Echoes of Lolita in Harrower’s play

Mephisto bring their production of David Harrower’s controversial play Blackbird to Cork Arts Theatre next week. The play was also a hit at last year’s Galway Theatre Festival.

Upon its debut in 2006, Blackbird won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new play, beating Frost/Nixon. It centres on a fraught meeting between a middle-aged man and a young woman who, 15 years earlier, had a criminal sexual relationship: the girl was then aged 12. The man, Ray (Ian Watt), was imprisoned once the affair came to life. Having built a new life upon his release, he is shocked when the girl, Una (Emma O’Grady), now an adult, shows up at his place of work, to resolve matters between them.

“The play doesn’t set up a black-and-white scenario for the audience,” says director, Mark Westbrook. “You come with your ideas about right and wrong and you have them slightly disturbed. And it’s hard for people not to be affected by it, one way or another. But you have to see beyond the issue to the much more human level of it. I think that’s what appeals to the audience. There’s a human story going on here, regardless of crimes committed, or right and wrong.”

Blackbird cemented the reputation of Scottish playwright Harrower who, a few years earlier, had burst on the scene with his debut, Knives in Hens. “Harrower doesn’t take a side in Blackbird,” says Westbrook, “which is refreshing, because it’s not shoving a moral in our faces. I’m not sure the play is trying to change anyone’s views. It just wants to challenge them.”

In addition to being a director and writer, Westbrook is an acting coach in Glasgow. His first contact with Mephisto was when the company toured their production of Tara McKevitt’s play Grenades a few years back.

The calibre of acting is vital to a play like Blackbird, says Westbrook. “The acting is invisible,” he says. “You want to remove a sense of performance, so that the audience feel like eavesdroppers. It’s as if they’re peeking in on these people’s lives.

“If the audience feel like they’re being performed to, there’s a distance in which they can ground themselves, and that gives them a distance from the issues. The way we work in my studio, in Glasgow, is to act as if no-one is watching. That takes training and it takes good actors.”

Westbrook’s approach is an intense naturalism, but what are its benefits to the audience?

“The play then becomes about the relationship between the actors onstage,” he says. “It’s not about presenting ideas and emoting them out to an audience.

“The audience are drawn into the play in a way that I don’t think they are when they are getting ‘performed’ to. They’re no longer in the role of spectator. In some ways, it makes them a witness,” Westbrook says.

Blackbird runs at Galway Town Hall Theatre, tonight; Portumna town hall, June 8; Cork Arts Theatre (CAT Club), June 9; and Áras Éanna, Inis Oírr, June 14.