Q:In most of your plays, ‘Philadelphia, here I come’, and ‘Lovers’, for instance, which have been performed in many countries, there is a lot of comedy and a great deal of human sorrow and misery. Is this how you see life in general?
By nature I’m a bleak sort of person, and whatever comedy there is, is the absurd sort. The only type of comic situation I see in life is a distortion of normality – which is a sort of definition of comedy.

Have you always been like this – bleak?
I don’t think I’m getting bleaker as the years go on, but my view of life isn’t very generous, isn’t very tolerant.

What have you seen in life to make you bleak and ungenerous?
Now we’re sort of dipping our toes into an area of philosophy in which I’m not expert at all. We all have such a brief period here in life, and the great portion of this time is spent either in working or crying. This general gloom is relieved only very seldom by periods of some kind of levity. I think this has got to be portrayed on the stage.

Are you a pessimist, then?
I don’t know. Maybe I am.

But do you not see something marvellous for the human being at the end of everything?
You’re talking in religious terms now?

I’m talking in general terms. Can you separate them?
From the religious point of view, I’m a very confused man. The only thing I think that is of absolute importance is life – being alive and holding on to this condition of existence – but this in itself isn’t really a cause for joy.

Doesn’t religion teach differently? That everything really worth anything is beyond life?
This is heretical religion. And especially the Irish Church, which teaches that the only thing worth living is the afterlife – this is total heresy. If there is an after life, the only way one can merit it is by being totally involved in the here-and-now.

Is there an afterlife?
I have no answer to this. At the moment I don’t know. As soon as I make a ponderous statement, I’m usually embarrassed by it the following week.

What is your attitude to God – believer, agnostic or atheist?
Oh, I’m not an atheist. I’m probably closer to agnosticism. This is a very searching and groping sort of area where one can’t have any sort of scientific truth. You can’t prove to me that there is an afterlife, and I can’t disprove that there isn’t. So it really is an area of speculation.

Is it an area of importance to you?
I don’t think it’s all that important. I am absolutely certain that if I die next week and am going to go to heaven; I don’t think it’s going to affect how I live here and now. I am not going to be any more charitable or uncharitable than I am now. One tries to live one’s life as best one can. Let’s forget about the afterlife for the moment, and live this one.

You were born and reared in the Irish Catholic tradition.
I suppose I’m a sort of practising lapsed Catholic. It’s one of these attitudes I’m not prepared to defend, because I’m a volatile sort of person, and next week I could be crawling up Croagh Patrick on my knees. And I don’t see any great contradiction in this either.

What is your background, Brian?
I was born in Tyrone, outside Omagh, and lived there until I was ten. Then we came to live in Derry, where my father was a teacher.

Your background was Catholic and nationalist.
Very intensely nationalist, and in those days one’s whole nationalism and religion was constantly interwoven and inextricable. The result now is that while I’m not as intensely Irish Catholic as I was, I’m still left with this very vigorous nationalism, as intense as it always was. This hasn’t much to do with the Border.

It isn’t just a matter of wanting a 32-county Irish Republic?
The desirability of this isn’t as obvious now as it was, because the turn the Republic has taken over the past nine or ten years has been distressing, very disquieting. We have become a tenth-rate image of America – a disaster for any country.

What form does your nationalism take?
There are certain values in this country which were very dominant 50 or 60 years ago and are well worth preserving. What we accepted as our cultural identity is certainly worth preserving.

Do you want Ireland to get back to the old culture?
One can never go back to the old culture, but it could extend to the present day. Our country should be as distinctive and individualistic as Belgium and Holland – I’m talking of small countries. Instead of that we’re becoming more and more Madison Avenue-ish and slicker in a very shabby sort of way.

What can you do about it? We are wide open to American influence, much more so than Holland or Belgium.
I think, for instance, Ireland is politically sitting in the lap of America. We have never taken a stand on issues that were certainly moral – issues at the UN where Aiken should have taken a stand and didn’t. But to go back to what is going wrong, I think the emphasis is on having at least one car and preferably two. One has only to go into any of the posh Dublin hotels and one can see the new Ireland sprawled around in the lounges. This development is terrifying.

Is this not an inevitable part of increasing prosperity?
I don’t see that it has any relationship with prosperity. One can have all the riches of the world and still have a very clean mind. It is sullied in Ireland at the moment.

How would you go about cleaning it?
One of the big problems is that there are two societies, and I feel very strongly about this. There is the Dublin society in the Dublin environs, and then there is the rest. This is not quite the same as purely urban-rural. You have an intensely urban society in Dublin, the cultural and political vanguard of everything that’s thought and done; and you have the rest of the country living in complete isolation. The result is that, instead of the rural and urban societies complementing one another and acting as a mutual balance, you have two distinct societies, one literally wilting away and the other forging ahead without this very necessary balance. A much closer link with rural roots is necessary.

As a Catholic did you have problems growing up?
Of course. As a young boy in Derry there were certain areas one didn’t go into. I remember bringing shoes to the shoemaker’s shop at the end of the street. This was a terrifying experience, because if the Protestant boys caught you in this kind of no-man’s land, they’d kill you. I have vivid memories when I was 12 or so of standing at my own front door and hoping the coast would be clear so I could dive over to the shop; and then, when I’d left the shoes in, waiting to see was the coast clear again. If you were caught, you were finished. It was absolutely terrifying. That sort of thing leaves scars for the rest of one’s life.

What do you think of politics?
I try not to be cynical.

Do you succeed?
At the level of Irish politics I’ve succeeded, but looking at international politics, I think I fail.

You took part in Civil Rights demonstrations in Derry – did the situation there offend you?
Until 5 October 1968, which was a red letter day, I thought that society was absolutely dead. Then suddenly five young men, who had nothing to gain in temporal terms, organised a very shabby rally. The parallel is not accurate, but suddenly the whole thing was dignified, as in 1916. The police beat hell out of these fellows. And suddenly the conscience of Derry was aroused.

You feel the Civil Rights Movement will succeed?
What people are looking for is human rights at a very basic level, and I think they will possibly achieve this. But the danger is that they are losing something very important – their orientation towards an Irish Republic.

You built yourself a house in Muff, Co Donegal. Did you cross the Border deliberately?
The Border has never been relevant to me. It has been an irritation, but I’ve never intellectually or emotionally accepted it. We had a cottage in west Donegal, so we’ve moved our permanent home into Donegal.

If Muff was in the Six Counties, would you have built there?
I don’t think so. I would much prefer to be under the jurisdiction of the Dublin Government. Stormont is either absurd or iniquitous, probably both.

You were, like your father, a school teacher?
I taught for ten years in various schools and liked it very much.

Before that you spent a term in Maynooth as a clerical student. Has that experience affected your life?
I don’t know. It’s a very disturbing thing to happen to anyone. I don’t know if one ever recovers totally from an immense experience of this nature. I was two years in Maynooth.

Were they happy years?
I wasn’t very happy at the time, but I was 16 or 17 and these are carefree years. If one is to have a ‘tragedy’ in one’s life, they are the best years to have it in.

What do you think of religious matters at the moment? Have you any idea what might emerge?
I’ve no idea, but I think this country is facing total chaos because of the complete stagnation of the hierarchy and clergy. They refuse to recognise that things are happening. Vital things are happening in the Church in Holland and America. I know quite a lot about the Catholic scene in America, where very interesting and exciting things are happening. The Irish clergy just dismiss it as just a Yankee fad, of no importance.

What do you feel about the future of the Church in Ireland?
Most likely the intellectuals will stay with it, but the mass of people will have gone. I find that the attitudes in Dublin are much more orthodox than I thought. The sermons I’ve heard in Dublin churches are a hundred years old. I would have regretted it some years ago, but now I don’t care that much. It’s a sort of spectator interest to me now. I’m not involved, except at the level of education. In my own area I see children being taught in schools that are inadequate. I blame the Church for this, because they are insisting on special schools for their own kids. It is ridiculous.

You gave up teaching to become a professional writer. What was your first published work?
It should be a red letter day in your life, but I don’t remember. I’d been doing a lot of reviewing and some journalism, and I had a few stories published. But the first major breakthrough I got was with The New Yorker, which is the best magazine in the world. When it took my first story this was a great encouragement.

What about your plays?
My first play, This Doubtful Paradise, was produced in Belfast. Next there was The Blind Mice, An Enemy Within, Philadelphia, Here I Come, The Loves of Cass McGuire, Lovers and Crystal and Fox.

You have gone over completely from the short story to play writing? They are two very different forms.
I keep seeing close relationships between them, but I hope I haven’t left short story writing. It’s a form I like very well. It’s not as vulgar a form as the theatre, which is really a vulgar form of communication.

This is because you are communicating en masse?
Yes, and because the theatre and economics are so closely bound up – to such an extent that one is at the mercy of producers and managements. The commercial interests are immense. Not so bad in this country, which is good for a playwright. But it’s awful in America. However, my experience in American theatre is only Broadway, and this isn’t very fair to the country as a whole. There is a very good regional theatre in America, but the Broadway theatre could not be lower. I’m not at all proud of having successes on Broadway, because I think it’s of no importance whatever.

It is financially.
Financially it is of great importance, but I don’t drive sport cars or have a yacht or swimming pool or these things. I’m not even fond of good food.

What play has given you most satisfaction?
I couldn’t answer that. All I can say is that I think the first part of Lovers is probably something I remember with a certain affection.

Do you put yourself into your plays? When Eugene O’Neill finished ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’, he said he had written it with tears and blood.
In writing you put all you’ve got into it, although it may be a complete failure. Inevitably you must reveal yourself. There’s a theory that actors fundamentally are very shy people and that they go into this profession because they want to hide behind the various characters they portray. I think that in much the same way a writer tries to disguise himself as best he can behind each play. In fact one is exposing oneself and at the same time hiding oneself.

Do you write about things that you feel deeply about?
These are the only things I could write about. What I would love to do in the next 18 months or so is either a farce or a brilliant satire on Dublin life. Now I don’t think I’m competent to do this, but I’d like to. The very best way to treat the ills in Irish life is to satirise them.

What playwright do you admire?
I admire Thornton Wilder immensely. He is one of the greatest dramatists of our time. For other reasons and other values, I admire people like Ibsen, O’Neill and a lot of English dramatists, Osborne, Auden and Wesker.

What about Pinter?
What I dislike about him is the complete dehydration of humanity in him. This is also something I don’t like in Beckett. There is a complete abnegation of life in both these men. They’re really bleak! But life is all we have, you know.

What about short story writers?
Frank O’Connor is superb. Outside Ireland, Updike, VS Pritchett and a Canadian-Italian writer called Vivanti.

Do you particularly admire any 20th century Irish playwright?
I admire Paul Vincent Carroll very much. And all the men, like George Shiels, who are, unhappily, going to be classified as less than great. But I’m not an O’Casey fan. This is a question of the urban versus the rural thing again. O’Casey is so intensely Dublin that I can admire him from a distance, but I’m never moved by him.

You don’t like Dublin, do you?
Funny, I like coming to Dublin and I have a sort of romantic feeling – this is the capital and so forth. And very stupidly, I have a twinge of emotion when I pass the Post Office, because I admire the men of 1916.

You write at a pretty high intellectual level, but your audience is, in the mass, unintellectual. Does the problem of communication with your audience worry you as a playwright?
This is always a problem. If you deliberately write down, you court disaster. The most you can hope for is that you will hold their intelligent interest right up to the final curtain. At the end of any night’s experience in the theatre all that any writer can hope for is that maybe one dozen people have been moved ever so much or ever so slightly, and that the course of their lives may be enriched or altered by a very fine degree. I don’t believe for one second that a dramatist is going to change the face of the earth.

Why do you think people go to the theatre?
I don’t think they’re going any longer simply for entertainment. They want to be engaged mentally, and if the dramatist does this, he is succeeding. The theatre is becoming more and more an intellectual exercise.

Is the audience becoming more intellectual, then?
Mass intellect is a very different thing to individual intellect. The group of people we call an audience is something like a mob, and they’re incapable of individual thought. But at the same time this mob has a different kind of attitude to the one they had 20 or 30 years ago. They are more receptive to intellectual concepts.

You said that the theme of ‘Crystal and Fox’ was that love wasn’t enough. Could you clarify that?
I feel in this age, and particularly since the Vatican Council and Pope John, that the whole emphasis in Christian doctrine is that we must love. It has been taken up by the hippy movement – love is all; make love, not war – and I find this whole emphasis to be a very watery sort of humanism, and a very shabby sort of liberalism. I don’t think it’s an adequate basis on which to live out one’s life at all.

What do you want with it?
When we talk about life, anyway, all we mean is what are the relationships between people and between nations. Now it isn’t sufficient that one orientate one’s life towards a belief and love. One must also live one’s life on the basis of duty and what we call charity, dedication and the sterner sort of virtues.

But if you really have love, do not these spring from it?
All I’m saying is that I don’t believe in the uniqueness or absolute validity of love. In fact I don’t believe that if you are in love life is going to be made so much happier or easier. One still has got to bring these other sterner qualities to existence on any level.

What do you place first among the sterner qualities?
Probably some sort of altruism. Generosity of spirit is the quality we need most now.

What type of life do you lead at Muff?
I try to do about three hours’ work at my desk every day, messing around with new ideas or working on a specific play or answering letters. I’ve got to take the kids to school and back. Then we have friends in at night, or we go out.

Do you watch television?
No, we haven’t got television. I think all television – using the term accurately – is a vulgar thing.

What do you like to do at night?
Read, or listen to music. Wagner is my favourite. I suppose this is symptomatic of something, but I don’t know what.

What do you think of modern pop music?
I don’t think it’s of any importance whatever. I think the Beatles, for instance, are totally insignificant.

What of modern composers of serious music…
I don’t understand them. I haven’t learned the grammar of these men yet, and it’s something one should do. A lot of modern music is like a lot of modern poetry – it has become intensely personal, and communication is diminished by this. A lot of these men aren’t communicating with us any more.

You have four daughters. What legacy would you like to leave them?
I would hope they will find themselves jobs in which they will be happy and realise themselves. I would like to see their capabilities utilised and expanded.

Are you yourself happy? You look very content.
I’m told I look a lot of things – content, serene, placid, self-contained. But I’m not at all. I’m very jittery, vain, anxiety-ridden, worried and very uneasy. Am I happy? I don’t know what happiness is. One has periods of contentment. I think we’re all in a period of spiritual and political eclipse at the moment. We are all acutely conscious of this unrest and unease.

Do you think something decent may emerge in the end?
Maybe. Or it may end up in total obliteration. This is an equally possible conclusion; it’s quite a proximate possibility. On the other hand, it may end up in a period of sunshine. I wouldn’t know. I’m not too optimistic.

Are you easily hurt?
Yes. For instance, the critics can hurt you, but they can’t flatter you. The flattery of critics washes off. Lack of loyalty hurts me. Loyalty must be total.

Would you live outside Ireland?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t like America at all. It still has some virtues and it’s a very generous country. I loved it when I went there first and I was very enamoured of it, but this left me very rapidly. Now I dislike it very much. I don’t like England. It’s a country I just don’t feel at ease in, although I admire it a lot. The English have a lot of admirable things.

Have you any ambitions?
No overriding one. Just to write plays and another short story. That’s on the professional level. On a personal level I want my children to grow up and be realised in whatever they do. I want to be in touch with them.

You have a satisfactory relationship with them?
I have at this stage. The eldest is only twelve and she still thinks I’m quite intelligent. So the generation gap has not entered into it.

Is there any person who influences you very much, whom you look up to?
I suppose my wife. She has great loyalty and courage and generosity of spirit.

From The Word February 1970