this to be central to the play because in a sense, I have always seen Deirdre as part of that. There s that extraordinary image of the cry from her mother s womb before she was born. For so long I wondered, was that cry heard? If she did cry, was it because she was foreseeing her own future? Was it invented in order to destroy her? Did Cathach, as I have created him as a possible misogynist, want her killed from the moment she is born? Did he invent this destiny in order to have her killed? I wanted to open up a myriad of possibilities rather than providing answers A to Z. I think some people have seen the play as that--as a journey from A to Z--and it s not meant to be at all. It s actually meant to open out all of this, put it down there, and let people judge for themselves. I was shocked by Fintan O Toole s review of the play which said I had simply taken details of Deirdre s life and told them in linear fashion as if the play is not doing anything else. True, there is linearity, but there s linearity to life. We live in space and time. While it is linear, it s also seeking to push the boundaries of those lines in almost all the characterizations. I also wanted the audience to get the relationship between Leabharcham and Cathach, between Ness and Conor. And this is very important: It s also part of what I hope will be a bigger tapestry. I am hoping to make one or two other plays in conjunction with this one--to make a bigger cycle of plays. I didn t want Deirdre simply to be this pawn in a game between Conor and Fergus or Conor and Naoise. I wanted her also to have power in her own right, to be complex--not necessarily lovable, but human. In fact, when I look at the play now I think perhaps I should have done more work on Naoise. The portrayal of Conor is the director s choice. There s a weakness in Conor in the text, not as much perhaps as he is portrayed in the production, but again it s a very interesting area to open up to this possibility that there must have been weak leaders. Were there any sections of the play that you found hard to write for the stage? No, not particularly. I started with a complete outline of the play. That frame was there from the very beginning: Fergus return from Connacht to Deirdre s pregnancy, her death, this child who Conor believes to be his, the killing of the child, and the return again from Connacht with the defeat of Ulster. The characters emerged as I wrote. Who knows where characters come from or why, but all of those threads seemed to come together. There are various triangles among the characters--that s quite a Celtic idea actually and the world got bigger as I wrote. For instance, that last speech of Ness, that really kind of gloating speech about Deirdre s death, I wrote in Paris in late March so I was working on the play, tidying it up. I wanted a long, last speech for Ness there and a longer one for Fergus, longer than I had. STAGING A CRY FROM HEAVEN You touched on the director s decisions. How would you characterize the collaboration with director, Olivier Py? Did you discuss matters of staging or interpretation? Olivier directed the play because I wanted him to. I saw a production he did of Paul Claudel s, The Satin Slipper (1929), and I thought it was extraordinary and beautiful. I thought, Here s somebody who can do something amazing with this Deirdre I m writing. We sent him an early draft of the script, and he said, Yes, I would love to direct it. He is also a writer, he loves poetry and theater, and so it seemed perfect. He has this extraordinary visual sense. We met and got on very well; then we casted it and rehearsal started. I guess ultimately there was less collaboration than I had hoped for in the production. I was there at rehearsals, but it became increasingly clear to me that the production of the play would be Olivier s vision of

6 6 the play. That s fine because in a sense that s what you do as a writer when you give the play to directors; it mostly becomes their vision of the play. The staging of the play is hugely important for Olivier; his whole concept of theater is something not static, but multidimensional, full of theatricality. A lot of people have talked about collaboration on this play and I guess when I think about it, there wasn t really collaboration because I wrote the play and Olivier directed it. I m very glad he did, but it wasn t the sort of collaboration where a writer and a director sit down and work together on text and shape something. I had a much more collaborative working relationship, for example, with Maelíosa Stafford at the Druid Theatre who directed At the Black Pig s Dyke (1992). I would suggest ways of directing something and he would look at it and say, Yeah that works. That s good. And then he d say, Do you think that line works? I d say, Hmmm... maybe not. That s great when it happens. And it s rare. Being honest, in this production I didn t want the singing, but Olivier felt that it was a way of distancing it from the rest of the text. And you learn to accept that. In truth, at the end of the day, it s a play. [laughs] Despite some reservations, I m still really glad of that production at the Abbey because it broke ground in terms of the way things are done. It s a very radical take on the story. THE LANGUAGE OF THE TEXT The language of the script is very lyrical. For example, Ness ponders whether Deidre is prescient in knowing Naoise before she encounters him: Was it out of air she drew his name? Leabharcham answers, Yes, out of air, night s breath; She conjures him in dreams. For years she dreamt him, as clear as you are now to me. Was it difficult to compose in verse? No. It seemed the only form for this play. I couldn t imagine writing it in anything like contemporary language. I wanted it to have its own shape, to have its own tone, to have its own truth and language. And once I began, a lot of it seemed to write itself, and I started with some of the love scenes when Deirdre and Naoise meet. Then I wrote some of the scenes towards the end. And it just grew and grew and grew. I still maintain that was, is the correct language for this play. I hope that it s also hard enough to be believable as the language of a political people, of a tribe, so that it s not beautiful language for the sake of beautiful language. It is seeking to be true. To be honest, I was stunned by Fintan O Toole who suggested in his review that the language was almost an insult to Shakespeare--the rhyme of language startles as opposed to impresses. Why should it be startling that somebody writing in 2005 uses classical forms and rhyme? It s one of those natural ways to write. I use it at times in my poetry. I ve used it to an extent in my other plays and this is the biggest usage of it, but it s also the play I m proudest of and I think it s my most accomplished play to date. A few people have said, But everybody sounds the same, as if they all speak in the same way. They don t. Different characters emerge clearly. Again I would maintain if we can t use verse in modern theater, why bother with theater? If we can t treat epic themes, what s the point? I see the production at the Abbey as the first production of this play. I would hope that there will be other productions that would also be very different.

7 7 THE CRITIC, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE TEXT: A PLAYWRIGHT RESPONDS Is there a comment you d like to make which hasn t been addressed in the interview? Yes, there is something I m interested in that had just come out of this experience of putting on A Cry from Heaven, which is whether critics read the text of a new play when they review it for the first time. It just struck me because the text of A Cry from Heaven had been published by Methuen and was available, and yet I got the distinct impression from many of the reviews that the critics hadn t actually read the play. They saw the production on opening night, and opening night was terrible because somebody in the theater on the production end had forgotten to grit the stage so the actors were slipping all over the place. It looked dangerous. It ran over time. A chandelier got stuck. It made me feel that there should be an onus on all reviewers to read a new play and comment on the text as well as the production because for the most part, critics are going to establish plays and they re reviewing new productions. That s a very different thing. Then it set me thinking about how you never read reviews of play texts in literary pages, and I think it s a huge omission because people don t know what s available. Not all plays are published and not everyone who goes to the theater looks at book shelves, so an announcement to say that the play text is published and where would make a difference. What has been interesting to me is to see the gap that can exist between the text and production and the differences that brings up. I was disappointed that the audiences were small. I think here in Ireland there s an attitude of, Who needs mythology? Oh, that old stuff. The sentiment ties into what I m doing in the play which is the killing of myth at the end of the play. The other things that startled me I guess is hearing that some people hadn t gone to see the play because they had heard such bad things about it which shocked me because I feel very strongly that well, surely you can only make up your mind by going to see something. And I was very struck by responses of various Americans who saw the play here. They actually seemed to be much more open to it than many of the other people I spoke to. And I think that s quite possible because they don t come with an attitude toward myth or toward the presentation of the play. I spoke to a group of American students and they were terrific. Their reading of the play was very intelligent. They really understood what I was trying to do. Similarly, several American friends came to see it and their response was very heartening. I feel that perhaps the play is something that could be done in the States. Again, I m gratified by a couple of Italian PhD students using the play already in their theses, so it s gone out there into the world. And the world goes on. Do you have a current project? WHAT S NEXT? A few things. I am slowly working on an adaptation, probably for radio, of Anthony Trollope s The Macdermots of Ballycoran (1847), a marvelous novel set in Leitrim. In addition, I m making notes for plays linked to this one and always scribbling at other poems. Actually, I was just looking again at a collection of poetry and songs of Irish Australians called The Turning Wave (2001) which I co-edited with Colleen Z. Burke. She s is in Ireland at the moment and we re considering revising and re-issuing it. I suppose what I m happiest about is that I m working with words. That s my job, that s my life.