Conor Clarke McGrath plays all nine characters in his upcoming show

Conor Clarke McGrath wrote an hour-long script and chose to play all the characters. All nine of them.

The play, called Play, is – on the face of it – about nightclub owner Nicky Flood, who has a really hard life. It’s about alcoholism, struggling with mental health, and death.

Within it there are three stories really: “The story of how Nicky tries to save his club. The story of his brother resurfacing and getting arrested. The story of his messed up relationship with Petra,” his love interest.

He plays the main characters: Nicky and Petra, as well as Will, who works for the club, Nicky’s mum, his housemate, his accountant. 

But the heart of the story, for Clarke McGrath, he says, is Nicky’s brother. Even though Richie doesn’t take up a lot of time in the script – he’s there for about five minutes.  

The character is in part based on someone he knew growing up. “He didn’t have a home for a while so he lived in our living room,” Clarke McGrath said.  

“To me he was a stranger. I was about 11 or 12. But he was a friend of my mother’s and she took him in,” he said. Richie died by suicide. "I was 18, I think."

“I guess it shaped me, and it stuck in my subconscious,” he said. “For a long time. I think for much longer than I realised.”

Richie stuck with Clarke McGrath, he says, but Play a fictional twist on the past, a riff on his experiences – it’s not Richie’s life.

There’s a bit of another person mixed into his character too, a friend of Clarke McGrath’s who experienced psychosis and told him about it.

Clarke McGrath said his own perspective on life has changed a lot over the years. He used to be really judgemental, he says.

“There's a term. ‘Loser.’ Right? You know, it's a very judgmental term. And that's the way I used to see people,” he said. That’s not how he sees things anymore, though, he says. 

“I think a lot of us are very close to falling through the cracks in society,” he said. “And I think it’s really important to think about people who don’t fit.”

He said he wants the audience to engage with difficult themes, “and either see their lives reflected or leave the play reflecting more about those with mental disorders”.

Author and actor

Clarke McGrath is a lot of things. He is an actor, a clown, a stand-up comic, and a playwright. 

He graduated from France’s École Philippe Gaulier. Then he worked at an Irish pub in Paris. “I wasn't writing, I wasn't being creative,” he said. 

So he moved to Dublin about a year ago, without knowing anyone, to restart, he said. He works in hospitality here too.

He started writing this script a month or two after arriving in Dublin, he says. 

It is two weeks now from his first performance of Play, scheduled for 1 March at the Pearse Centre on Pearse Street.

Both Clarke McGrath and his director, Eri Farrell, repeat that a few times on Monday at an afternoon rehearsal in Clarke McGrath’s living room. Two weeks: soon. 

Preparation

The blue and sun have broken through on Monday so Clarke McGrath’s coffee table – its lower shelf spilling with books – is outside in his garden.

It leaves space for the rehearsal in his living room. Inside, the stage is set with two wooden chairs for blocking, to help signpost where he should stand and sit. 

Clarke McGrath was in navy blue slippers. Farrell sat on the couch. She wore big round red earrings, and took notes with a stylus on her iPad. 

Footsteps of housemates in the room above creaked through the ceiling. 

Today, they’re blocking out Act II. It is an extended flashback, a scene which explores the relationship between Nicky Flood, the protagonist, and a woman who’s only in this act.

“So physicality is really, really important. You know, I'm playing two people. We've just rehearsed a sex scene,” he said. “It's also my character telling the audience about this, which is a really vulnerable thing.”

He is spinning a couple of plates, he says. “I'm having to be the guy telling the audience about it, while acting it out. While playing the man and the woman.”

They’re about halfway into blocking out the play. He gets back into characters.

“Work on pauses,” says Farrell. 

Okay, Clarke McGrath says. They reset. He starts again.

“I call my solicitor – and manage to get him [Richie] out on bail. McDonald's for breakfast that morning, and he eats so much. He tells me he actually couldn't remember the last time he ate something, which breaks my heart.” 

He moves the chair: later, he said that shift is him making the setting into McDonald’s.

“There's a silence as I drink my shitty fucking Americano. I offer him a job at the club. I offer him my sofa to sleep on. He says no to both.” 

Clarke McGrath pauses. “Finally, I ask what I can offer him.”

Farrell injects. "I like that sequence,” she says. “That was nice." 

Clarke McGrath makes eye contact as he rehearses. That’s intentional, he said, it’s part of the show.

"I don't want that fourth wall, you know? I want to be able to talk to my audience members and tell the story,” Clarke McGrath said. “Because it's a storytelling show."

The inspiration

Play is the first time Clarke McGrath has based a character on a real person – Richie’s character–  he says, during a pause in rehearsal. 

He has written several scripts before: four full-length plays including Tipsy Sugar Flipping, and he brought solo shows Stalagmite and Stanley to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

He co-wrote a short film that got into international film festivals, he wrote a stand-up show that he said “blurred the line between stand-up and theatre”. And he was in Netflix’s Sex Education.

This is different for him, he says. It’s based on somebody he knew in his teens, and where he still lived in England. 

“I was desperate to get out into the wider world,” he said. And Nicky’s character is “fully fictional” but a bit like himself. And yeah, “He’s really stuck.”

“It’s not ... It’s not really … It is about Nicky,” he said, of the play.

“But, the real, real tender heart of it, is this other character – who I only play for a short time,” he said. Richie, based on his mother’s friend who lived in their living room. 

“There’s a thing in Act I about that character loving the May Fair,” he says, a real carnival which breaks out in Hereford each year.  

“That’s one of my memories of the real Richie. Him loving that carnival,” he said. “So that’s in the show, as our introduction to Richie.”

 “When you first start to hear about Richie, that presence kind of comes out,” says Farrell, the director.

“Speaking of Richie, I really liked the way you played it with the chair,” Farrell said. “How did it feel, sitting down doing it?” 

Good, Clarke McGrath said. He liked having something to look at.

“Again, those pauses will just need to be put in and certified,” said Farrell.

Crunch time

Clarke McGrath has been trying to get down two pages of script a day. That first show on 1 March is kind of a rehearsal too, he says, preparations for festivals they hope to get into.

“So I'm just, I'm just looking at the text every single day,” he said. 

Clarke McGrath said he has enough experience as an actor that even if he forgets something he can paper over the cracks, he says. He is also giving himself permission to read from the script if he needs to, he says.

“I'm working part-time as well as doing this,” he said. “And maybe I need to forgive myself a little bit and go, oh for Act III, you can read it.”

He’s sent Play to festivals – to Dublin Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe. “Fingers crossed, we get in,” he said. 

It’s intimidating, he says. “But look, I'm going to take a risk. This is a year-long project for me.”

He said he’s ready for the next step: performing. He said it’s a good show for taking on the road internationally because there’s no set, no props, no costumes. 

There’s just him, and he’ll need a tech person. But he can sort that out if he goes to Melbourne, LA, London, wherever. He can find tech support there.

Clarke McGrath dwells on how he needs to switch and change his physicality and his voice and lighting and sound.

He is conscious of not boring the audience, he says. “Like, it's an hour of text. So how can I make it the most interesting?”

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.