‘I wanted to be Bogart but I’ve not had a drink for 24 years’
HOW daring is David Ireland? Well, imagine Indiana Jones-meets-Edna O’Brien with a laptop and you have an idea. The playwright’s massively successful Cyprus Avenue, for example, told of an Ulsterman who believed his granddaughter to be Gerry Adams and its denouement caused walkouts in New York. An earlier play, Ulster American, featured one of his characters ask the question, ‘Is it ever morally acceptable to rape someone?
In the past, however, East Belfast-born Ireland has hinted that some of the ideas in his work have emerged from personal experience, with all of his plays, (and his recent Sky TV romcom The Lovers) referencing the Troubles.
But what of his new play
The Fifth Step, set in Scotland in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous? It features two men, the younger Luka (Jack Lowden) and James, his sponsor (Sean Gilder) as they go through the 12 Steps to recovery, and we learn their ideals clash louder than a marching band’s cymbals. So how much of David Ireland himself has made it onto his laptop?
“I stopped drinking when I was 23, and although I would never have called myself an alcoholic I had had big problems with drink, since the age of 14 or 15,” he says.
“In my neighbourhood, people began by drinking strong cider but I was drinking whisky and Jack Daniels.” Why, David?
“This sounds crazy, but I loved Casablanca and Humphrey Bogart, so I wanted to be the sort of guy who drank bourbon,” he says.
He also loved the part-time departures from reality which alcohol promised. “I was very shy,” he explains. “And drink would liberate me, give me great confidence.”
Ireland’s dad died when he was young, and he grew up with his mum and two older sisters.
As a teenager he escaped into youth theatre with the idea he would emerge as a mix of Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh.
And he was good. So good he was accepted by Glasgow’s RSAMD. Yet, while living in a bedsit in Glasgow’s West
End the inherent shyness didn’t abate. And nor did the drinking. He recalls his drama college days.
“I was drinking all the time, although I managed to turn up for classes, but not on a Friday, because that was the day the college did dancing and singing,” he says. “I hated all of that. At one point I was threatened with expulsion if I didn’t show up, but I got away with it for a long time.”
Wasn’t singing and dancing part of an acting course, and career? “Not for me!” he laughs, “because I’d read Stanislavsky (Method acting) books and I wanted to be in the Godfather. Yet, while my exterior persona was of someone who was too cool to be dancing and singing, deep down I was just deeply insecure.”
He adds, with a wry grin: “When I was younger, I was naturally good at comedy, and told I was very good in panto, but I remember thinking ‘I don’t want to be good at panto.”
The hopeful young serious actor landed his first professional job in King Lear at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in 1999, and incredibly his first-ever scene on stage was with acting legend Tom Courtenay, as Lear. (Ashley Jensen and David Tennant were also in the cast).
But Ireland was still pouring his life into the bottom of a glass.
He recalls: “I was drinking so much that this older actor took me aside one day and said, ‘Don’t be another drunken Irish genius. We have enough of those.’ It was exactly what I needed to hear. And I thought to myself ‘I’m trying to be Richard Harris or Peter O’ Toole but I don’t have the talent or the charisma to back that up. What I am is a drunken idiot.”
He was also an actor in search of an identity.
“One day I was supposed to do a spear carrier part, and I was hungover, but I sort of thought that no one would notice I hadn’t turned up.” he says. “But when I walked in (late) everybody looked at me, and they knew I’d been drinking the night before.”
He cringes at the memory as he adds: “I think someone had told Tom Courtenay that I’d had a doctor’s appointment, to spare my blushes. But then Tom said to me ‘How was your doctor’s appointment?’ And I said ‘I wasn’t at the doctors. I was hungover.’
“Tom didn’t say anything. He just looked at me as if I were crazy. And right then I decided to quit. And I never drank again. It’s now 24 years since I’ve had a drink.”
The Fifth Step isn’t about alcoholism as such, but it certainly delves deeply into the fragile male psyche. The older man is married. The younger man can’t find a girlfriend and thinks alcohol will offer the confidence he needs.
Ireland says that was part of his own story for a number of years.
“I felt a bit of a weird person,” he adds. “I couldn’t talk to people. I was a member of the Dundee Rep ensemble about 15 years ago but it was another city in which I was lonely and struggling to find a girlfriend. And yeah, that’s why the part Jack Lowden plays is of a young man struggling to find his place, who desperately wants to find a girlfriend.”
Haud the bus right there, David. Audiences will be asked to believe that Jack Lowden can’t get a girl? Lowden is the bookies favourite to be the next Bond.
“Jack is such a good actor he can make himself look less good looking,” says the playwright, grinning.
“But no, we do address that in the play. It’s all about a lack of confidence.”
The Fifth Step, a National Theatre of Scotland production, doesn’t however feature the Troubles. Does it feel odd to have left Ulster behind this time around?
“Not really, because I’m so disconnected from Northern Ireland these days,” he says. But this play does feature the Catholic-Protestant divide.
He adds, grinning: “I left Ireland to escape sectarianism. I once thought if can make it to London I can make it to LA or New York but the furthest I’ve come is Glasgow.
“And when I arrived here, I thought ‘This is just a bigger version of Belfast.’”