Playwright David Ireland spoke to David Hennessy as Finborough Theatre revive his first ever play, What the Animals Say.
David Ireland is known for his award-winning plays such as Cyprus Avenue and Ulster American.
It has already been a big year for him with Ulster American playing at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre with Hollywood star Matthew Broderick starring. When it was last mounted in London the same play’s cast included Oscar- nominated Woody Harrelson, Andy Serkis and Louisa Harland.
Just last year Martin Freeman and Jack Lowden were lauded for bringing Ireland’s The Fifth Step to Soho Place.
Also last year David Ireland wrote Coldwater, a tense psychological thriller starring Andrew Lincoln and Ewen Bremner, which aired on ITV.
Prominent Irish actors Stephen Rea (Cyprus Avenue) and Darragh O’Malley (Yes So I Said Yes) have fronted Ireland’s plays.
But David Ireland’s playwrighting career started in 2009 with What The Animals Say.
Primarily an actor up until then, David’s first play would start at Òran Mór in Glasgow and go on to have stints in London and Belfast but more importantly, it was a start of an award- winning career.
It is his debut play, What The Animals Say, that Finborough Theatre are bringing back to London this week.
The play centres around Jimmy and Eddie, who former schoolmates who reconnect on the boat back to Northern Ireland from Scotland.
Jimmy is a struggling actor.
Eddie is a footballer and the captain of Celtic, despite being a Protestant.
They are from different worlds but have more in common than they realise.
Harry Burton directs the cast of Robbie Martin and Matthew Blaney.
David Ireland took time to chat to the Irish World about the return of his debut work.
What is it like to see your first ever play get a new life so many years on?
“I never thought this would happen.
“At first I was like, ‘Does this play really work in 2026?’
“It’s very much a play of its time but it was really good to hear it again.”
It seems that even in this first play of yours, you were writing about some of the issues that your writing would go on to be defined by. I’m thinking questions of identity..
“Yeah, it seems in most of my plays, there’s some kind of argument between two characters, usually Protestant, about whether they’re Irish or British or Northern Irish and that’s in this one as well.
“Of course the play was originally done in Glasgow and the thing that really made the Glasgow audiences laugh is that the character of Eddie, the footballer, is very Protestant, very Loyalist but he’s the captain of Celtic and Glasgow audiences just love that.”
You say you were wondering if the play would work in this era but I wonder is it surprising how relevant a lot of the themes still are?
“I guess so.
“I think at the time I wrote it, Northern Ireland seemed like a very calm, peaceful place.
“It felt like the peace process was going really well and things were all right.
“But now it feels like the whole world has become a bit like Northern Ireland.
“There’s so much tribalism and sectarianism and hatred out there so in some ways it’s more relevant.
“But some of the references and some of the jokes are very politically incorrect.
“It was very influenced by South Park at the time.
“And Eminem.
“I was listening to loads of Eminem when I was writing it.
“I remember I was trying to write in this kind of elegant, poetic way like I was trying to be Chekhov or Brian Friel or something but I was listening to some Eminem at the time and I was like, ‘I should just write like Eminem because I don’t have the same kind of background as Brian Friel, I don’t have the same kind of life as Brian Friel but Eminem’s more my kind of guy’.
“So I started just writing with this ferocity and just letting loose and having these characters say whatever they wanted to each other.
“I was like, ‘Apart from Gary Mitchell, you never see working class Protestants portrayed in the right way.
“I felt nobody really captured the way that I felt and the way that the people I grew up with felt.
“Ulster Protestants were always conveyed in a very simplistic one dimensional way and I wanted to show a bit more of the conflict and a bit more of the complexity there.
“I’ve done that in other plays but right from the off, it was like, ‘This is my authentic voice and I hope it’s a kind of authentic voice of what Northern Irish Protestants are’ and I think that’s how it was received.”
Jimmy is a struggling actor. Of course you were primarily an actor before turning your hand to writing. Is there a lot of you in the character of Jimmy?
“Yeah, it’s very much me.
“I’m sort of dreading seeing it because it will be like going back in a time machine.
“It’s very much me at that time when I was writing it.
“I’d been out of work for so long and I could barely get an audition, never mind a job so that’s the position Jimmy’s in at the start of the play.
“He’s really keen to work but he takes himself quite seriously and he’s quite intense and he’s quite performative like he’s playing the part of being an actor which I don’t think I was ever like.
“I remember at the time thinking, ‘There’s no point writing a character based on me and making it all heroic and making him a victim and all that because that just looks kind of self-serving’.
“I had to make fun of myself a little bit as I was writing it.
“He’s an out-of-work actor.
“He’s a very angry young man and he’s desperate for a big opportunity to come his way.
“And then Eddie, the other character, is a hugely successful footballer.
“He’s been at Man United for many, many years.
“In my head he was always part of that generation of Paul Scoles and Ryan Giggs and David Beckham. All these people are his contemporaries.
“And then in the play, we meet him after he’s had a huge fight with Alex Ferguson and he’s left Man United in a huff and signed for the first team that would take him, and that was Celtic.
“He says the only reason he signed with Celtic was to get back at Alex Ferguson because he hates Celtic.”
Falling out with Ferguson and going to Celtic, isn’t that reminiscent of Roy Keane?
“I don’t want to get sued but yeah, there is a bit of Roy.
“I love Roy Keane.
“I find him such a fascinating character and I love how direct he is and how he takes no prisoners both as a player and as a pundit.
“I like that about him and the character of Jimmy’s a bit like that as well.
“There’s a bit of Roy Keane in there.
“There’s a bit of Neil Lennon.
“There’s a bit of David Beckham.
“There’s a bit of George Best as well.
“There’s a bit of everybody in there with him.
“He’s a very self-destructive, charismatic, brilliant footballer.
“You never hear of anybody playing for Rangers or Celtic who actually hates playing for them.
“I don’t think you’ve ever heard of a diehard Celtic fan playing for Rangers or vice versa so Eddie would probably much rather be playing for Rangers but Celtic have made him a better offer.
“You’d think it wouldn’t be as much of an issue these days.
“I used to follow Linfield.
“I was a huge Linfield fan and they famously never had any Catholics playing on the team.
“And when I was a kid, they signed their first Catholic who was a guy from Senegal called Tony Coly.
“I think he was the first black player to play for them and also the first Catholic so it was quite challenging for a lot of the supporters.
“Maybe the fact that he was a Catholic but he wasn’t a Catholic from Ireland made it more palatable for some of the supporters.
“Living in Glasgow as soon as people hear your accent, they want to know straight away whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic or you’re a Celtic fan or a Rangers fan.
“You don’t get that kind of directness in Northern Ireland.
“People would never actually ask that question but in Glasgow, they just kind of go, ‘You Celtic or Rangers?’”
Do both Eddie and Jimmy present themselves as something other than they are? In that way do they have more in common than they think?
“What they have in common is they both went to the same school and they have the same background.
“They both have a working class Protestant background but Jimmy has reinvented himself as this very middle class, slightly pretentious actor who thinks he’s like Daniel Day- Lewis or something.
“Eddie has stayed the same guy but he’s playing for Northern Ireland and he’s getting booed by a section of the support because he plays for Celtic and they see him as a traitor and he’s kind of putting on a front about that.
“But I think the interesting thing is that Eddie’s very authentic even though some of the things he says and some of the things he does are morally questionable and unpalatable, he nevertheless is authentic whereas Jimmy isn’t authentic.
“Jimmy is pretending to be somebody that he’s not and I think Jimmy learns through Eddie how to be his real authentic self and his real authentic self is, like Eddie, a very violent working class Loyalist.”
Is there resentment between them as they could both see the other as selling out as Eddie is playing for Celtic and, as you say, Jimmy is presenting as this middle class actor which he is not..
“Yeah, I think they both see each other that way.
“Jimmy sees Eddie as a bad representation of his community, like an idiot and a vulgarian and a hooligan whereas Eddie sees Jimmy as a liar and this guy who’s a hypocrite.
“When they first meet, Eddie just loves seeing Jimmy and wants to catch up with him.
“Initially Jimmy doesn’t want to have anything to do with him but then, when he realises it’s a guy who’s become a famous footballer, he wants some of that celebrity.”
What do you remember of the experience of writing this, your very first play?
“It was really exhilarating.
“I loved it.
“I found acting to be a real struggle.
“I think when I was a teenager, acting was really liberating for me but by the time I got to the age of 30, I had so many psychological and emotional blocks about being an actor that I couldn’t be free creatively as an actor but I just found a creative flow with writing.
“I found I could do things that I couldn’t do as an actor.
“I had a kind of freedom.”
Were you initially trying to write a part for yourself?
“That is true and I did write the part for myself.
“I wrote the part of Jimmy for myself to play but then the director ended up not casting me,” David laughs.
“Initially I thought, ‘I’ll actually just invent a character for myself and I’ll write a bunch of plays with this character in it just as a kind of showcase for myself’.
“But it never worked out that way.
“As it turned out I was too good at playwriting and then acting just fell by the wayside so not a bad problem to have.”
What do you remember about the reactions from its first run?
“It was wild.
“I was a completely unknown writer.
“I had no idea what people were going to make of it.
“It’s a lunchtime theatre in Glasgow and there were lots of senior citizens coming in and I thought, ‘Oh, the language is so bad. They’re not going to like this’.
“And then a Catholic priest came in as well and I was like, ‘Maybe I should go up to this priest and say to him, ‘Listen, I don’t know if you’ll enjoy this’.’
“But they went absolutely wild for it.
“I think the priest was laughing harder than anybody else.
“You can’t judge what the audience are going to be like by how they look when they come in.
“A lot of the time the older audience members are more up for having a good time than the younger audience members.
“On the first day, it was a small audience.
“People really loved it and then word got around.
“It was only on for a week but by the Saturday, the place was packed.
“I was just this out of work actor that nobody really noticed and then suddenly it felt like everybody was talking about me.
“Everybody was wanting to commission me.
“I got an agent in London from it.
“It was a very exciting time.
“But a lot of the play was about my discontent with living in Glasgow.
“I moved back to Belfast but I started the play when I was in Glasgow and I was kind of going, ‘Why am I living in Glasgow? If I’m going to be an out of work actor, I may as well be an out of work actor in London or New York’.
“All these questions were in my head so a lot of the anger I felt towards Glasgow and Scotland was in the play and I thought that might offend the Glasgow audience.
“At one point Jimmy says to Eddie, ‘I thought you were happy in Scotland’, and Eddie says, ‘Nobody’s happy in Scotland’, and this Scottish audience just roared with laughter.
“People really took to it but it will be interesting because it’s a very Glasgow play, it’s a very Belfast play and it will be interesting to see how a London audience respond to it.
“I could say the same about Cyprus Avenue or Ulster American.
“Cyprus Avenue felt to me like a really Belfast play.
“I didn’t think anybody outside of Belfast would have been able to understand it but it did really well everywhere.
“It’s still playing all over the world.”
You must be delighted with where the playwriting has taken you but I’m sure you couldn’t foresee the awards and success when writing What the Animals Say..
“I was pretty ambitious but no, I couldn’t have foreseen.
“I remember when the audience were coming in I thought, ‘If this fails, it’ll be okay because I can just go back to being an out of work actor. People will say, ‘Oh well, he tried to write a play, it was okay’.’
“At most I was hoping it would be good enough that people would give me another chance.
“But no, it was much bigger than that.
“It was the start of a big journey.”
You have had star studded productions of pieces like Ulster American and Yes So Said Yes. Stephen Rea starred in Cyprus Avenue. What has been a highlight of it all?
“Ulster American was wild because Woody is friends with so many big names.
“There was a different A list star at the show every night.
“It was kind of surreal.
“Jim Carrey turned up one night, and Ted Danson, Bryan Cranston, David Blaine, Salma Hayek, people like that.
“It was crazy.
“But it’s strange for me.
“I live in Glasgow and I’ve got two kids and I just like to keep things very simple and stay away from anything too glamorous.
“There’s a little Costa Coffee around the corner from me and I just like to sit there and write every day and then go and pick up the kids from school, and that’s pretty much my life but the little touches of glamour I’ve had in my life have been a lot of fun.”
What the Animals Say is at Finborough Theatre until 24 October.
For more information and to book, click here.
