Interview: David Ireland

Playwright David Ireland’s most recent Edinburgh Festival experience was a very good one. Ulster American hit the Traverse Theatre’s stage like a primed explosive in 2018, a fierce satire of the self-consciously right-on nature of middle-class British theatre, and the culturally appropriative ways big stars co-opt real-life stories. Critics went wild for it.

“My agent sent it around various theatres in London and it was rejected,” says Ireland, who’s from Belfast but now lives in Glasgow. “The message was, it was too controversial or offensive or whatever. Then I had a meeting with Gareth Nicholls from the Traverse – I’d acted for him as Santa Claus in a kid’s show at the Arches in Glasgow. He asked if I had any unproduced plays.

“I sent it thinking there was no way the Traverse would do it after every theatre in London said no, but he jumped at it. I was really proud of the play, but I was convinced it was going to be a disaster. I thought people would hate it and find the characters repulsive. But no, it was much loved – and hated by some.”

Lockdown delayed Ulster American’s London transfer, but it opened at the Riverside Studios in late 2023, starring Woody Harrelson, Andy Serkis and Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland. “It was great, but a very strange experience, dealing with that level of Hollywood stardom,” says Ireland. “It paralleled the play – not that Woody is monstrous, but when you're in a room with somebody that famous it changes you, which is what happens to the playwright character.”

Ireland’s profile had clearly risen, because the National Theatre of Scotland told him Slow Horses actor Jack Lowden had expressed an interest in appearing in a play by him. “I'm a huge fan, I think he's one of the best actors of his generation, so I leapt at the chance,” says Ireland. “I think actors tend to like my work more than audiences and critics, which has given me a career. I used to be an actor, so I write for them first.”

Setting aside the idea that a National Theatre of Scotland play (now also an Edinburgh International Festival co-production) needs a large cast and dazzling effects, Ireland wrote two-hander The Fifth Step, about men in an Alcoholics Anonymous programme. “Like all of my work it's autobiographical to an extent, which is a horrifying thing to admit,” says Ireland. “I really love those David Mamet plays of the ‘70s and ‘80s, where it's just two or three people in a room talking. It's an older man and a younger man, a very basic two-hander, but with elements of absurdism and surrealism, a naturalistic play which veers off into strange worlds.”

When he mentions autobiography, does that extend to his own relationship with alcohol? “I don't drink alcohol, I stopped when I was 23,” he says (he’s 47 now). “I don't label myself an alcoholic, but certainly in my teens and early twenties, it was a problem. But what the play’s about is that it was more of a problem when I stopped drinking. I found giving up quite easy, but just being a young man and being sober at a time when the whole culture was based around drinking, I thought, how am I going to socialise? How am I going to get a girlfriend? Maybe it's easier for today's generation.”

Alongside Lowden as Luka, The Fifth Step stars Sean Gilder as James and is directed by Finn den Hertog. “It’s a strange play to talk about, because I can't pinpoint exactly what it's about,” says Ireland. “Ultimately it's about fathers and sons, about older men and younger men, but it's also about sexuality, alcoholism, faith and religion. Like most of my plays, it's overloaded with themes. People seem to like that.”