Bound for the stage

Gary Duggan’s new play Shibari marks his debut at the national theatre, says Pádraic Killeen

PLAYWRIGHT Gary Duggan came to the attention of the Abbey theatre in 2006, when his breakthrough play, Monged, had a successful run at the Project Arts Centre. The Abbey invited the Dubliner to contribute to a series of short plays, 20: Love, in 2008, and a few months later he was commissioned to write a full-length piece. The result is Shibari, which opens tonight on the Abbey’s second stage, the Peacock.

“Structurally, the idea for Shibari was to have a cast of six and to have each individual character meet every other character only once in the play,” says Duggan. “So the play is a series of scenes between two people.”

The six characters include three Irish siblings, a Japanese man, a Romanian girl, and an Englishman, and the play reflects the multicultural flavour of life in Dublin. “The Abbey’s literary director, Aideen Howard, asked me to write a play that could take place immediately outside the theatre right now,” says Duggan. “So the intention was to be very urban and very contemporary and I decided to write about the city as I saw it. I had been frustrated that a lot of new Irish plays weren’t really drawing more on multiculturalism. When you walk around Dublin, now, you see people of so many cultures and nationalities rubbing shoulders with one another and I wanted a story that reflected that.”

‘Shibari’ is a Japanese term for a form of erotic bondage. Is bondage in the narrative? “There’s an element of bondage in the play’s content,” says Duggan. “But in Japanese the word ‘shibari’ just means ‘to tie’. So it can refer to a lot of different things. I interviewed a few Japanese people, who live and work in Dublin, and I learned from them that if the word is changed to ‘shibaru’, then it becomes a slang term for a stalker or for someone who is obsessed with another person. Overall, the title is used metaphorically to refer to the concept of a network of ties and connections between the people in the play.”

Overseeing this network is Corkman Tom Creed, one of Irish theatre’s most highly regarded directors. Given the play’s theme about people’s lives intersecting, Creed’s involvement is apt. Ten years ago it was Creed, then cutting his teeth in theatre, who selected Duggan’s script for Monged from a pile of submissions to Cork theatre company Corcadorca. The fledgling play was work-shopped by the company. It was an invaluable experience for Duggan.

“That submission of Monged wasn’t a finished draft and I actually finished the first draft during the workshop process,” says Duggan. “I developed some of the sequences with the help of the actors that we had during those two weeks. Subsequently, that was the draft that I sent to Fishamble Theatre Company, and it ended up becoming my first production a year or two later.”

Duggan and Creed remained in contact and are now making their Abbey debuts together. When the Abbey approached him to direct, Creed — who is director of Cork Midsummer Festival — was taken with the timeliness of the script. Creed says that while the cast is multicultural, the play is not a statement about multiculturalism. “What I found exciting about Gary’s script was that it isn’t about that,” he says. “The play is about what it’s like to live in a city. It presents multicultural, contemporary Dublin in a play that isn’t saying: ‘oh look, here’s this multicultural contemporary Dublin.’ It’s not a play about race or immigration, although it obviously deals a little with the immigrant experience.”

“I wanted to avoid making it a play about those issues,” says Duggan. “We’ve had a very mixed culture for ten or more years. The play is, basically, a relationship comedy-drama with a cast that, if you went out on the street and took a sampling of people, it would include some of these people.”

For both, working with set designer Frank Conway has been instructive. Shibari marks Conway’s return to the Abbey, where he was an influential figure from the 1970s through to the 1990s.

“He is, unquestionably, one of the greatest designers this country has ever produced,” says Creed. “Frank is doing a lot of teaching now and he doesn’t do as much design, so it was a really exciting opportunity to work with a great artist. We’ve made quite a big statement with the stage design. Frank was very keen to use the design to present some of the ideas in the play, which is about the connections between people but also very much about the past and about how our pasts hang around our necks like a weight. All of the characters in the play are in the process of moving on from something. So the design is very theatrical and it presents the idea of one’s past literally hanging over you.”

Talk turns to the Peacock’s past, and its future possibilities as a platform for new work. In the last few years, the national theatre’s second stage has gone dark, on and off, for long intervals during the year. Yet it’s heartening that when work has been staged there, it has been plays by emerging Irish writers.

“I’m excited about a space like the Peacock,” says Creed. “I think it should be full all the time. I was talking to someone recently about what the theatre was like decades ago, when Joe Dowling ran it and young actors could try directing. Obviously, that was easier then, when there was an ensemble of actors signed to the Abbey. In those days, at the Peacock, there were a lot of productions. There was lunch-time theatre. There were a lot of opportunities. Nowadays, in Irish theatre, there are a lot of opportunities to show work that’s being made in non-traditional ways. But it’s very difficult to get a play on.”

Duggan says: “I’m interested in writing plays but there are definitely less places for them. There are fewer companies commissioning scripts and it’s very focused on festivals now. You open for a big festival audience for a short run and hope that it becomes something that can tour. But it’s very difficult to write a play now that will get a second or third production.”

Duggan is busy. His next play should see production in 2013, while his four-part drama series, Amber, co-written with Rob Cawley and directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, will screen on RTÉ in the spring. One presumes he has been harassing Creed for a commission for next year’s Cork Midsummer Festival, too. “Not yet, no,” says Duggan, laughing.

“Let’s get this one out of the way first,” says Creed.

* Shibari runs until Nov 3.