Mind The Gap

EDITED BY JANE HARDY

Playwright Clare McMahon, whose new play Gap Year explores the self-discovery trip of three sixty-somethings, talks grannies, ageism and gardening.

Plays begin in various ways. Inspiration and the muse, a deadline and often nowadays, via real-life interviews. That’s the case with Clare McMahon’s Gap Year, the play already attracting a buzz and about to open at The Lyric Theatre, when we meet in the café bar. It’s good for funding but does it really help the creative process, I ask her over coffee. McMahon (35) gets the point but politely fends it off. “I did interview real women who had brought up my generation as I wanted to check out my ideas, and they repeatedly said they felt invisible. That’s something I’d sensed. But all my plays are based on the imagination and creativity.”

The idea for Gap Year’s road-trip narrative, a bit like Thelma and Louise without the nasty stuff, came to Clare McMahon when she saw a request for new dramatic ideas spanning Ireland, north and south. She explains: “Fishamble Theatre put out a call for plays to cover the whole of Ireland. I wondered what I could submit and was thinking about my grandmother’s generation.” The idea McMahon came up with was genius. What if three women – Kate, Roisin and Oonagh – decide to grab their moment, their very own gap year.

It isn’t quite like their granddaughters’ version, partly because of location. McMahon says she and the cast and production team, including her husband, director Benjamin Gould, were aware of the financial constraints now. “We discussed cost of living the other day and what they could afford. They don’t go to Thailand, but visit every county in Ireland, and they’re frugal. When buying their camper van, there is a scene where they ask the price. The seller names something, then Kate says ‘What’s the real price?’, that is not the one for old ladies.” As the blurb says, newly-widowed Kate, childminder-in-chief Roisin and Oonagh are excited, adding, “some of them they haven’t even heard of!”

Understandably McMahon, who started out acting and is still a thesp in spite of having no fewer than four shows in development, won’t give too much away. “No spoilers, but I can say that it all ends when they die horribly… no, only joking, there is of course a positive ending which I think we all need.” She adds that her play is about new beginnings – “that’s something we are allowed, no matter how old we are”. She touches, too, on loss and her recently widowed gap-year lady says wistfully at one point that she’s only sorry her husband hadn’t lived long enough to enjoy his pension. That is pretty much a Victoria Wood line and McMahon says she admires Wood and Walters. The humour definitely punctuates McMahon’s plot and her characters quip that in three hundred years’ time, archaeologists will dig up three ancient female skeletons and wonder what they were doing in a tent in Donegal. At the risk of a terrible pun, the excitement is of course in tents. Or camper vans. So is there love, maybe even s-e-x, too, for our heroines, I ask? The writer smiles and notes that women of a certain age now have romance in their lives as well as pensions. Later on, actor Frankie McCafferty appears - he has multi-roles in Gap Year, taking on four of the male roles. So are you a bit of love interest, I enquire? He smiles enigmatically, says he’s a priest among other things and vanishes towards the rehearsal room.

On the topic of whether ageism or sexism is worse, McMahon is illuminating. She notes that ageism is pervasive and often not recognised as true prejudice. “Carol Moore who plays one of the intrepid gappers says that ageism is one of the last recognised -isms. It’s still a joke to be an old lady.” That could be true, although we bat about the fact that prejudice against us women, the oppressed majority, also remains endemic. If equality was achieved last Wednesday, we frankly didn’t notice it.

Gap Year is really about a topic that concerns all of us and that’s identity. How we find it, maintain it in the face of others’ preconceptions. And in the case of ageist bigotry, how we fight it. As Oonagh, the divorced gap-year traveller, says: “Just because I have more past than future doesn’t mean I have to stay there.” Her rallying cry will no doubt chime with many overtwenty-ones. There will be in this production, therefore, some good craic. In terms of comic influence, McMahon reveals an enthusiasm for Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, but also earlier generations of comedy writers such as Morecambe and Wise and the Two Ronnies.

Clare McMahon, who is from Carrickfergus but now lives in south Belfast, had her mind set on treading the boards. She says that her parents, butcher Owen and Housing Executive officer Cecilia, supported her all the way. “When I got into the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, my mother came over with me to find accommodation. It wasn’t as expensive then as it is now and you could get a room in a shared house for about £300 a month. I teamed up with another girl and we found two third-year students to share with.”

The educational side of things didn’t always suit McMahon, as she admits. “We were taught to speak in RP, received pronunciation.” That’s fairly posh English and Clare McMahon had to wait to use her soft northern Irish accent. “Well, the curriculum at Central was very classical, Shakespeare onwards.” Oddly, in an earlier era of drama students, the Sixties, it was cool to sound as if you came from Yorkshire. McMahon says that times had definitely changed.

But after graduating, the woman whose audition pieces were from Juliet and The Weir, got roles where she could retain her own vocal identity. “I was in a tour of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Scottish and Irish actors and we used our own voices. I was Hermia (one of the four lovers) and the Wall.” She took on the juicy role of the female Russian landowner, Madam Ratushinskaya, in The Cherry Orchard at The Greenwich Theatre. McMahon also rested, like well over three quarters of her colleagues in the acting profession. Her day job was caring for children with severe physical and mental learning difficulties. “I would look after all their needs and be on the floor playing an animal.” Another form of acting in a way, you could say.

She returned home with her husband Ben Gould, whom she met while a young performer in the Rainbow Factory, after a few years. Now life is creatively stimulating, but they find time to eat out at restaurants off the Lisburn Road where they live. Is it tough being the couple that work and live together? McMahon laughs, saying her husband has criticised her writing in his role as director, but it all seems amicable.

When not writing or collaborating with husband Ben on their company, Commedia of Errors, McMahon likes to garden. “The excitement when I grew my own carrots!” We discuss her fondness for dahlias (“I like them yellow.”) and how to keep certain plants alive. “I never succeed with fuchsias, they just huff on me and die.” Maybe she could perk them up with a few lines from Gap Year.

Gap Year runs from September 3 to September 25 at The Lyric Theatre (0289038-1081, lyrictheatre.co.uk)