This much I know: Marie Jones, Playwright

I am disciplined about writing. I nearly always have a deadline.

Starting something new is the hardest part. My house is cleaned from top to bottom when I start a new play.

Nothing interested me in school until I discovered drama. I became a trouble-maker, distracting classmates, and I was constantly kept behind in detention.

When I was fifteen, one of the teachers said ‘that girl doesn’t need any more detention, she needs to join the drama group’. I thought it would be boring and all about Shakespeare, but when I opened the door to the group they were jumping around and singing, doing a musical, and I thought: I have arrived.

I believe that you really have to work for anything you want. Opportunity doesn’t do home visits. You have to seek things out.

Belfast is my home. I was born there and I’ve watched it go through such horror and terror and come out of it, although sometimes it is two steps forward and three steps back. My dad was a shipyard worker. Nobody had any aspirations to work in theatre. We were destined to work in the factory or the mills, not that that was a bad thing.

I was encouraged to stay on at school to get some qualifications and ended up in a secretarial job but I was also acting at night. I loved it — the lights and the sounds of the theatre. I think it came quite naturally to me. I do still act in some of my own plays but I find writing more creatively satisfying.

In the 1980s a group of us were very frustrated with the lack of roles for women. We asked the playwright Martin Lynch to write a play for us about women. He said ‘write it yourself: if I can do it you can do it’ which is some of the best advice I’ve ever got. We ended up forming our own company Charabanc and our first play ‘Lay Up Your Ends’, based on a strike by mill girls in the early part of the 20th century, was a big hit.

My husband Ian McElhinney is an actor and director. We met in 1980. It was not love at first sight. He thought I was loud and common and I thought he was posh and arrogant.

I love rugby, but outside of that, drama is pretty all consuming in our lives. I have three grown up sons, and two grandchildren.

When I wrote ‘Stones in his Pockets’ I knew it was good, but you never think about whether or not something is going to be a success when you are writing it.

They say where there’s a hit there’s a writ and one of my biggest challenges was the major court case over ‘Stones In His Pockets’. The director [of an early version of the play] wanted to sue me [for being recognised as joint author].

It was hard going as it took two years to get to court, during which time it was very hard to be creative with the case hanging over me.

I had to spend five weeks in The High Court facing barristers when I’d done nothing wrong — and worrying, ‘will it work out for me’? It did in the end. I won.

Despite that case, I will always still work in the same way, letting people become part of the creative process. My writer’s contract protects me — if you couldn’t let an actor say ‘how about putting a line in here’ it would make the process of creating a play very difficult.

I used to be scared of doing interviews and speaking as myself, to say ‘what Marie Jones thinks’. Outside of that I didn’t have any confidence, I didn’t have the language or the education. It took time to change. It happened by listening to other people, thinking, reading and also by realising, ‘what is the worst thing that could happen if I make a mistake’? No one is going to shoot you. The worst that could happen is that you might feel embarrassed.

Marie Jones’ comedy ‘Stones in his Pockets’ is being staged at the Gaiety Theatre Dublin 5th to 22nd March and The Everyman Cork 31st March to 5th April