Free Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

he was but that had been denied to him until he had the courage to accept it. Stuart was just a phoney.
    For all that, agreement was reached, dates fixed, actors cast and contracts signed: Stuart and I were locked into working together. Molly thought that a certain degree of tension between us might be no bad thing. She told me that she had on occasion done good work with people she didn’t much care for, whom she’d found abrasive or hostile. Even if it was dark energy that was being generated it was still energy, and if it could be converted and channelled into the work it would make for a powerful production. ‘You’re not going to live with this person,’ she pointed out. ‘You don’t have to be their friend.’ Her argument persuaded me, because I realised that I had experienced the opposite situation many years earlier, when a cast, director and technical people had been so fond of each other, such good mates and so uncritically admiring of each other’s efforts, that the end result had had all the edge and power of a school play.
    And so we went into rehearsal. The Yellow Roses was about an Irish couple, Ellie and Lorcan, who had moved to London in their twenties, she a nurse, he a labourer, where they met and married. Now in retirement, Lorcan wants to go back to live in Connemara again, while Ellie insists she wants to stay in London. The conflict between them about this, together with the input from their doctor daughter and schoolteacher son, formed the substance of the play. It was a work that dealt with the nature of home, how it was often a state of mind as much as a place.
    After I left my family to go to university, I never again lived in the north, but it has remained a constant in my life, a touchstone, the imaginative source of so much of my writing. Even this new play I was struggling now to write in Molly’s house was connected with it: the hare’s world was also mine. I have always believed that I know who I am, no small thing in the shifting dream that is contemporary life. I put this down to my background, my identity as solid as the mountainside on which I grew up. With Stuart and the actors we talked in rehearsal about home, about returning. I said that the person in the play with whom I most closely identified was Lorcan. I told them that although I too had lived in London for most of my adult life my plan was that eventually I would live in Ireland again.
    â€˜But you can’t,’ Stuart said. ‘You can never go back. Never’ – and when I gently protested against this, he became more vehement, scornful even. Our discussion quickly moved from being a valid exploration of something to help us in the production of the play to personal acrimony. I suppose I had known that going back was as much a wish as a plan, and writing the play had been a way for me to deal with it, to let myself down gently. I knew Stuart was probably right, and he knew that I knew, that was the worst thing. ‘And anyway, why would you want to go back?’
    â€˜I do!’ I cried, petulant as a child. ‘I just do!’ He laughed and turned away, changed the subject. He’d rattled me in front of the cast, got under my skin, and I realised then that this was how he operated.
    In the following days and weeks he worked his way steadily through everyone involved in the production,systematically sowing conflict and dissent, setting people up and playing them off against each other. By instilling a sense of fear and insecurity in everyone, he wanted to get the upper hand. I could see how this tactic might work. Doubtless it had contributed to his rapid rise and early successes; but to deliberately create tension and unease in an enterprise as fragile as a theatre production is a high-risk strategy, and on The Yellow Roses his luck ran out. We all eventually realised that he was an arch manipulator, but by then the damage had been done.
    I remember watching