Secrets & Lies: Damian Gorman
Award-winning Northern Irish playwright Damian Gorman (44) is getting married in December to Bronwen Williams, literature specialist for the Arts Council of the Republic. He has two children, Molly (18) and Jack (13). His new play Darkie, about migrant workers from Bosnia who set up home here, is on at the Belfast Festival at Queen's. Another new play, 1974: The End of the Year Show, will open at Belfast's Lyric early next year. He reveals all to Gail Walker
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE IN A RELATIONSHIP? ARE YOU A GIVER OR A TAKER?
I'd say that now I would be both, whereas I think before I would always have tried to be a giver, but that's not maybe a good thing and at times I would have been a grim giver. That approach was born out of the belief that in any situation the hard thing to do was the right thing to do and I've come to learn that is not necessarily the case. Now I'm more relaxed, more two-way about it.Bronwen and I are getting married in Wales on December 17. She has two grown-up children. What attracted me to her? Well, apart from just attraction - and we could talk about that for a long time - we just get on. It's easy to spend time with her in different ways and in different situations.
ONLY CHILD OR ONE OF A CROWD?
I'm the second eldest of five - four boys and a girl. I think that in some ways being tucked in behind the eldest is a good position to be in. My brother Brendan, who died last year, was the third of the five, and I remember he said to me that the eldest, Gerard, was the blue-eyed first-born who could do what he wanted, and Declan and Moya were the two youngest and could get away with things, and then there was me and I was just odd, and had some sort of dispensation for being odd. I was writing and being strange and my parents left me alone to be strange in whatever parallel world I was in. But Brendan was in the middle and he felt he had none of these dispensations.You certainly don't expect at the age of 43, as I was then, to be standing over your brother's coffin. I was terribly, terribly sad; I was close to him.But it's no secret Brendan was an alcoholic - I don't drink myself any more - but because I knew something about the path he was on and would have seen him every week, I could not get on the roundabout with him. Coming from my background, part of you thinks as regards this illness that if you could say a particular thing at a particular time, it would be the saving of him. If I could just have caught him in mid-stride in a particular way ... but the thing you learn is that you don't have the saving of anybody. Rather than getting in beside him and going where he goes emotionally - I'm someone who can't drink myself - I would have kept him company and if he was well enough we would have gone out together. In fact, he was actively helping me with a new play, 1974: The End of the Year Show, which will be on at Belfast's Lyric next January and February. It's set in a drink unit during that limbo week between Chistmas Day and New Year's Eve in 1984. Brendan was a big help with practical information and I also liked the idea of getting his help because it was, maybe, a while since someone would have done that.
ARE YOU CLOSER TO YOUR MUM OR DAD?
Both my parents are dead, but I think I would have been closer to my mum when I was growing up - possibly we all were. That's just the way things were at the time - mum was the one around the house and had more time for us and we had more time for her.There was also the fact that Gerard looked very much like the Gorman side of the family - black-haired and blue-eyed - wheras I looked more like my mother's people, the Culls. Mum died quite young, when she was 57, and I became closer to my father, particularly during his last illness, when I came to admire him very much. I grew up in Newcastle, where my father was a fishmonger. Mum worked occasionally, too, in a cafe and cleaning people's houses.I'm not sure what they made of me starting to write ... every writer I know has a wee bit of a wont in them and whether writing is about knitting together something that fills that wont, or not, I don't know, but I'm sure there is something about this business of trying to put feeling into words which comes out as a wee bit of a wont. I've a sense of going to write, as a very young person, of taking a turning on the road which was a way to a room or a quiet place to attend to this business of dreaming things up. Now I have a much stronger sense of it as a vocation.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
This sounds a bit cheesy - and I am a bit cheesy - but I'm very proud of my children. They are not an achievement of me and their mother but when I look at them and see how they have turned out I would say into myself, with pride: "I'm their father." I take a small, uncomplicated pride in them.I also take a pride in the fact I'm getting married to Bronwen, who has two grown-up children.And in a work sense I have to say that I'm proud of the play coming up at the Lyric and also of Darkie, my play at Queen's Festival. I'm not just saying that because they are my two most recent things, but when you do something and you know when it is done that it is what you came to say, what you wanted to say in the way you wanted to say it, there is some point in putting your name to it because it came through you in a way you think will reach people.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST ASHAMED OF?
God Almighty ... you've got the questions, I'm telling you. I have learned an awful lot of life lesssons at the expense of other people - maybe that's just human. What I'd be most ashamed of is hurting other people in my life. I have hurt people by being ignorant in both the senses that we use that word in Northern Ireland.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A LAPDANCING CLUB?
No, I have not. I have been in Tommy's Toyshop, though, on Teatime with Tommy, a children's show that ran on UTV 30 years ago. You did your piece on the show and then you were allowed into the toy shop to pick a present for a sick child. My brother and I sang Paddy McGinty's Goat. We wanted to sing something that was in the charts at the time but we were not allowed.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A FORTUNE-TELLER?
I have. I was a making a programme for BBC2 called The Great Journeys of the World and I was making the journey of conquest that the conquistador Cortes made. I was in Mexico City and there was a street of diviners, as they are called there. Fortune-telling is taken very seriously in that part of the world. For example, the President of Mexico would consult his fortune-teller before calling an election. The person producing the programme suggested that I went to a fortune-teller, so I did. It was very interesting and she did say some things ... for example this was 1993 and she told me: "There will be peace in your country the following year." She was also able to tell me the number of children that I have. I also asked her very gingerly about the length of my life but she got angry and was annoyed I had asked her that. She was also very specific with the soundman on that shoot. She told him that he wanted to write a book, which was true. Like I say, it was very interesting but I wouldn't say that I believe in it.
DO YOU HAVE ANY PHOBIAS?
Black insects I don't really mind, but wasps! I don't care what anybody says, they are out to get you, or at least they are out to get me. They target me and I hate them.
DO YOU TIP IN RESTAURANTS?
Yes. When I was growing up in Newcastle I used to have summer jobs working in restaurants and or bars, so I know that it's important to tip. Also, I lived in France for three years and you just do tip over there, even if you only have a cup of coffee.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?
I believe that it's possible to set different things against, say, the idea of evil or hopelessness or despair; that there are things you can set against the void, if you like. Personally the idea of God would not be the idea of what I would set against that, but you never know ... What I'd set against it would be the idea of being a net contributor in life, the idea that we ought to connect with other human beings who are on the planet at the same time as us. To me it's an act of moral imagination to connect deeply with someone who is not you.
QUICK DEATH OF TIME TO PREPARE?
The way I would like to die, if I had a choice, is halfway worked up to the biggest, most raucous laugh of my life.
REGRETS ... HAVE YOU HAD A FEW?
I wish I had been braver earlier in a lot of ways. That I had not been so fearful. But I'm not afraid of much any more.I wish I had been kinder more often and I wish -if this makes sense - that I had learned to dance out loud. What I mean by that is that when I was a teenager I used to go to the Wilmar House in Newcastle, in 1978, 79, 80, and I would sit on the pool table when the music was playing, dancing very well from the waist down, and I do wish I had danced out loud. My father was a great dancer. Occasionally I used to meet women of a certain age who'd say: "Are you Pat Gorman's son? I remember the night he led off at Lisburn Orange Hall ... what a dancer!"
• Darkie, Tower Street Theatre, Belfast Inst. of FE & HE, November 2 and 3, 1.30pm and 7.30pm. To book, tel: 028 9097 1197 or http://www.belfastfestival.com/
• 1974: The End of the Year Show opens at the Lyric, Belfast, on January 20. Box office: 9038 1081
Gail Walker
gwalker@belfasttelegraph.co.uk
source - http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=666170
