Mark motors ahead in Bewley’s

SPEAKING at the Ennis Book Club Festival in 2009, Mark O’Halloran offered an important insight into his obligations as a writer.

The award-winning Ennis playwright and screenwriter of Adam & Paul and Garage suggested his work is inhabited by characters on the “borderline of articulacy” – characters who don’t have the language to say what they want and who challenge him as a writer to find other ways of expressing their truths.
Mary Motorhead, his play written in 2001 but currently receiving a belated world premiere at Bewley’s Café Theatre in Dublin, shows that he dedicated himself to this mission from the outset.
Produced by Galway’s TrueWest Theatre, Mary Motorhead, starring Cora Fenton, is the story of a woman speaking from prison after stabbing her husband, Red O’Brien, in the head with a carving knife.
Over the course of her monologue, Mary recounts her friendship with Kathleen Brennan, her shot-putt success at school, her courtship and marriage to Red and the action that has left her husband in intensive care.
It’s a companion piece to Mark’s The Head of Red O’Brien, also a monologue, where Red reflects on his life with Mary. TrueWest presented that play at the same venue for three weeks in January.
If the double bill sounds bleak, it isn’t. Both plays revolve around a tender, if raucous, love story. Mark specialises in black comedy and the droll humour that blossomed in his internationally recognised film scripts is firmly sown in these earlier efforts.
For example, the event that triggers Mary’s attack on her husband isn’t infidelity or domestic violence; it’s his obsession with Sean Connery and the film The Hunt for Red October.
Similarly, Red’s main grievance isn’t that his wife stabbed him; he seems more put out that she used his Christmas present to her – an eight and a half inch wooden-handled stainless steel carving knife ordered from a catalogue – to do it. “Well I thought it was rather thoughtless is all,” Red grumbles.
Best known for his film scripts and his TV script Prosperity, Mark’s writing career started with these two plays for lunchtime theatre. That both are monologues is no accident as the form offered him an introduction to writing for the stage.
“It’s a different type of writing,” says Mark. “For a beginner, it starts you storytelling, developing a character’s voice. There’s craft in every type of writing but the monologue is more straightforward.”
Mark wrote The Head of Red O’Brien first but with Mary Motorhead, he was exploring content as well as form. “When I wrote it, it was a conscious attempt for me to write a female voice and to experiment with different techniques,” he explains.
In Mary Motorhead, the protagonist tells her side of the story. Mark says he was drawn to Mary’s character. “I like the idea of a strong, impulsive, headstrong woman. I’ve met a lot of women like that in the West of Ireland,” he jokes.
After graduating from the Gaiety School of Acting, Mark established himself as an accomplished actor in productions for Corn Exchange, Druid Theatre and the Abbey Theatre.
He has won numerous awards for his acting and writing. In 2006, he received the Gijón International Film Festival’s best actor award for his role in Adam & Paul and the London Evening Standard’s best screenplay award for the same film. In 2008, he garnered the Irish Film and Television Award (IFTA) for best film for Garage and for best television script for Prosperity.
A recurring theme of Mark’s work is that it throws a searchlight on characters on the margins of society.
Adam & Paul charted a harrowing day in the life of the titular Dublin heroin addicts as they scrounge money to feed their habit. Garage explored the loneliness and casual cruelties of small-town Irish life through the simple-minded Josie. Prosperity examined the lives of four peripheral characters struggling with their isolation.
The importance of the outsider in his work has echoes in what Mark sees as the role of a writer. He suggests that his early experiences in the capital, for example, sharpened his senses and contributed to the authenticity of his script for Adam & Paul.
“I moved to Dublin when I was 20. As an outsider, your ears are tuned into – and your eyes are opened to – the world around you. For a writer, the most important things are observation and an eye for detail.”
Although his artistic preoccupations remain constant, Mark has chosen Havana as the canvas for his next film.
“After Prosperity, I came to a halt,” he says. “This film is set in the world of drag queens and prostitutes of Cuban nightlife. But it’s also about a father-son relationship – that old chestnut.”
Written in 2010, Mark is in discussions with a production company in London about the film and hopes it will be made later this year.
Despite that foray to foreign shores, this country’s changed atmosphere has pulled him back to the landscape of small-town Ireland for his next work. Currently co-writing the film script with Lenny Abrahamson, the director of all Mark’s film and TV screenplays, this is a family drama set in 1981.
The period setting is significant. “There are a lot of parallels between today and 1981,” he suggests. “Back then, there was uncertainty, fear, a lack of self-esteem and that’s where we are now.”
While Mark’s stage and screen work to date haven’t directly tackled politics, they reveal the underbelly of the economic excesses of the last 15 years. He is dismissive of how the Celtic Tiger ‘triumph’ was portrayed.
“The Celtic Tiger passed me by – I was poor before it, I was poor during it and I was poor after it. We could’ve solved so many problems but we did nothing to solve them. It felt like an illusion and that’s what it’s shown to be.”
Mary Motorhead runs at Bewley’s Café Theatre until February 19.