Débutant playwright eyeing 10-year sabbatical

As a long-awaited début play opens tonight at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, its award winning writer begs for a 10-year break.

Beauty in a Broken Place, by Colm Tóibín, recalls the infamous riots around the first productions of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the theatre in 1926.

The play, the first Tóibín has penned, is one of several dramas marking the centenary of the world famous Abbey Theatre, but the débutant dramatist claimed he was in no rush to put pen to paper for the stage again.

“Ah yeah. I would write another, but not immediately. Give me a decade of solitude and I’ll come back for the 110th anniversary,” Toibin said.

“With a play you have to pass it on. Nobody understands it the way you meant it.”

Audiences fought battles with actors and producers after O’Casey’s play mocked the heroes of the 1916 Easter Rising – memories of which were still fresh in the mind of many Dubliners.

But Tóibín is confident the three and a half week run at the theatre will not end with the same disaster.

The play is ironic, provocative and funny all in one but audience reaction is as much a mystery today as it was in the late 1920s, Tóibín said.

Ironic as it challenges traditional concepts of actors and dramatists, provocative when it questions how we remember the dead and funny when actors are forced to riot.

“Audiences have been laughing at the previews, but not always laughing where I wanted them to. All I can say is that there is certainly not going to be a riot,” Toibin said.

The play opens with William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory facing a battle with a marauding audience, while a bemused Sean O’Casey is caught in the crossfire.

But the crux of the play is whether free speech was restricted in the early days of the Free State, and it questions, in the same way as O’Casey did, who the heroes of 1916 were, and why they are revered.

O’Casey mocked the patriots and claimed the looters as the real heroes in the wake of the rising. A debate which used correctly can be as relevant today as in 1926.

“It proceeds to tell the story of the first battle of the new Free State, and it is an attempt to dramatise the politics of those days but it’s also about a play set in a theatre,” Tóibín said.

Colm Toibin has been a prolific writer of novels since his debut in 1990, and accumulated an impressive array of awards and nominations, and it is this critical acclaim he chases as much now as a decade and a half ago.

“As O’Casey said: ‘Feck the money and give me the glory’,” Toibin said.

Beauty in a Broken Place, directed by Niall Henry, runs at the Peacock Theatre, Abbey Street, Dublin, from August 16 until September 11.