In pursuit of theatrical perfection

After years of hard graft, toiling away in the background, far from the limelight, things are really starting to happen for professional playwright Deirdre Kinahan. Kinahan, who lives at Wilkinstown, Navan, with her husband and two daughters, is currently in the throes of writing a play commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, no less. She's just about completed the first of what will be four or five drafts. Turning an idea in the mind into a stage drama can be a long, painful process, she says. Each play can be a year in gestation with a series of rewrites required along the way. She constantly seeks to hone and polish the language, mindful, no doubt, of the Shakespearean warning: "Words without thought never to Heaven go." Yet, once her words are transformed on a stage before an appreciative audience, all the effort can seem worthwhile. As the author of a number of stage plays, Kinahan knows that feeling well. She also knows what it's like when a production doesn't quite work, when the magic is missing. It's all part of the learning process involved in the long, endless search for theatrical perfection. Kinahan's plays have been seen in venues such as the Project, the Peacock, the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, and in other theatres around the country. They have also been staged abroad, in Australia, the United States and Scotland. As well as a working writer, she is the artistic director of the Tall Tales Theatre Company which she helped form over a decade ago with Maureen Collender. Tall Tales is now the resident production company at the Solstice. These days, she runs the company with Tracy Martin. "Since 2008, we work full-time in Solstice and what we did is that we produce all our plays there, rehearse them there, create them there, premiere them there. Then we bring them to the Project Arts Centre before taking them on tour around Ireland and, in the last two or three years, we've started to tour internationally," she says. "So it's great because work that has been created and made in Meath and written by a Meath-based playwright is touring nationally and internationally." There's no guarantee that the Abbey will stage Kinahan's play, yet the fact that such a prestigious venue has commissioned her to write something is an indication of her growing reputation. The Abbey project is not all that's happening for Kinahan just now. Her best known work, 'Moment', will be staged in the Bush Theatre in London early next year. There's also the strong possibility that another of her creations, 'Hue and Cry,' could be produced in New York in September. Yet another of her works, 'Bogboy', will be put on in the Solstice as part of a new arts festival in June. 'Bogboy' was originally a radio production aired on RTE. It has now been re-worked for the stage. Kinahan - who is originally from Dublin but who has lived in Meath for over 10 years - used a well-known location close to her Wilkinstown home as the backdrop for her latest stage opus. "Bogboy is set in Oristown Bog and it looks at the story of the disappeared, people who were kidnapped in the North in the 1970s and buried in Oristown. I was haunted by that because I walk in there all the time so I've written this play about a girl from Dublin, a recovering heroin addict who becomes very friendly with this local auld fellow when they meet in the bog and I've intertwined it with the whole story of the missing boy," she says. Kinahan admits that working professionally in the arts in Ireland, particularly in these recessionary times, can be hugely challenging. Grants have been slashed and the day after talking to the Meath Chronicle, she was planning to make an application to the State funding bodies for further productions. It can take up to €80,000 to put a professional production on the stage and take it on tour, with only a fraction of that sum met by what the audience pay at the box office. Those who seek to carve out a career in the arts are certainly not motivated by big financial rewards. Making a living is the primary aim, with the appreciation for their work the chief payback. It is gratifying for Kinahan to learn that some far-off theatre company in an Australian or American city is prepared to put on her work, having come across it on the website. Writing can at times be easy, she says, while at other times it can be a real slog. It helps that, even in the difficult days, she loves what she is doing. To pursue her career and be a mother of two at the same time requires a solid support structure. She adds that she's fortunate to get the total backing of her husband, Gary O'Farrell, who is a social worker. While working in film and TV can be much more lucrative, it is those odd magical moments that belong exclusively to theatre that have always proved the most alluring for her. Kinahan attributes her love of the theatre to the days as a youngster when she was brought by her mother to the Abbey and the Project to see the plays from master craftsmen such as John B Keane, Brian Friel, Sean O'Casey and JM Synge himself. She studied at UCD before "floating" for a few years. She spent some time abroad, worked in various jobs before the call to pursue a career in theatre proved irristible. In her late 20s, she set about forming Tall Tales Theatre Company and putting pen to paper for the first time. A decade down the line, she's still writing and learning about the world of theatre. The spark to write her debut play came from an unlikely source. "I was working with women who had worked in prostitution. They were older women who were trying to retrain, trying to get off the game. I was doing theatre workshops, English language creative workshops, all of that, and they asked me would I write a play about their lives, so the first play I wrote was 'Be Carna', which is the old Irish term for women of the flesh. But I didn't write about them as prostitutes, I wrote about them as mothers, sisters, lovers and how their ordinary lives are totally overshadowed by their profession. It was the first play I wrote and it went really well, it went to Edinburgh, did really well over there," she recalls. While Kinahan likes to write dramas that are grounded in what is sometimes dark realism, she also seeks to inject plenty of humour into her dialogue. It's all designed to keep an audience with her on the dramatic journey. "The most difficult part of writing for the stage is to bring the audience with you, get them to care for the characters, get them emotionally engaged, carry them on the emotional journey you want them to go on," she explains. "Five minutes is a long time in a theatre when you are bored, so you've got to keep them with you." For months, Deirdre Kinahan can be thinking about a play, developing ideas and researching before taking herself off to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan to write in a week or two of intense work. A haven for artists, musicians and writers, it's not unusual for Kinahan to come across people like the singer Brian Kennedy as they toil away on their next piece of work. Deirdre Kinahan continues to learn her trade as a playwright, all the time aiming to do what the great Bard himself said was the chief purpose of the trade, to "....hold a mirror up to life to reflect virtue, contempt, and the spirit of the times".