David Ireland: ‘Going sober was easy, finding a girlfriend without it was hard’

David Ireland looks like a hard man easing into a softer middle age. The 48-year-old playwright’s shaved scalp, pointed beard and raven-coloured eyes suggest a Viking warrior considering retirement plans.
The macho look is not a surprise. Ireland, the author of the electric, award-winning plays Ulster American and Cyprus Avenue, is one of the few contemporary writers in any form who can write about masculinity without making a fool of himself.
He admits that the highest compliment he has received for his plays was: “My boyfriend really hates theatre but I took him to see your play and he loved it.”
Boyfriends probably will love The Fifth Step, his newest work, which opens at the Edinburgh International Festival this month. It came about after the Slow Horses star Jack Lowden got in touch asking to collaborate with Ireland. Did he have anything that might work?
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He did: a grimly comic two-hander partly inspired by Ireland’s decision to give up alcohol soon after he moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland to go to drama school. He was 23.
When Ireland was a child he saw how his father, who died when the playwright was young, was affected by drink. “Nowadays you would call him an alcoholic,” he says. “My very few memories are of him being drunk and unpleasant. He had a lot of anger and I never really saw or remember that much that was good about him, sadly. But I’ve heard good stuff from other people.”
Giving up alcohol was easy, Ireland says. “But having a social life without it, well, that was hard. Trying to find a girlfriend was impossible.”
Ireland wants The Fifth Step to have the sparse texture of a David Mamet play from the 1970s. Two guys yakking, two chairs, a table. “They are talking about being men; there’s swearing and there’s violence in it. It’s very old-fashioned in a way.”
So, surprisingly, is Ireland. His plays (inevitably described as “shocking”) have led to walkouts on Broadway and in the West End. Cyprus Avenue climaxes with infanticide. Ulster American explores consent, the abuse of power and why A-list Method actors are creepy blowhards. Both are wickedly funny.
I had half-expected Ireland to be a fire-breathing maniac. Instead he is courteous, even courtly, and does not swear once during our hour-long conversation. He openly wonders if he would even like his plays if he had not written them. Does his mother like them? “My family isn’t really interested in what I do,” he says.
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His mother did eventually see Cyprus Avenue, in which an Ulster Unionist named Eric loses his mind and murders his five-week-old granddaughter because he believes she is Gerry Adams. “She wasn’t too bothered by the violence. Just the swearing.”
For years Ireland, originally an actor, wrote plays in the expectation that they wouldn’t be staged. His role model was the poet Philip Larkin, whom Ireland adores for all the “miserablism and nihilism” and his “caustic and uncensored” letters.
Now Ireland appears to have been outflanked by his own success. Woody Harrelson played Jay in Ulster American when it went to the Riverside Studios in west London last year. High-level glamour followed each night. Jim Carrey, Salma Hayek and Ted Danson turned up.
“I just tried to stay away as much as I could,” Ireland says, having remained in Glasgow with his wife and two children for most of the run, because he “couldn’t handle the intensity of being around Jim Carrey and Salma Hayek”. Wasn’t Ulster American intended as a brutal and uncompromising takedown of Hollywood A-listers anyway?
“That’s what I thought,” Ireland says, laughing at the memory. “But they all seemed to love it. People told me Jim Carrey loved it and that he was laughing away.”
It turned out that everyone in Hollywood knows somebody like Jay — a nauseatingly myopic actor who mistakenly believes that he is Irish. “They all said, ‘I know a guy like that,’ and then they would name a famous actor.”
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Ireland was more interested by the reaction of “London theatre people” during Ulster American’s initial run in Edinburgh in 2018. They were “appalled”. “It wasn’t so much that they were offended but they looked frightened. They looked worried that this play was going to get out of control.”
Control is a quality that the Belfast-born Ireland clearly prizes. He works all day and night, hates travelling, goes to church and reads the Bible instead of watching the news.
Where does the fight-or-flight mania of his work come from, then? “This is a terrible thing to say,” Ireland admits, “but that violence and that rage is in me, and it comes out very easily when I write.”
The Fifth Step is his first play that does not touch on the Troubles. (Being an Irish playwright is not without its travails: an astonished Ireland once received feedback that asked whether a scene of Irish dancing might be inserted into the script.) The play’s lack of overt stand-taking is an oblique response to what Ireland calls contemporary culture’s “fake obsession” with politics.
“I find it weird that people I worked with in theatre ten years ago were Liberal Democrats,” he says, “and the next time I see them they’re telling me all about Malcolm X. What on earth has happened?”
By sublimating the political elements in his work, Ireland has achieved something that many of his contemporaries, who invite audiences to stare at their naked bodies on stage or ban white people from the theatre during Black Out productions of their work, have failed to create: the element of surprise.
He is nothing if not surprising. The evening before we spoke he was up late watching The Best Man, a 1999 rom-com. He is writing something similar — a light-hearted comedy based around a wedding — while also putting the finishing touches to Cold Water, a six-part ITV thriller that will mark Andrew Lincoln’s return to British television.
As he ages, he says that he feels less desire to be provocative. Ireland has taken on baby murder, Brexit, #MeToo, the Troubles and half a dozen other landmine subjects in his work. Is there anything he wouldn’t write about?
“I don’t want to speak too soon …” A shadow of worry passes over his face. “I feel like things always turn out OK. Somebody told me once that the pure of heart never get cancelled.” He smiles. “I think there’s something about being fearless. Nothing ever ends up as bad as you think it’s going to be.”
The Fifth Step by David Ireland is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, until August 25; eif.com
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