Director-playwright Conor McPherson and actor-comedian Dylan Moran are an odd couple. At work on the set of their new film The Actors, all is smooth. But away from it? Expect some seriously dark verbal jousting

Sally Vincent ,Saturday July 13, 2002, The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>

They come as a job lot, a sort of unmatched pair, similar only in the enigma of their Irishness and the perilous fatigue of having just worked another 16-hour day in conditions long since outlawed by every civilised labour force but their own. They do not know each other. Each is careful to make this clear. One says, "I don't actually know him, but I trust him to do what he does." The other broods for long enough to select one rubber stamp from among many and says, "Yes." This sounds promising of the quality of the crack to come, but then any respite from the cold, wet, comfortless squalor of film-making, with its stinking chuck-wagon and Portaloo and derelict trailer-park accoutrements is welcome to the point of overexcitement.

This afternoon I lurked behind Conor McPherson for more hours than I care to count, watching him direct this man he doesn't know in a scene with Michael Caine (who he also doesn't know). The actors said their lines, the sort of lines where two words do the work of a hundred, delivered with that astonishing, understated facility actors have when they know what they're up to, while Conor crouched over his little teleprompt director's viewer, impassive as a ghost. Once, only once, I saw his shoulders move in a barely discernible heave, up and down, up and down, which was Conor expressing himself in public, enjoying a covert chuckle. Later, by way of small talk, I asked him if it was gratifying to hear words he has written spoken with such easy understanding.
No, he said, with the air of one who does not require anyone to get near his knuckle. When he's working he doesn't think like that. He just gets on with it. Coming from a 30-year-old playwright and director (The Weir, The Good Thief) upon whom the hysterical epithet "wonderboy" has been often and (for him) embarrassingly pinned, this is not an unduly defensive attitude.

We are in a bar on the outskirts of Dublin, close by the Irish Sea. Dylan Moran, in an uncharacteristic display of feverish activity, extracts a packet of Marlboros from the fag machine and, ripping cellophane, collects a couple of screw-top quarter bottles of chardonnay from the bar. The expression on his extraordinarily beautiful face, usually taken for misanthropic scorn and much exploited in his television roles (Black Books, How Do You Want Me?) reminds me suddenly of the raw, anguished spirituality I once saw in an old etching of Saint Patrick waving a stick at a load of snakes. It's the way you'd expect all stand-up comics to look if they had any Celt in them; stick, snakes and all. I don't know why.

In deference to our many professional commitments, we make a stab at the nature of the work in progress. The Actors, it's called, which is fairly self-explanatory as it's about these two actors played to the manner born by Caine and Moran, in his first co-starring role. Based on an early Neil Jordan story, and adapted by McPherson, these two actors, the old one and the young one, the traditionalist and the one who's not sure he's any good at it, conspire to rob a criminal of their acquaintance and put his dirty money to good use.
What's it about? It's about, yes, it's about acting, as in lying through your teeth, believing your own lies, manipulating people, conning and being conned. It's about loss of innocence, about remorse and redemption. But it's layered, you see, there's the undertow and the overbite and this, that and the other metaphor.
Conor is the first to crack: why are we sitting here talking all this shite ? God, he says grimly, it's only a bit of a laugh. All this academic stuff's a fucking waste of time. It's bullshit. Is the world really that simple? You can analyse anything if you're fool enough.

It's like psychoanalysis is the norm. Who's going to sit down and write a story if they have to deconstruct the text first? Nobody's laughing. Conor says that he's just this person who gets something together hoping it will be entertaining. He sounds plaintive. Dylan makes companionable noises. You don't, he offers, walk into a room and get it all. Talking has nothing to do with wanting to understand or be understood. You don't want to be told who you are. But, says Conor as though inconsolable, everyone has a drive to do something or make something that wasn't there before. It's very mysterious. The drive... Like making... a pot, says Dylan. Yes, a pot, you're going to make a pot and you've got to make it a nice pot. With good, big handles and a shiny glaze. A fine pot.
Consoled, Conor says that's how you meet people, isn't it? How you make contact with other people... but Dylan is off on one about his imaginary pot, the rapidity and fluidity of his speech patterns kicking through the dust of the long day, wheeling and prancing and strutting off his tongue like wild birds on a picnic. He can't help it. It's what he does.

Simultaneously, he can hear Conor flagellating himself over his artistic pretensions. A lot of artists, he says, are driven by the idea that they're different from other people, and not only that, but better, qualitatively more dignified. Maybe they're looking for approval, he asks himself. And answers himself, no, because you can get approval without having to work so hard, but perhaps you can't. Perhaps you're only any good at writing songs or novels, and that doesn't mean you're better than anyone else. But you've got to do something, and that's what drives you. And someone, Dylan says, might like your pot. Then, helpfully, "everybody is isolated. It's just a thing about whether they're comfortable in their isolation." And he slopes off to the bar.
"Something non-alcoholic," he calls back over his shoulder. Conor names such a concoction. Some years back, Conor medicated himself with so much whisky they had to pull him out of a three-day coma and hospitalise him for the duration. His drinking days are over. Enough said.

Sobriety suits him well enough; it's not as though it has changed his personality, or that drunks are in any way enviable. With Dylan out of earshot he talks politely, mechanically, about his boyhood in Dublin. He'd played in a pop group and wanted to be the Beatles, but his family thought an education ought to be on the cards, which was why he went to university and wound up (since I ask) with an MA in moral philosophy. It was Kant, really, who started him off. When you're brought up on the Catholic imperative that you're a thoroughly bad lot, it gives you quite a jolt to discover that someone has actually thought about thinking, asked questions about the meaning of good and bad. But, really, he says as Dylan comes back with his hands full of clinking things, all he ever wanted was to be a cooler kid. That was his ambition. Still is. Dylan says all he ever wanted was a beard. Yes, says Conor, a cooler kid and a beard. I'm not sure whether he's flinching or smiling. A bit of both, probably.
Dylan contributes the decent thing, albeit at a dizzying rate of knots. It's all very ordinary, really. You know? No college. Ten years of stand-up. It's like this, like talking to someone in a bar, you look around, there are some people you don't want to talk to, some you do. So you do. I don't know why anyone has a go at anything. You just do. You think, I could do that, OK, so I will. I was in a club watching a stand-up and I thought I'd have a go. I had something scribbled on the back of an envelope and I probably had the odd steadier, you know, and got up and gave it five minutes of bollocks.

He doesn't remember if anyone laughed. Or, if they did, why. What's laughter anyway? Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. What's funny? This, clearly, is a question as serious as terminal cancer. People at a garden party: would you like red, white or Penny's cider punch? Ha ha ha. I'll have the punch please. HAHAHAHA. It's nerves. Embarrassment. Laughter is about embarrassment, about feeling exposed. The stand-up is a martyr to the awareness of how exposed people feel. Conor wraps it up. "It's a kindness," he says. A sort of gentle social contract. You don't see it so much here in Ireland, which is a funny thing. A funny-peculiar piece of sociological fact, if you like.
For instance, where Dylan grew up, a prosperous zinc-mining community called Navan, 30 miles west of Dublin, there sprang at least three stand-up comics from his generation. One of them was in his own class. And this is odd because, according to Dylan, the Irish don't really need their kind of service, because their function is already fulfilled - and he makes a small and undramatic gesture to indicate the rising decibels of the locals at their leisure around us. The Irish don't have a tradition of vaudeville because they're all storytellers, one way or another. Hence, while Ireland has three or four comedy clubs, Britain teems with them. The British formalise things. All this hit him when he left Ireland for the first time.
"They want somebody in a room with them, being the agent of relief. They come into a club on a Friday night, having worked their holes off all week, they're knackered, tanked, full of aggression and frustration; they have to go back to work on Monday, and this agent has put himself up to make them feel better, give them a laugh, and if you're not quite doing the trick, they're going to let you know about it. They scapegoat the scapegoat, let out their poison. They interject, heckle, and if you bat it back, they settle down, OK, yeah, I know where I am now, you can carry on. Because they want you to deal with them, there's a whole lot of themselves they want you to help them with..."

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