‘Irish writers don’t talk to each other unless they’re shouting abuse’: Sebastian Barry interviewed

Sebastian Barry, Irish literary Laureate, is in London to promote his first play in a decade. He didn’t plan on leaving it so long, he insists; it’s just that finishing the play — On Blueberry Hill — took longer than he’d planned. How long? Most of the decade, he confesses. At one point progress was so slow that he wrote to his agent and offered to pay back the advance. ‘God knows, money is tight enough already in theatre without me taking it for not writing a play,’ he says.

In his defence, Barry has been rather busy, publishing no fewer than three novels (including the Costa prize-winning Days Without End) in the time it took to finish one play. Why did On Blueberry Hill take so long then? Is it that he finds novels easier to write, or does he just enjoy them more? Neither, he says, insisting that, despite any statistical evidence to the contrary, he’s actually come to prefer writing plays to novels.

‘I’m a prose writer who grew up in the theatre,’ he says. His mother, Joan O’Hara, was a stage actress who went on to star in one of Ireland’s longest-running soap operas. ‘As a young child I just assumed everyone’s mother was an actor,’ he says. ‘I was shocked when I went to school and found that they did other things, like minding house.’

He speaks of his admiration for the actors he’s worked with on previous plays — Claire Bloom, Donal McCann and Sinead Cusack. Did he never want to act himself, I ask. His live readings, some of which can be found on YouTube, are brilliantly flamboyant, with Barry — a six-foot-something mountain of a man — unable to resist the temptation to put on bombastic accents or segue into Irish folk ditties.