Funny, peculiar

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

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..."

It is a funny thing. When Dylan was a child, he thought slapstick was funny. He saw it on television and in cinemas, and he laughed a lot. He also thought adults were funny. He'd watch them talking with each other, and he'd think it was funny, how long, how very, very long, it took them to say hello. Hello, how are you? I am well, how are you? I am well. Before they'd sit down and drink their tea. Then the hollow, drawn-out laughs and niceties, meaning it's all right, there's nothing wrong here, I'm not going to fight you or fuck you, nothing's going to happen, we're quite safe. Pass the doily. Generations go by like that. All kids know it. They don't know what it is, but they see it. Dylan thought it was funny. He still does, only in a more ferocious way.

Something happened, Conor says, to the kids he went to school with. They saw it all, they had huge, distinctive personalities and then, somewhere around 12 or 13, it was as if they died. And you see them sometimes now, and they're adults and you wonder where their souls went. They just... packed it in. Dylan is delighted. "They are the über-dead", he cries. "They make a thing of it. They flourish!"

"Oh, it's a sly one", says Conor. "It's like a contest: you can't hurt me, I'm not taking part, I'm dead..."

"... They radiate death, they give it out and get it back and they huddle together for safety. They have to put on the dead act, belong with the über-dead, but they're still trapped inside themselves. If they come out and be themselves, they'd either be removed or marginalised... No." The little negative comes out in the same tone as the preceding, proceeding monologue of existential doom.

A strident voice has risen above the general background noise and is waxing more and more imperious as it moves closer. Then it's in your face and a woman shouts, "Did any of you order a taxi?" like her life and wellbeing depends on it. So Dylan says no, mindful, no doubt, of the social contract. At all events, the woman departs and is immediately forgotten. Except by Dylan. She was, he says, a case in point. You can see it - don't wreck my head, leave me alone, all I'm asking is about a taxi, that's all it is, that's all I want from you, don't mess me around. It's there all the time, he says. It's the fear. It's about safety. Then you get the deadness, so you won't be at risk. And then there's safety in numbers.

"My drive," says Conor, "is a fear of being dead. It's only something I have decided to embark upon. The psychoanalytic approach is only part of a sort of cop-out culture. I don't believe in the unconscious."

"All you can do is pick up a torch and say, hello, I'm here, and go over the top," says Dylan happily. "Be a brave soldier..."

"A trooper," says Conor.

"I don't have any time for anyone who's not a trooper." Dylan moves smoothly up his own gears. "No to dead. Dead goes over there. Yes to trooper. Trooper comes here."

"Life's a battlefield," he goes on, moved by his own metaphor. "And more than that. You're held hostage wherever you go. In the first world war, officers went into battle with a batman in tow, a servant to whom you were entitled, who'd make your tea and polish your shoes and fetch and carry for you. Then you'd be a hostage to your batman, hostage to all the trappings you think you deserve. Because you're combative and ambitious. Then your attainments become encumbrances. Very, very quickly you get weighed down by your own wealth, social status, fame, whatever. All that searching and climbing to the vaulted sky is going to drag you down into the mire. So it will. Ambition is deadness."

And we all thought Black Books, the Channel 4 series about a dysfunctional bookshop owner, was a flight of fancy, stuck there on a Friday night somewhere between Father Ted and Frasier. We lavished comedy awards upon it for its outlandish wit and improbable invention. When Dylan Moran (together with Graham Linehan, who co-wrote Father Ted) made up Bernard Black and then "acted" him out, glowering inside his crummy shop, repelling boarders, there wasn't a lot of fantasising going on. But if it was only black, only an exercise in nihilism, who'd have laughed?

"Being alive," Dylan says, "is about shedding. From the moment you're born, you should be shedding. I don't want any of it. Baby clothes? I don't want them. I don't want your pappy baby food. No. Let me be. Leave me to grow and develop in my own way. Repudiate and repel, that's the thing. Stuff all the hereditary shite we're all fed. Let me find my own way. In Japanese culture, in Zen, they have examples of people who are truly alive, those who are in the process of arriving at the real, true self. They have a scale of one to 10..."

"Oh yes?" asks Conor, with a mean little interrogative twist, "And where are you now?"

"I don't know where I am. I'd need a Zen master to tell me that."

"On this scale, where are you?"

"Well, to be brutally honest, I'd say I was on the cusp between four and five..."

"I wouldn't agree with that."

"Well, you're not actually a master, so you wouldn't know."

"No," Conor agrees, "but it makes me think this veil of humility, this 'look at me I'm a humble social functionary' stance is phoney, because what you're doing is probably essentially more fascist than anything anyone else is doing, because you know what you're doing."

And Dylan, unfazed as the kid who said the emperor had no clothes on, remonstrates undefensively, "I only said between four and five. Give me time. One day I'll do a proper show. All the shows I've ever done have been aiming towards the same thing. The laughter is just a prop and I admit I lean on it. I'm perfectly aware of that. But one day I will be able to go up on a stage and sit there for two hours and people will watch and understand what I'm doing..."

"Well, bloody good luck to you. I hope you'll achieve that some day."

Nothing, apart from a slight miscalculation, betrays any agitation in Dylan. "Every minute of those 75 will be absolutely real, as it happens, there. It sounds insane. I know it will work..."

Conor mocks on: "Oh, it sounds like career suicide, but I will do it because it's the right thing to do. But it's really much more stunningly manipulative than just trying to entertain people. Can you not see that levelled at you, that you are cynically manipulative..."

"Yeah, well, you might say that. That's typically western stuff..."

"I think it's gobbledegook..."

"... You can't begin to understand the complexity, the levels of civilisation, the compression, the years and years of culture and study..."

"... Just you, sitting on the stage doing nothing - that's the pinnacle of civilisation, is it?"

"... No, not the pinnacle. I'm just saying I'm part of it, not the thing itself. No, not that." And then Dylan says, brave soldier that he is, "It's only art."

"Oh!" cries Conor, "I seeeeee!" He is not being sarcastic.

"It's not like I'm saying, look at me, I'm the guy sitting on the stage," Dylan says. He stands up, presents his front. "Look at me. I'm a fool. I know I'm a fool."

If he didn't know that, he rattles on, he wouldn't get out of bed. But he does. He wakes up and thinks, well, I'm a fool, but I'm getting up, anyway. He incriminates himself. He congratulates himself on nothing. He hates his teeth, but he brushes them. Individually and back and front. He even flosses the buggers. Anger fuels him and he lets it out, bit by bit and eloquently. He doesn't palm it off, he owns it. And, as he acknowledges his own anger, he recognises Conor's. He calls it "singular". He is not going to ignore it. He will not pass the doily.

Very quietly, Conor selects four words. He says, "I am beside myself." This is neither a devastatingly bleak statement nor a comment on the companionable nature of Conor's id and ego. Among other things, it might be a bit of both. It resounds like a starting pistol and has the pair of them scampering away together, running for the hell of it, just to see where there is to arrive at.

"Accept you are getting away from yourself. That's the struggle. There are two Conors," Dylan says.

"Whoever is going to forgive me?" Conor's tone remains neutral.

"No one is going to forgive you except yourself."

"I'm consumed by my own self-absorption. But the self that is consumed is not myself. It's a perpetual struggle, like with mirrors..."

"... It is a mask looking into a mirror..."

"... a wrestling match..."

"... What's behind the mirror? What's behind the mask?"

"The mirror's behind the mask. Take away the mask and you've just got two mirrors..."

"Two mirrors looking at the mask.There's nothing in the mirror. Just refracted light."

"That's what all families are," Dylan says, like he's arrived at their destination and rather likes the look of it. "A circle of broken mirrors."

"That," says Conor, "is a nice way of putting it."

"And if you don't have a family," Dylan says, "you make one up out of whatever comes to hand. Animals, trees, things." He's not kidding, he says. There's a university in Wisconsin that proved it. They took a guy, drove him to the back of beyond and set him down all by himself near a railway siding and left him there for six months while they filmed him with some kind of automatic camera. Six fucking months he was there. With nothing and no one. Just a couple of signal posts and a crow that used to fly by every day and the odd train that never stopped. And they filmed him all day, every day, all night, every night, and discovered that all his responses, his eye movements, his reflexes, mimicked those he'd have had with parents and siblings and so on.

Matched absolutely. When there was a train coming, he stood to attention like it was his father. There's a short, companionable lull while we take in this horrible piece of scientific research. We content ourselves that the guy must have volunteered for the experiment. Although Dylan reckons it would have been technically funnier if he hadn't.

What do these young men think, I wondered, what have they felt over the past 10 years, when people have said they are talented, gifted? At last they are in total accord. "Fundamentally," Dylan says, "it's abusive."

"It's cruel," Conor reckons.

"... Why do people do that?"

"... to wipe you..."

"... to fucking wipe you. Ah, it's a gift, they say, like you found it in a box. Like you wandered into a forest and, as luck would have it, you came upon this box and opened it and there was a gift inside it..."

"... So you try to find some way to amuse or entertain, and they fucking swoop on you. You're gifted. You don't count..."

"... You're not a human being, you're gifted. You're not one of us. Go over there."

"You're not allowed to have worked..."

"Or suffered. You didn't sweat. You didn't have any self-doubt or self-loathing or self-contempt. You didn't even have any choice. No. You're gifted..."

"... All the old, diffusing mechanisms. Fear, danger..."

"... Kill. And the zombies turn away and enjoy the warmth of other zombie bodies."

They're calling time across the bar. Someone puts Danny Boy on the juke box, but gently, to soften the blow. Dylan says he used to think there was nothing funnier than a really angry man, but he's not sure he believes that any more. In fact, it never was the anger that was funny, rather the impatience that went with it. Now he thinks it's grief that's funny. It hasn't been looked at enough, he says. Grief and tragedy. And the more compounded the tragedy, the funnier it is. The more ridiculous. Dylan is on one of his kamikaze flights to the paradise of perdition. He knows it, Conor knows it, I know it. "You're not going to get any laughs out of the plight of people in the home counties when the river overflows and makes their houses all wet," he says. "No, they have to be very, very poor peasants, already shat upon, and their village is flooded.

"Yessss. It's all got to be in inverse proportion to the Gotterdämmerung aspect. I can't be doing with all that stream of consciousness meandering about how people feel about each other and what happens to them. I'd rather have the broad, flat-out horror. Horror is where the humour is.

"Horror, real horror, staring you in the face. That's where it is. Everything else is just... ppffffff. Do you know what I mean? Do you really?" Conor nods. He knows what he means. I say I wish I didn't. "Don't feel bad," Dylan says. The song ends. Oh Danny Boy I Love You So.

The Actors will be released next year.