If you ’re going to travel to a different world, it makes sense to have a tour guide. For almost three hours last Wednesday night at the Ratcellar Theatre in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Tom Waits was that guide, granting 3,500 people access to his own private universe, a fantastical carnival-esque land, filled with strange wonders and delights.

Although Waits remains perhaps best known for songs like Downtown Train and Martha, it’s been a long time since that was the kind of material in which he was most interested. Waits got strange on 1983’s Swordfishtrombones.

Over the past decades he’s got even stranger, turning himself into the kind of primitivist human beatbox that the Beastie Boys should envy.

Aided by a virtuoso five-piece band, Waits, 58, didn’t just sing. Instead, he hissed, huffed, yelped, sputtered, whispered and growled into the microphone. Many songs found their focus not in the melody, but in the intense, eccentric rhythms that Waits, aided by his son Casey on drums and percussion, located.

Baltic airs; sinuous funk; foot-tapping blues; jazz jams; aurally, it was both bananas and utterly brilliant.

Visually, it was equally transfixing. Stood atop a wooden platform, Waits - ever the stage hobo - would lift his besuited leg up, then - whoosh! - send it flying down onto the box, sending up huge plumes of beautiful, theatrical dust.

His every movement was perfectly calibrated - as he twisted, contorted and stretched over to plink the piano, you thought of mime artists such as Marcel Marceau.

‘‘In Dublin you can no longer make a monkey smoke a cigarette,” Waits rasped, as he settled at the piano proper, his jacket turned a darker shade of grey by sweat. ‘‘I used to come over here just for that.”

You would want to have been at this gig just for the laugh-out-loud spoken word material; with stories about frogs in his stomach (‘‘I saw no reason to evict them’’), lost luggage and his addiction to Ebay, Waits - the son of two schoolteachers - yakked like we were in his front room and he was telling tall tales round the fireplace.

Ultimately, it was Waits’s more conventional songwriting gifts that made this gig truly special.

On songs like Falling Down, Tom Traubert’s Blues, Get Behind the Mule, Make it Rain and Time, Waits moved from the remarkable into the transcendent, rendering a whole gamut of emotions from loss to solace to love.

Awe-inspiring.

Rating: *****

PS For more reviews, see here: http://nadineoregan.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/tom-waits/#comments

And for a Waits concert, see here: http://wordpress.hotpress.com/petermurphy/2008/08/05/weird-scenes-inside-the-online-goldmine/

Lots to come on the show tomorrow. In fact, I would say there will very probably be a fight in studio on the reviewing front over the merits of the new Batman flick. Our reviewers will also be checking out the new season of The Wire, now airing on TG4. The Dandy Warhols will pick out a favourite track for The Kiosk’s Back Track series. I’ll be talking to Lavinia Greenlaw, the author of a brilliant book now published in paperback from Faber & Faber called The Importance of Music to Girls. Acclaimed classical guitarist Darragh O’Neill will be performing live and we’ll have a review of those Tom Waits gigs. That’s all to come on The Kiosk – Saturdays at 11am. Repeated Sundays at 8am.  Oh, and before I forget — we’ve a great competition for you too. Fans of U2 should be happy

Playlist

Noah and the Whale ‘5 Years Time’

The Dandy Warhols pick their Back Track choice

Tom Waits ‘Hoist that Rag’

So…Tom Waits last night? Amazing. I do feel sorry for the folk who were in the area where the tent sprung a leak, but from the seats we were in, the sound was just incredible: crystal clear. Highlights for me came in the shape of Raindogs, Cemetary Polka, Tom Traubert’s Blues, Get Behind the Mule, Make it Rain and Time. But Falling Down was probably the best of the lot. Spotted Shane MacGowan ambling out into the rain at the end. I’ve a full review of the gig in the Business Post this Sunday, but for now, here’s a profile I wrote about Waits last week.

Waiting for Tom
27 July 2008  By Nadine O’Regan
In an appearance on the David Letterman Show in the early part of this decade, Tom Waits told the story of how his children once recruited him to drive the bus on a school field-trip.

They went to a record store, he said, and - with 30 kids in tow -he posed by the guitars, the drums and the pianos in an effort to get recognised by shoppers. Nobody bothered him.

The next week, he was asked to drive on another field-trip -this time, to a dump. ‘‘Twelve guys surrounded my car,’’ Waits laughed. ‘‘Everybody knows me . . . at the dump.”

The tale was typical Tom Waits: self-deprecating, yet also feeding into the myth of the Waitsian underworld, where those in the dump are most likely to know his name. Of course, the fact that he told the story on Letterman- with an audience of more than four million - suggests that it’s not just kooky dump-dwellers who are acquainted with his strange genius.

Where most artists are content to search for three chords and the truth, Waits has long operated from a universe somewhere to their left, blending primitivist recording techniques with instruments that include gramophones, tubes, dripping taps, calliope, percussion, doors creaking and bacon in a frying pan (‘‘it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33rpm recording”).

After decades as a cult figure, all that hoover-playing is now reaping bigger dividends than ever. Waits’ most recent albums have met with critical praise, his concerts sell out in jig time and Hollywood starlet Scarlett Johansson recently recorded a deservedly lauded debut album of Waits covers.

Tickets for his three all-seated concerts in Dublin’s Phoenix Park this week sold out in less than three hours when they went on sale in May - with fans paying a splutter-inducing €116.25 and €131.25 for their tickets.

As it’s the first time in more than 20 years that Waits has played in Dublin, few ticket-holders are complaining about the cost. As one fan wrote on an internet message board: ‘‘I pretty much see this Tom Waits gig as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Those in search of last-minute tickets will be disappointed - in an effort to defeat the touts, tickets were limited to just two per person. Ticket-holders will be asked to produce photo identification when picking up their tickets, and tickets are non-transferable.

‘‘This is what Tom Waits wanted,” said a spokesperson for Aiken Promotions, the promoter of the concerts. ‘‘He wasn’t going to do the show unless it was put in place. And it’s worked. No ticket touts have got tickets. It’s the first concert we’ve ever done with this. If it turns out to be successful, we think more acts will do it.”

Waits, currently midway through his European tour, will perform in a specially built 4,500 capacity marquee that he has named the Ratcellar Theatre. Although it’s fair to assume that most of those at the gigs will stem from Waits’ older, wealthier fanbase who can afford such prices, the artist has no problem garnering street-cred with younger fans.

His song Way Down In The Hole is the theme tune for The Wire, the hit HBO show. Johansson’s surprisingly good album of Waits covers was aided by David Bowie, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner and Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio.

‘‘I would never have done it if Tom didn’t give his OK,’’ Johansson said at the time. ‘‘But I think he was probably interested himself to hear what could happen. I don’t feel like it’s a debut album or something. It’s more like a valentine for his work.”

Over the years, many others have offered up similar valentines to Waits, including Bette Midler, Bruce Springsteen, Marianne Faithfull, Rod Stewart, Johnny Cash and the Ramones.

‘‘No one has written with more purity and sheer gothic beauty about life’s crazy journey than Mr Waits,’’ Neil Labute, the playwright and film-maker, has said, when asked to explain Waits’ appeal.

He takes a gleeful joy in pulling the veil from your eyes, exposing the tender carcass of the song and indirectly hammering home the message that music doesn’t have to be produced according to conventional recording techniques.

Although individual tracks such as Downtown Train (covered by Rod Stewart) have become classics, think of Waits and - as with the likes of Francis Bacon or Tim Burton - you think of an entire culture filled with soothsayers, killers, creeps, crazies and kooks.

Lines like the refrain from We’re All Mad Here, from the album Alice, heighten the atmosphere: ‘‘All the worms they will climb the rugged ladder of your spine.” Waits treats the art of songwriting with great seriousness, understanding both the richness and the essential mysteriousness of his craft.

‘‘Some of[m y songs] are little paramedics,” he has said. ‘‘Maybe some will be killers. Some will die on the windshield. And some will never leave home.”

His voice - once described by a reviewer as sounding like ‘‘a drunken hobo arguing with a deli owner over the price of a bowl of soup’’ - is a fascinatingly primitive instrument, capable of belching diesel into the most delicate of lullabies.

Then there’s his appearance: with his tiny piggy eyes, surprisingly delicately etched nose, battered fedora, hair like Kramer from Seinfeld, and an air of dishevelled elegance, Waits has exactly the right vaudeville-act-by-way-of-a-tramp look to support the act.

His is the face you could imagine peering out from a hall of mirrors, looming, distorted and dangerous. Waits clearly relishes his weirdness, nourishes it and offers it up on chat shows such as Letterman with a sideways smile that suggests that he, too, is in on the joke and enjoying the spectacle.

But at times the schtick has raised questions. Are his eccentricities too contrived? Where does Tom Waits the person end and Tom Waits the persona begin? Or are they one and the same?

Although he likes playing gags on his interviewers - he has claimed for years that he was born in a moving taxi, and fans should check out his recent ‘‘press conference’’ video on YouTube - he has admitted to wondering himself if his quirks are essential to himself, or if they are just an easy way to showoff before a crowd.

When Waits quit alcohol for good 16 years ago, he was forced to take a close look at what was most fundamental to him.

‘‘I was trying to prove something to myself,” he told the Guardian in 2006. ‘‘It was like, ‘Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?’ All the big questions come up when you get sober. ‘What am I made of? What’s left when you drain the pool?”‘

Waits’ character had already been tested young. Born in Pomona, California, and raised for some years in National City, near the Mexican border, he was the product of schoolteacher parents who divorced in 1960.

Their split bred a restlessness within Waits, who always felt something was lacking. ‘‘See, my dad left when I was ten, so I was always looking for a dad,” he has said. ‘‘It was like, ‘Are you my dad? Are you my dad? What about you? Are you my dad?”

Aged 15, Waits moved out of home. He eked out a living as a cook and a nightclub bouncer, all the while writing songs about drunkards, thieves, barflies and prostitutes and those who found comfort in the black of the night. Waits was close to those characters.

‘‘Bruce Springsteen likes to sing about these characters,” journalist Geoffrey Himes has said. ‘‘But Waits sings as one.”

Waits initially signed to Asylum Records where he recorded his debut, 1973’s Closing Time, and several more albums. Listening back to those early recordings is a shock for the listener grown used to Waits’ deliberately ramshackle contemporary arrangements.

While his voice is as raw as ever, the early production is stodgy, staid and conventional. When Waits met his muse and wife-to-be Kathleen Brennan in 1980, she encouraged him to change the recording techniques to suit his style.

‘‘I like my music with lumps and rind and pits and pulp,’’ Waits has said. ‘‘Until that time, I felt like I was being photographed with my head on somebody else’s body.

‘‘Kathleen said: ‘Look, we can find musicians. We’ll find the engineer. We can get money from the record company. We have 12 songs here. Let’s go, we’ll do it ourselves. You don’t have to give six [royalty] points to a producer.’ “

Waits’ next experimental album, 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, utilised percussion, low-pitched horns and odd time signatures. It ended up being voted the second most important album of all time by Spin magazine in 1989.TomWaits, the world realised, did weird very well.

Brennan has continued to be a major influence on Waits’ work; the couple work together on his albums, with Brennan occasionally taking co-writing credits. Talking to Dave Fanning in 2004, Waits still sounded in awe of his wife.

‘‘She’s the best,” he said. ‘‘I don’t know how to describe her. She’s done a million things. She kind of pushed me out onto the freeway in a baby carriage.”

Brennan’s grandfather is from Co Cork and the couple married in Tralee, Co Kerry. ‘‘We get over there every now and then,’’ Waits has said.

‘‘She comes from a big, wild, loud Irish family. There’s a lot of noise and carrying on at the dinner table. So I fell in love with the whole clan.”

Two of Waits’ favourite ‘‘beacon’’ tunes, he has said, are Fairytale Of New York and Raglan Road. The couple, who live in California with their three children, have also released a track called Widow’s Grove which contains traces of the melody of The Rose of Tralee.

Brennan once said that her husband wrote two kinds of songs, ‘‘the grim reapers and the grand weepers’’. Early reviews of Waits’ Glitter and Doom tour, which began in Phoenix, Arizona on June 16, suggest that fans will get fire-in-the-belly renditions of both.

On the US leg of the tour, the reported set highlights came from 2004’s Real Gone album and 1999’sGrammy award-winning Mule Variations. Waits played with bullhorns hanging over his head and spent a lot of time atop a wooden box that spewed clouds of dust and grit when he stamped his feet.

‘‘There is a certain grace in Tom’s weird, angular gyrations and Frankenstein’s monster posturing,” commented two reporters for Vanity Fair magazine. “ ‘I didn’t expect him to be so sexy,’ said one fan. Indeed, what could be sexier than the man standing, arms outstretched, beneath a shower of glitter?”

For his part, Waits sounds like he’s enjoying being back on the open road. ‘‘Performing live is [like joining] the circus,” he has told reporters. ‘‘Maybe it’s kind of like alligator wrestling, because you’re dealing with something that’s alive.

‘‘You might be thrown by it and you might be gored by it. But you may get to ride it.”

Serious preparations underway today for tomorrow’s very exciting edition of The Kiosk. More details here:

http://www.hotpress.com/news/4669089.html

But have I mentioned The Dark Knight is great? Heath Ledger is very, very good, too — you start to understand the Oscar hype…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/09/DDCM11L7KI.DTL

In an odd twist of fate, I find myself in the airport this morning waiting to go to Turkey. I’m going to be spending three days in Istanbul and another harder-to-spell location learning about Turkey’s culture and the like. Apparently, according to the itinerary, this includes a concert at which Rufus Wainwright will be performing. Rufus, I had no idea you were Turkish. I’ll also be learning to cook Turkish food. Since I can’t cook Irish food, this should be entertaining. I think I’ve brought all the wrong clothes. People tell me to cover up (no knees, no arms on display); then other people say not to worry, that I won’t need to. So I’ve packed the weirdest assortment of clothes. Back on Thursday to Cork to go home for a day or two, then onwards and hopefully upwards to Oxegen 08.

In Tobias Wolff’s fiction, stories of quiet despair abound. Here are tales of slow horror: strong women stuck with terminally deadbeat husbands; lawyers horrified by their own animalistic desires; men attempting to atone for their misdeeds; soldiers trying to reconfigure their lives post-service. But through the haze of accidental shootings, living deaths and lives lived uncomfortably, there is a certain mordant wit at work - a devilish streak of snail silver etched on the surface of a dark rock.

As Wolff is in print, so he is in person. Over the course of an hour-long interview in a Dublin hotel, Wolff - all twinkly eyes, military bearing, authoritative voice and sprightly moustache - is rarely less than humorous and warm, even when the horrifying story he is touching on stems from his own life rather than those of his characters. Wolff rarely deals in negativity because, to a certain extent, he can’t allow himself that luxury.

‘‘That’s what has got me through life,” he says. ‘‘The sense of hilarity that lies just beyond the edge of the awful. The two are so mingled sometimes.”

Wolff’s own life became famous in 1993, when his memoir of his childhood, This Boy’s Life, was made into a Hollywood film starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Robert De Niro. His story is a harrowing one.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, he barely knew his real father, a compulsive liar and conman who went to such lengths to hide his Jewish heritage that Wolff finally met his cousins only after his father had died.

With his father living mostly on the east coast with his half-brother Geoffrey, the ten-year-old Wolff moved with his mother to Chinook, Washington, where his sadistic new stepfather terrified him. Violence, betrayal, rejection and injustice: Wolff learned about all these things thanks to the vicious behaviour of his stepfather, which he documented through vivid prose in This Boy’s Life and touched on in In Pharaoh’s Army (1994), an account of his experiences as a soldier who went to Vietnam.

This is the second time we’ve met - the first was when Wolff was doing interviews for his charmingly written novel, Old School - but although he couldn’t be nicer, he is more open in his prose than in his conversation.

Language is used precisely in Wolff’s work; you sense he’d prefer to express himself through a medium he can control than one he can’t. That’s possibly why, although the film version of This Boy’s Life struck me as pretty compelling, Wolff shrugs it off.

‘‘When I sold the rights to my book to the movies, I proceeded to get a lesson that any writer should get - which is that, when you sell your rights, you don’t have them any more.’’ He laughs. ‘‘They were free to do what they wanted to do with the memoir, and they took it in different directions in terms of tone. It’s a very earnest movie.”

Wolff’s writing is far less so, but it still documents dark realities. In almost all his short stories, you’ll find a character who is constantly a little uncomfortable, a little remote from everyone else, struggling to fit in, to belong, but always falling short.

That figure flits through the stories in Wolff’s latest work, Our Story Begins, a ‘greatest hits’ package of new and collected stories, some of which date from more than 30 years ago. To some extent, you feel that what Wolff is really etching is a particularly fine portrait of loneliness; the space that echoes around these characters is agonisingly well drawn.

Through the process of rereading and editing the stories for the book, Wolff has had the opportunity to view his own writing with a little more objectivity and distance. When asked if he noticed certain patterns emerging, he nods.

‘‘I saw certain things coming up again and again,” he says. ‘‘Characters who needed to be forgiven and who couldn’t forgive themselves, who carried a burden of irrational guilt. There’s a sense of fraudulence in the characters. Some aren’t authentic, and some worry they aren’t. If we’re to speak personally, that interest arises out of a lot of experience and observation in my own life.”

In his memoir, Wolff documents how he tried to fashion an escape from his stepfather by faking transcripts to win a place at the prestigious Hill School in Pennsylvania. Wolff got into the school, but was later asked to leave when his poor grades meant he lost his scholarship.

Through his falsehoods, he was, whether he realised it or not, emulating his real father, a man whose life reads like the stuff of fiction. Duke Wolff - also known as Arthur Saunders Wolff and Saunders Ansell Wolff 3d – was many things during his lifetime: a car thief, bon viveur, heavy drinker and the kind of man who slept well at night despite never sending his ex-wife, Tobias’s grittily resilient mother, any financial support.

Right up until his death, Duke Wolff hid the fact that he was Jewish from as many people as he could, including his own sons. It was a jolt when Tobias found out the truth.

‘‘We were in my mother’s apartment, my brother and I,” he says. ‘‘I was in the army already. Geoffrey had said something that provoked her - and then she said to him: ‘Well, you’re half-Jewish yourself.’ Geoffrey was shocked and then she looked at me and said: ‘Oh, that means you’re half-Jewish too.’

‘‘I could never really get my father to be truthful about it, either. I saw him shortly before he died when I was on my way to Vietnam, and I brought it up. But he wasn’t going to go there. In order to maintain his fiction, he cut us off from his side of the family. It was foolish. It trivialised his life to do that.”

While Wolff describes himself as Catholic, his author brother, Geoffrey, is a nonobservant Jew. Like Tobias, Geoffrey has also written a memoir: in The Duke of Deception, he details and attempts to process their father’s systematic lying. According to the New York Times, when both memoirs were published, their much-written-about mother dreamily said: ‘‘Well, I guess that’s it now. That’s all the boys I have.”

Wolff says he doesn’t regret anything he wrote about her. ‘‘I showed her the book before it was published - not because I was going to change anything, but because I wanted her to know what was coming down. She understood that it was written in love. She said: ‘That’s how I was. And if you’d prettied up the picture, I would have felt that you didn’t accept me the way I really am.’ I thought that was a nice way to put it and it’s true.”

I ask Wolff how his stepfather felt when he read the memoir. It transpires that he didn’t read it until he had lost both his legs to diabetes and was on his deathbed. ‘‘My younger stepsister said: ‘I hope you’re happy. You made his last days miserable. I had my daughter read him your book and it was very hurtful for him.’

‘‘People are very irrational about the whole privacy thing. In some ways I understand it, but it did seem a strange choice of reading material for a man on his . . . ‘’Wolff pauses. ‘‘I was going to say last legs, but he didn’t even have last legs at that point.”

Wolff can’t help it. He hoots with laughter - and doesn’t look remotely apologetic for it. With so much rich source material to draw on for inspiration, it hardly seems surprising that Wolff would parlay his experiences into fiction. Although not the most prolific of writers, Wolff’s work has always been warmly received by critics.

Wolff has won the PEN/Malamud Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his writing. He currently lectures in creative writing at Stanford University. Unlike writer/professors such as Hanif Kureishi, who have slammed such programmes, he is a staunch defender of creative writing courses.

Is there any particular piece of advice he always gives to his students? ‘‘The one thing I can tell them with confidence - because it’s been so true in my own life - is that time is your enemy and everything else is your friend. You can’t rush a good story into existence, you have to gnaw at it. So I always encourage people to learn to revise their work.”

Like many of the characters in his books, Wolff appears to find a kind of refuge in the structure of the university. ‘‘I like the community of it,” he says. ‘‘The director of our programme is Eavan Boland. Salman Rushdie was with us the other day. And Ian McEwan. And Colm Toibin taught with me. A lot of literary life revolves around universities.”

After this round of interviews is done, Wolff and his wife, Catherine, will visit Toibin at his home in Wexford. Shortly after that, they will head home to Palo Alto, California, where Wolff will be returning to the drawing board, working on new material to turn into books.

Although he could easily have called his latest tome The Collected Short Stories instead of Our Story Begins, Wolff decided against such a tack on the grounds that he didn’t want anything that sounded ‘‘funereal’’. A healthy and vigorous 63, the point Wolff is making with his latest book title is simple: his story continues.

[Here's a recent SBP news piece I did.]

Enda Walsh, Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson re-establish themselves as they blaze a trail through the worlds of international theatre and film, writes Nadine O’Regan.

Amazing. Enthralling. Envy-inducing. When Enda Walsh’s play Disco Pigs premiered at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork in 1996, those were the kind of words critics used to describe how they felt about the latest work from the most mesmerising new voice in Irish theatre. Where Enda Walsh would go from there, though, was anyone’s guess.

Twelve years on, the rest of the world is rapidly warming to the hypnotic tales of Walsh. With glowing reviews in the New York Times (‘‘a master storyteller’’) and his recent move into writing directly for film, Walsh joins a wave of Irish playwrights - including Dublin-born Conor McPherson and London-Irish writer Martin McDonagh - who, with their recent works, are establishing and re-establishing themselves, not just as important Irish voices, but important worldwide ones.

Hunger, the forthcoming film directed by the artist Steve McQueen and co-written by him and Walsh, received the prestigious Camera d’Or award at the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival last weekend. The movie, starring the German-born, Killarney-raised actor Michael Fassbender, chronicles in harrowing and coldly intimate detail the final days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Critics have called it ‘‘astonishing’’.

‘‘You rarely have the opportunity to make a film like this,” Walsh told The Sunday Business Post, down a crackling London mobile phone line.

‘‘We were left to our own devices. We had the trust of producers who believed in us. I was too busy to see the screenings in London before it went to Cannes, so it was a huge shock to see it with 1,000 people in Cannes.

‘‘You couldn’t have made this film five years ago. It would have been too raw. This is a contemporary story about how we deal with terrorism and how we deal with who we think the enemy are. To be honest, knowing very little about Cannes, but listening to the people, the award wasn’t [a shock]. As soon as I saw the film, I thought ‘this is a one-off’. Steve McQueen delivered on his instincts throughout.”

While the stream of international acclaim directed at Walsh recently has been heady, the Dublin-born, London-dwelling playwright, who is married to an editor at British Vogue, hasn’t been the only playwright receiving plaudits from abroad of late. Thirty-six-year-old Conor McPherson - a previous Tony Award nominee for Shining City (2004) - was recently nominated for Tony Awards for best play and best direction for his Broadway production of his acclaimed play The Seafarer.

London-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, meanwhile, who first found Tony Award success with his Leenane Trilogy, has navigated his way cleanly into commercial film success with his recent feature length debut In Bruges, starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The nascent film director and screenwriter didn’t find the film-making experience easy, mind you.

‘‘Going into it, I was terrified,” McDonagh said, cracking a gap-toothed grin, on a recent visit to Dublin to promote the film. ‘‘But we had three weeks of rehearsal before the shooting started, and that really eased my nerves. It was just me and Colin and Brendan in a room drinking coffee and talking about the script.

‘‘By the end of the three weeks, we knew exactly where we were coming from, so, by the time we got to shoot it, everyone had to fall in around us and catch up almost. I think the pressure that I had was just the pressure I put on myself.”

McDonagh, McPherson and Walsh share a reputation for extreme fastidiousness, passion and an exactness of vision about their work. Perhaps as a consequence, although all three playwrights’ work is regularly set in Ireland and focuses on Irish characters, the setting and accents appear to have been no barrier to their international success.

‘‘We are less affected these days by the geographical origin of the work we watch,” said Garry Hynes, who directed the Tony Award-winning production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. She will also helm a new production of McPherson’s The Weir at The Gate Theatre, Dublin.

‘‘Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh are major international writers. They’re young. They’re Irish. And the great thing about them is that they don’t give a rat’s ass about national stereotypes or their supposed responsibility to reflect the national stereotype. These writers have moved far beyond these kinds of questions. They create their own unique visions of the world,” said Hynes.

Ultimately, while the playwrights are united by the scale of their ambition and level of artistry, and have each made forays into the film world (McPherson with Saltwater, The Actors and I Went Down), from the perspective of theme and content, much divides them.

Splashes of blood stare out from every canvas in the McDonagh play gallery; the controversial director has become famous for pulse-stopping stories of matricide, madness and torture.

Walsh, meanwhile, is focused on transporting the viewer wholesale into a world that seems half-fantasy, half-reality; a place that in the words of the New York Times makes you feel like ‘‘you’ve walked in on a Hibernian Three Stooges routine, directed by a drunken Dadaist’’.

Of the three, McPherson, a UCD philosophy graduate, is the quietest and most overtly philosophical writer, blessed with a gift for conveying the essential spark of characters, their authenticity, uniqueness and, often, their intrinsic, forbidding blackness.

His characters are generally older than McDonagh’s. ‘‘With younger characters, no matter how bad things get in their lives, they’re still only in their 20s,’’McPherson told this paper.

‘‘But if you’re old, the stakes are higher, because that person is really looking into the abyss.”

McPherson is currently in a rare position for a playwright who isn’t Shakespeare: two of his plays will be performed in major theatres in Dublin in June. While the Jimmy Fay-directed production of The Seafarer - the funny yet horrifying story of a man who returns to Baldoyle to take care of his irascible brother - is currently running at The Abbey Theatre, McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir is about to open at The Gate.

‘‘When you’re doing your play in other countries, you’re in a bigger situation and you feel more anonymous,” McPherson said. ‘‘But when you’re putting your work on in your home town, you’re much more self-conscious. You want it to be great.”

All three playwrights know each other and - to a greater or lesser extent - have followed each other’s work over the years. ‘‘I admire Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson,” said Enda Walsh.

‘‘Shining City [by McPherson] was the most profound exit from a theatre I’ve had. I understood what loss was. I understood what it was like to live a life and feel like that life was shit.”

‘‘There’s no room for hiding when you’re working with Conor,” said the actor Karl Shields, who starred in a production of McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower in the late 1990s.

‘‘Kevin Healy was the director, but Conor would come in occasionally to throw his eye over the production. He’s 100 per cent into the detail of the performance.

‘‘It’s the subtlety of McPherson’s characterisations that’s important.”

While McPherson and Walsh occasionally weary of being constantly compared to each other and to McDonagh, not to mention several other major Irish names - including Mark O’Rowe, Marina Carr and Sebastian Barry - it looks as though, for the immediate future, they’ll have to get used to it.

Over the next months, the interest in all three should remain high. Hunger looks likely to go on cinema release in the autumn, while productions of plays by Walsh will feature at the Edinburgh festival, the Galway Arts Festival and the Dublin Theatre Festival.

McPherson has plans to venture back into the world of film-making; the Dun Laoghaire-based playwright has written a film with Billy Roche, which will star Ciaran Hinds.

Even as the playwrights whittle their works into shape, those surrounding them look on with anticipation. ‘‘We’re very lucky to have such incredible playwrights,” said Eileen Walsh, the award-winning actress who starred in the debut 199 6 production of Walsh’s Disco Pigs.

‘‘I would drop everything [for those plays]. If you’re the one who is lucky enough to have those words in your mouth, then you’d have to drop everything - just to get to that place.”

No, I don’t know what we’re doing in that pose either (as may be obvious from my slightly baffled-looking stance on extreme left). But our weekend in Dingle was brilliant fun — pic taken by supersnapper Cli…