David Ireland is a worried man. The Northern Irish playwright’s darkly comic, deeply political works about the Troubles have prompted trigger warnings and audience walk-outs in their time. Notoriously, Cyprus Avenue, described by the Guardian as “the most shocking play on the London stage”, culminated in a stomach-turning act of infanticide.
But this is not what concerns him today. Ireland has just explained how, around four year ago – just as he began writing his latest work The Fifth Step, which is about to premiere at the Edinburgh international festival – he started praying. Then he began reading the Bible and attending services at an evangelical Christian church on the southside of Glasgow, where he lives with his young family. This led to his baptism earlier this year.
Now he’s fretting. “Even telling you this, does it mean Christians are going to come and see it expecting a Christian play? It’s definitely not,” he says plaintively. “Ninety per cent of it is about masturbation.”
The Fifth Step is a deadly funny and seriously provocative two-hander about the relationship between a younger man (played by Slow Horses star Jack Lowden) who has recently quit drinking and is trying to get to grips with his past in order to manage his sober future, and his older mentor (played by Sean Gilder). If it was intended as a departure from previous work – in which Ireland has tackled more explicitly the extremities of religious conflict and the Troubles – it is only partly successful. As he says: “I can’t really escape it. No matter where I set them, all my plays boil down to that conflict between belief and ideology.”
The title refers to the 12-step programme, originally created in the 1930s to help alcoholics maintain their abstinence and now practised globally by people in recovery from various forms of addiction. But representations of Alcoholics Anonymous in popular culture tend not to stray beyond a bunch of people sitting gloomily in a circle, or making amends for their earlier booze-driven bad behaviour – the ninth step – with hilarious or tragic consequences.
So what drew Ireland to this lesser known part of the programme? As he explains it, the fifth step involves writing down the things you feel ashamed of or guilty about in your life, and sharing that list with someone you trust. “Sometimes you write something and you don’t realise where it’s coming from, and then I realised it’s called The Fifth Step because the whole play is like my fifth step – it’s my confession.”
Ireland explains that he last had an alcoholic drink at the age of 23 – he’s now 47 – after coming to this conclusion: “I definitely had a problem, and it was going to stop me having a career.” He starting going to AA meetings after his first year of sobriety, chiefly “out of loneliness”, but then decided it wasn’t for him. “I heard a lot about the steps, but I just wasn’t attracted to it as a programme.”
That loneliness he experienced as a newly sober young man – especially in the theatre scene, where alcohol is pretty much compulsory – is at the heart of the play. “I found it very easy to quit drinking, but fitting in … I didn’t know how to talk to women without a drink in me. Which is a problem the young guy has in the play. How to socialise, how to have a conversation. It took me years to work that out and I was very lonely. So the play is about loneliness and despair. But out of that comes comedy.”
Another aspect of the 12-step programme is the concept of a higher power. The founding principles of AA are rooted in the American Christian organisation the Oxford Group, although the modern fellowship takes a far looser approach to faith. “One of the things that put me off AA was the God thing,” Ireland says. “People aren’t very strict about it – as the play says, it’s ‘God as you understand them’. But as soon as I heard the word ‘God’ I just ran away.”
Spool forward to 2020, when God came into his life again – Ireland was brought up a Protestant but left the faith as a young teenager. “It’s weird because I started writing this play as that started. The question was in my head – why was this happening? Why had I rejected AA on the basis that it was a spiritual programme, and yet now, at the age of 47, I was becoming a Christian?”
The play is also about men and intimacy, how they talk to one other when they think no one else is listening and – perhaps inevitably given the generation gap between the two protagonists – about fathers and sons. “My father died when I was very young, so I didn’t really know him well,” says Ireland, who grew up with his mother, sisters and then stepfather in east Belfast. “But he had some kind of drink problem, and I think that imprinted itself on me. Certainly, when I was a teenager and I discovered alcohol, I did feel like I was turning into my father. From the age of 14, I didn’t really drink beer, I went straight to whisky. I wanted to be like a hard man who drank hard liquor.”
A few of the play’s early readers concluded that the drama was prompted by current debates about toxic masculinity. Ireland, who says he tries not to spend a lot of time online and doesn’t watch much news, didn’t know what they meant, and had only vaguely heard of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate. “I didn’t know what it meant, but it felt like they were being judgmental and critical about these two men.” He prefers to write characters whom he and the audience find hard to sympathise with, he explains, “because it makes it more interesting”.
Then again, he clarifies, a lot of the dialogue is based on real conversations he has had with men. “Especially men who don’t drink. And a lot of those conversations are about women or about sex and sexuality.” There is, for example, a lot of chat about pornography in The Fifth Step. Lowden’s character is addicted to porn, and well aware that he has a problem with objectifying women, but he doesn’t know what to do about it.
“So some of the discussion around that will make people uncomfortable, but it’s a funny thing for me. It’s like with Ulster American –” his riotous play about gender relations and geopolitics, set against the background of Northern Ireland and Brexit “– its characters don’t know that they’re in front of an audience, so they speak more freely. I’m trying to write what people say behind closed doors, and sometimes what men say to each other behind closed doors isn’t very pleasant.”
Watching Ireland’s work, his delight in making people laugh is as apparent as his delight in making them feel uncomfortable. It’s not something he sets out consciously to do, he insists, though when he was younger he wanted to write plays in the mould of the outrageous animation South Park. “Partly becoming a Christian has something to do with it – I’ve been trying to be Quentin Tarantino my whole career and now I want to be CS Lewis!”
His faith still feels relatively new, he says, and it is evident in conversation that he is still asking questions about this seismic shift in his life, still interrogating its truth. It has been a curious experience, developing a play that is grounded in his personal experience of faith, with a group of mainly atheists. “They don’t see [faith] as being the central thing, because we live in such a secular world. A lot of the people helping me put the play on are so atheist that they can’t comprehend what it means for a person to have religious belief.”
Ultimately, Ireland says, “every play is a question you don’t know the answer to. When I wrote Cyprus Avenue, the question was: am I Irish? And if I’m not Irish, then what am I? And if I’m British, what does that mean? With Ulster American, there was a different question: what would I sell my soul for, how far would I go for fame and fortune?”
The question for The Fifth Step is: what does God want from me? “That’s what the young man is really asking. It always starts with a personal question for me, which is why it’s weird when people start talking about politics, or saying a play is offensive or controversial, because this is just me. Why are people shocked by this? Do they not have the same thoughts?”
“I have to write from a state of conflict,” he concludes. “I take my Christian faith very seriously. I really believe that Jesus was resurrected and I believe in the Holy Spirit and all that. But there’s another part of me that goes, ‘Am I crazy?’ And that’s where the play is.”