Conor McPherson

Conor McPherson (1971- ), Irish playwright, who has revitalized the dramatic monologue with his distinctive plays. He was born in Dublin and had his first plays produced by the drama society at University College Dublin, where he was a student and later a tutor of philosophy. After graduating, he co-founded a fringe theatre company, Fly By Night, which from 1992 to 1995 staged his first professionally produced plays: Rum and Vodka, Radio Play, A Light in the Window of Industry, Inventing Fortune’s Wheel, The Good Thief, which won a Stewart Parker new Irish playwright award, The Stars Lose Their Glory, and This Lime Tree Bower. Of these, Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief were single-character pieces, consisting solely of monologues, the style by which McPherson would make his reputation. This Lime Tree Bower extended the form by overlapping three characters’ monologues in a family saga set in a small seaside town outside Dublin. His early work was impressive for its vibrant use of vernacular and the way in which McPherson merged the monologue and short-story forms.

After This Lime Tree Bower transferred to London’s Bush Theatre in 1995, McPherson became writer-in-residence there. His first commissioned play for the Bush, the monologue St Nicholas (1997), was also produced off-Broadway in New York. A bold modern fable, it starred Brian Cox as a rancorous theatre critic who, in exchange for eternal life, becomes a procurer of victims for a gang of modern-day vampires. McPherson was then commissioned by London’s Royal Court Theatre, for which he wrote The Weir, first staged at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1997. This highly atmospheric play, featuring four locals in a remote Irish pub who while away the night telling ghost stories to try to scare a young woman visitor from Dublin, became a long-running success in London’s West End, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright award.

McPherson’s subsequent plays are Dublin Carol (2000, Royal Court), about an undertaker looking back on his wasted life; Port Authority (2001, New Ambassador Theatre), interweaving the monologues of three generations of Dublin men as they reflect on love; the one-act Come On Over (2001, Gate Theatre, Dublin); and Shining City (2004, Royal Court), in which a widower is tormented by a vision of his deceased wife.

McPherson also wrote the screenplay for the film I Went Down (1997), as well as adapting and directing Saltwater (2000), a film of his play This Lime Tree Bower, and writing and directing the comedy The Actors (2003). For television, he directed Endgame (2000) for Channel 4’s Beckett on Film season.