Born of frustration

Damian McCarney

The day that Philip Doherty’s play 'The Great Couch Rebellion’ premiered in Dublin, the Indo led with a photo of An Taoiseach Enda Kenny chasing a goose in Tayto Land.
A Fine Gael PR-exec probably figured it’d make for a good photo op, and show the politician’s lighter side.
Philip Doherty wasn’t one bit impressed.
“This is our leader,” he says, still incredulous, six months on, “and he’s chasing a goose.”
He’s shaking his head in dismay, sitting across the table of a main street Cavan café, which the Celt ill-advisedly suggested as a quiet spot for an interview at 11am on a Thursday. It’s busy. By the time we finish up it’s rammed.
Embarrassed and distracted at the prospect of getting photos taken amongst the diners, lest people think he’s lost the run of himself, once he’s riffin’ on Ireland’s financial mire he’s back in the zone.

Dark
It’s the basis of his latest stage production, which plays the Town Hall Theatre this weekend.
Mid-rant he recalls, if not the final straw, the penultimate straw, that broke the camel’s back and provoked him to pen his dark, sideways look at the state of the nation. “One of the things was Enda Kenny on the front of Time Magazine. That really annoyed me. What the f*ck? And then he’s getting some award in Germany as the best politician in Europe - while the people in Ireland are going absolutely mental.”
For political balance, Doherty’s also perplexed by Fianna Fail’s resurgence in the opinion polls - so soon after the nation blamed them for our financial freefall - and fully expects them to form a future Government.
“I think the main thing that is annoying me is that we are the fighting Irish, the great Irish country and we’re sitting around doing nothing, just sitting around and complaining and being obedient like whimpering dogs being patted on the head.”

Breaking point
The Great Couch Rebellion tells the story of unemployed Adam (Paul Marron) and his Greek girlfriend, Eve (Margarita Grillis), who, tied forever to a mortgage, reach breaking point when they decide to rise up from their couch and lead Ireland in a new rebellion. Eva, in Philip’s words, “starts looking deeper into the rabbit hole” and convinces Adam that they can be the catalyst to a new world order. “You have to do something so radical, so desperate, and terrible, awful to get attention,” says Philip, “and that’s the way Adam goes – he goes over the line completely.”
Wondering how autobiographical the yarn is, the Celt speculates Doherty, who’s based between Cavan and Dublin, isn’t the sort to have mortgage burdens.
“No-ooo, I’m one of the wealthiest people in Ireland at the moment. I don’t have anything, but I don’t owe anything.
“I mightn’t have a mortgage but a lot of people around me do – family, friends, so I wanted to write something about the state of the nation I think that’s kind of a playwright’s duty and privilege to try to put a shape on what’s going on and make sense of everything, and what is happening in the country.
“And write about the contemporary stories rather than writing pure escapism and comedies.”

Anger
He aims to give voice the anger simmering in living rooms across the country as they watch in disbelief as the bamboozling figures of national debt spiral upwards, flat-lining unemployment and, of course, the despicable outlook of top bankers. He equates the boom-time bankers with drug-dealers pushing money on vulnerable addicts.
The first draft of his black comedy was written in a week-long, trance-like venting session. He says “It came from the right place,” and rates it as “the most important play I’ve ever written”.
“Underneath I was boiling with anger when I was writing this, and of all the play’s I’ve written, I wrote this in the quickest time. It just came out. I was writing for fourteen hours a day – just writing non-stop, just getting it out as quick as I could.
“The more and more I read into what was going on in my country the more I got angry. I felt I had become the Adam character because he gets sucked into all these conspiracies theories and the more information and more stuff you read the more angry you are. It was happening to me as well!”

http://youtu.be/yi4ZGBTvkWw

Book of Genesis
Doherty has flavoured the play with the Book of Genesis to get his point across, and many would agree that the public remain largely in the dark about the real machinations at the corroded heart of the Irish financial system.
“Adam and Eve is the whole fruit of knowledge, the apple of knowledge, and how little we actually know of what’s going on – what’s really and truly going on. Do we even really know what’s going on with the banking system? Do we? Do we really know what’s going on top, on top, on top, on top – and who’s really running anything. “It’s very strange that we are being very compliant in the country – it’s strange that Greece is rising up, Spain is rising up, and it’s all over the news on social media but it’s not on our TV stations.”

Conspiracies
Doherty’s aware there’s a line not to cross when it comes to conspiracies.
“There’s a couple of my friends, they’ve completely opted out of society, and they just have got completely sucked into conspiracy theories.
“It doesn’t look like they are ever going to come back,” he says with a raucous hiccup laugh.
Are they in a better place for it?
“They think they are, they think they are,” he says. “It’s that thing, ignorance is bliss. It’s just so interesting to see what Greece have done, and what Spain have done, and Ireland are sitting around... I went to a protest yesterday, there were a few hundred at it. It’s like f*cking hell like, we’re in debt forever, and we’re just going 'Alright, okay, that’s grand.’”

Humour
Given that he wants to develop as a writer and ultimately write for screen as well, the Celt asks in a ham-fisted way whether the humour will reduce with his maturing as a writer.
“I do want to be a playwright where my plays are put on in a hundred years’ time,” he says po-faced. “I have pulled back on the c*ck jokes,” he says delightedly laughing. “There is one good one in the Couch Rebellion. That’s a sign of my maturity.
“Seriously, I think the Couch Rebellion is the first step of me changing, or writing on more serious topics, and trying to put a shape on what’s happening in the world today, and write about contemporary society and just try to make sense of everything.”
The play has been getting love-it-or-hate-it reviews, and Philip is thrilled that it’s provoking such strongly diverging views. “Tom Murphy said that the worst reaction you can get from people leaving the audience is indifference and anyone who has went to see this certainly isn’t indifferent or ambivalent, they have an opinion on it and I’m proud of that.
“For the most part people love it and I think now with the whole backdrop of the Anglo Tapes and stuff like that, it’ll be interesting to see their reactions, especially outside Dublin. I was surprised because it got so much media coverage, and I think it’s simply because no one else is writing this stuff at the moment.”
Might there be a march down Farnham Road after it?
“Where? To Blessings?”