Frank McGuinness talks about his Oedipus at the National Theatre
Theatre is where Frank McGuinness belongs. "It may drive me crazy and drive me hard, but I am never happier than when I am writing a play. I had a great and loving family, but by reason of my sexuality, I never felt I belonged; I could be what I wanted in my imagination. Theatre is where I should be. I love the thrill of these voices becoming my familiars; I love their company, or am threatened by their company. That's a tremendous, joyous thing, and when it is happening it completely dominates my life: everything else is a sideline."
His most famous play, first performed in 1992, is Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, which was based loosely on the experiences of Brian Keenan and other hostages in Lebanon. Other successes have included Dolly West's Kitchen (1999), about a family in wartime Buncrana, County Donegal; his first play, The Factory Girls (1982), which drew on his mother's and aunts' experiences in shirtmaking factories; and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1985), his dramatisation of the lives of a group of Protestant soldiers as they made their inexorable way to the horror of July 1 1916.
What draws his plays together is a generous sympathy with people's foibles in all their forms. But McGuinness loathes sentimentality and views the notion of redemption as laughable. "Sentimentality has damaged so many writers and storytellers. And to hell with redemption. It's not true, folks! To me, it's like creationism. Grow up and face reality. Just grow up."
McGuinness's adaptations are as important to his practice as his original plays - he has tackled nine dramas of Ibsen; Chekhov's Three Sisters (1990) for the Cusack sisters; and Electra by Sophocles, with Zoë Wanamaker in the title role (1998). And it is to Sophocles that McGuinness has now returned, with a new version of Oedipus the King for the National Theatre, starring Ralph Fiennes and Clare Higgins and directed by Jonathan Kent, which had its press night this week.
Oedipus has a history for McGuinness. He first saw it in Yeats's translation when he was a teenager at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: it had "an enormous impact on me". Then 12 or 13 years ago, he commissioned a literal translation - always his first step when working on an adaptation. (The fewer literary pretensions this translation has, the better - "I don't want a rival," he says.) Nothing beyond 100 lines came of that first go. "Then finally last year I decided I would look at the two plays - Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus. With the perverse, mad logic that dominates my life, I thought, 'I'll start with Oedipus at Colonus.' And I got a literal done and I began to work on it, and thought, 'It's too hard', but I'm a bollocks for never giving in, you know. 'I'm going to do Oedipus [the King],' I thought."
All the hesitation and fearfulness and false starts have been for the best, he thinks. "I am at the right age to do it. I think if I had done it younger, even 12 years ago, I didn't have the various familial or biological crises in my life that I have now. That's all to the fore, I hope, in the writing of it."
He explains: "Of course we know about Freud, we know about the cliché that Oedipus marries his mother and the rest of it. Obviously it is a very primitive taboo that is taken apart in the play. But I find that when you are tackling a great play, something has to come at you, when you think you know the thing backwards but you don't.
"And with this play I feel it is about how you deal with the loss of your father, the threat of your father. I had an astonishing experience when I was working on Oedipus. My father died 11 years ago and my mother about 10 months before. I have spent the past decade dealing with her death; the death I hadn't really dealt with was my father's. And when it came to tackling the scene where Oedipus calls for his children and says goodbye to them, this dreadful shock came over me and I started to see my father with incredible clarity.
"I'm not saying he manifested himself in front of me, but I think I had some tremendous buried grief and sorrow and fear, and it came to the fore. And that's when it struck me how primitive and powerful and basic this play is. You do have to confront the reality of the fact that you have a father, and your father will die. Oedipus killed his father. I'm not saying you'll go out and do it, but the very fact that you survive, the very fact of your existence, is a testament to your father's death."
Oedipus the King puts us through the death of its principal character's father repeatedly and relentlessly, in different forms: we are told about the death of Laius, the former king; and we are told about the death of Oedipus's adoptive father, Polybus, whom he loved. Then comes the appalling wrench of Oedipus's discovery that he is a parricide, that not only did he kill Laius, but Laius was his father.
Finally, the blinded Oedipus, about to be exiled from Thebes, in one of the most touching scenes in all of theatre, bids his children goodbye: "He has sentenced them to a terrible life," says McGuinness, "and he is killing them in a way, just as he killed his father. It is the stringency of the writing, the plotting, the sheer skill: how much had we forgotten until Shakespeare came along? There's a ruthlessness there in the Greeks - an absolute pitilessness. And sometimes you need to stand before that kind of judgment, where there's no mercy."
For McGuinness, the apt metaphor for what he does when he mediates these great voices is drawn from painting. "I remember once going to the Picasso Museum, and on the wall there were four very quick sketches of Le Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe - very quick, rough sketches. And I looked at them and they were all different, and they were all evidence of Picasso's obsession with the painting; he was recording different ways of seeing. That's exactly what I want to do. It's me thinking about a play and brooding on a play. I make absolutely no scholarly claims. But I have to be able to share the obsession through my writing."
The act of making a version is, for him, an act of creativity and of confrontation. "But," he says, "I have to make them work as plays, and give them a secret life, an interior life that I am imagining this playwright is telling me about, one to one. That's where we make love. That's me and Anton [Chekhov]." He laughs gleefully.
McGuinness was born in 1953 in Buncrana, "between Derry and Malin Head - between the Devil and the deep blue sea". His mother worked in a shirt factory and his father was a bread man; he has a younger brother and a younger sister. At primary school he was not much of a student. But the Irish government brought in free secondary education in the 1960s, and he was determined to take advantage of it.
When he was in his early teens, his father lost the bread business, and the family began to struggle. University seemed to promise a way of escaping that kind of crisis. "My mother was adamant that I could do what I wanted - she had tremendous vision in that way - even though they were desperate for me to go out and work." When, at the age of 15, he was offered a job on a printing press, there was a crucial moment of family decision-making, and he was allowed to stay on at school.
There was no history of further education in his family, and no one at school to whom he could talk about his ambitions. "My mother was the only person who knew, and even with her there were a lot of things kept back. I couldn't tell her I was gay for a long time, for instance. Though I knew - when I was very young."
As a teenager, he was already writing - song lyrics mostly: "The head teacher once came round and asked everyone what they wanted to be. The answers came: 'I want to be a priest'; 'I want to be a teacher.' I said, 'I want to be a writer,' which stopped him in his tracks. But he actually took it seriously."
An undergraduate degree in Dublin was followed by an MPhil. All the time he was writing, and when he was 21 a poem was published in the Irish Press. "It was one of the happiest days of my life. I knew then that I was going to be a writer. It was an elegy for my grandfather. I still have a copy - and I keep very few things. I got £3 for it, which in 1973 wasn't bad."
McGuinness had done some acting and directing as a student, but had little thought of writing plays, until he attended a workshop run by director Patrick Mason. He applied to this course under false pretences: he wanted to meet the man behind a production of The Winter's Tale that he had found revelatory, but he had no play to submit, so sent off a detailed description of a non-existent work.
To his horror, he was accepted, and had a week to write the play that would eventually become Factory Girls, about a group of women who take matters into their own hands when their livelihoods are threatened. "My god. Chancer, chancer!" he says, remembering. He had five friends come round with typewriters to help.
His major play of the 1980s was Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. He calls it a "political and cultural challenge" to put himself into the shoes of the Protestant soldiers - but, more importantly, the history of the Ulster regiments presented him with a gripping, untold story.
"We knew nothing about it; we weren't taught about it in school. It was a great subject, sitting waiting for me." Like many of his plays, it contains a gentle and moving love story between men. "Every Irish writer from time immemorial has been engaged in a fight against censorship," he says, "and gay characters have been few and far between . . . It was about bloody time, and it had to be faced.
"I was once told by someone in the Irish theatre that they read Someone Who'll Watch Over Me with enormous relief because there are no gay characters in it. Strangely enough I have never worked with that person again."
Less gentle was the roaring anger and tragedy of Innocence (1986), his play about Caravaggio, which ends with the artist's flight from Rome after committing a murder. The work dealt in explicit terms with the sexual and artistic appetites of its characters, one of whom was a cardinal. "It's fair to say it caused a wee bit of bother. At the beginning there were a few people walking out and shouting things. What made me suspicious was that they did it when the two young actors were on stage: they knew they could throw the young ones. In a way that wised me up to what was happening - that this was a form of censorship. But our country had been afflicted for long enough by an adamant reluctance to deal with sexual and moral realities, and I was damned if I was going to let them shut me up."
He recently re-read the play, and what he found shocked him. "The man who wrote Innocence was a very troubled individual," he says. "It came from some terrible knowledge that I was not going to have children. I was 33 when I wrote it and I think I was in mourning - and I transferred that to Caravaggio."
If Oedipus has presented McGuinness with a way of confronting the grief of losing his father, Dolly West's Kitchen - a big, generous play about a family in his hometown during the second world war - relates to his mother, perhaps the most vivid presence in McGuinness's life. She died while he was writing the play, in 1997, and in turn McGuinness kills Rima, the mother in the play, halfway through the second act, without ceremony - a reflection of his "savage grief". "I was advised that, if the play was to go to America, maybe Rima should be sick and come back at the end." But McGuinness has no time for those whom he calls the "redemptive eejits".
McGuinness is now professor of creative writing and writer-in-residence at University College, Dublin. For 30 years he has been with his partner, Philip, although they do not live together. He lives alone, in a small house near the sea; he and his brother also have a house in County Donegal.
"It's a quiet life - too quiet," he says. "I miss a bit of the madness. In the Irish theatre I am looked on as an old fellow. But I'm still a bad bollocks, you know; I'm not entirely respectable. I couldn't be. I think the younger ones think I am a grey-haired old git. But I still have the flaming red hair."
McGuinness on McGuinness
Vershinin: "I've come to say goodbye to you."
Masha: "Goodbye to you."
Some years ago we did the Three Sisters with the Cusacks, and there was the sheer joy of writing something for their voices - and God, do I know their voices. But it came to the end, and in Russian there is a particular use of the word "you". I am told it's the only time Masha and Vershinin use it, when they are saying goodbye to each other. And it was a tremendous challenge to come up with something that was beautiful but natural without making it too much. What I did was to have Vershinin come to her and say, "I've come to say goodbye to you." And she says to him, "Goodbye to you." And what I wanted there was the word "you" repeated. Now a classic Russian scholar can come and beat me off the stage for that. But to me that was such a thrilling liberation for those two people. After Vershinin goes, Masha has lost the meaning of the word you. I understand love like that. I understand loving someone like that, and then losing them. That was a great gift that Chekhov gave me; and at the time that was a great healing thing for me. The wee bit of ignorant Russian that I know gave me that. To me, that is taking liberties, making the text my own. Much more than setting it in Durham or in Mullingar.