Playwright Richard Bean talks to Viv Hardwick about turning terrorism into a subject which would attract audiences.

RICHARD Bean admits that if he’d set his play, The Big Fellah, about the IRA in Ireland rather than New York then audience numbers, and accolades, would be much, much fewer. “I think controversial subjects do tend to find me,” says Bean, who tackled immigration with his previous work, In England People Very Nice.

“If you’re a playwright you’re looking for what I’d call the cracks in society and the points of friction.

I went to New York three or four months after 9/11 and that was sponsored by Kevin Spacey. Six or seven playwrights went over and I don’t really know what the point was. Writing 9/11 plays was ridiculous at that time, but I was fascinated by my first time in New York,” he says.

He expected the skyscrapers and people like the hard-nosed cops that Brit audiences see in TV and film dramas. “There were flags everywhere and what that tended to do is make the uniformed aspects, cops and firemen, stand out. Fire engines, or ladders as they call them, were covered in patriotic flags, and I kind of got to realise that New York was an Irish town.

“It came as a dawning realisation and at Ground Zero there were collection points for those who died and the irony jumped out at me that these same guys may have been collecting money for the IRA for 30 years,” adds the writer, who has a family connection with the police and the civil service.

Was that why he made his pivotal idealist into a fireman who is recruited by the IRA in a piece set in a Bronx safe-house between 1972 and 1999? “It’s really about politics and what you believe in and how far you’re going to go,” Bean replies.

The fascination is his decision to create this USstyle version of terrorism and bring it back to a UK audience. “I think you have to do these things from an angle which, basically, makes it easier to write.

It would be more difficult for me to write about an IRA cell in Belfast. That’s because I’m not Irish and I don’t think I’d have found it so easy. It’s better to find a niche corner to look at the big issue.

“How many tickets would you sell for a play about an IRA cell in Belfast? Zero. An IRA cell in New York? Why yes, there’s a big Irish community in New York,” says Bean.

He discovered that the main IRA officers tended to be rich, self-made men and based the role of The Big Fellah (David Costello, who is played by Finbar Lynch) on George Harrison, who used to run Noraid, plus five or six others based in New York and Boston.

“The Big Fellah is the nickname for Michael Collins who was the Easter rising leader of the Irish nationalists. David Costello has this vanity thing and wants to be in the history books. He wants to be the American Michael Collins. He’s the smallest bloke on the stage of course and it’s a kind of ironic nickname that the rest of the cell give him because he’s a short guy,” says Bean.

The play toured last year and moved to the massive Dublin Gaiety Theatre last month. “The first week was a bit crazy, I’m told, and the theatre staff had to call the police. There was an articulate drunk who was shouting supportive heckling at the stage.

He absolutely agreed with the point the play was making, that the IRA had slipped from being a civil rights movement into becoming a bunch of gangsters.

But there’s no such thing as supportive heckling, so the Garda was called.

“As he was being dragged out, he was shouting ‘this is my life’ and it’s one of those things that, as a writer, you dream about happening.”

Bean will be travelling to Newcastle for a postshow discussion on Thursday and he admits that one of the most difficult, and chilling, questions about The Big Fellah came from just such a gathering.

“If you’re a theatre-goer you do get more out of the evening (with a post-show discussion). It’s rather like getting a DVD with out-takes. I think it’s part of theatre and anything which disassociates theatre from television and cinema is useful. Part of what theatre is, is the discussion in the bar afterwards.

It’s a more communal thing.

“The toughest question we’ve had came from what we assumed was a supporter of the real IRA.

They said ‘the play suggests that the IRA chose a commercial target in Omagh, what’s your evidence for that? My understanding was that they were planning to bomb the courthouse’. We all kind of froze and failed to answer the question. Max Stafford- Clark (director) kind of bull-shitted his way round it. Max is like a terrier with a rat and he went off and discovered that the real IRA had always considered the Omagh bombing to be a commercial target.”

In comparison, Bean adds the thought that people in the North-East don’t really know, at this moment, what happens to the money they give to Palestinian aid. “Noraid was set up to support nationalist families (in Ireland) during the troubles. It was a bucket going round to buy armalites.”

􀁧 The Big Fellah, Northern Stage, Tuesday- Saturday, 7.30pm, Sat Mat, 2pm.

Post-show discussion with the cast Tues Post-show discussion with Richard Bean Thurs.

Tickets: £6-£19.50. Students and Under 21s: £9.

Two for One First Night Box Office: 0191-230-5151 northernstage.co.uk 􀁧 Richard Bean’s latest work, One Man Two Govnors starring James Corden, opened this week at The National Theatre, London.