Introduction to the printed edition of Sydney and The Old Girl

‘Wired to an in-built, shock-proof bullshit detector’: On Eugene O’Hare

Eugene is my friend. But he’s not easy company. The trouble is he listens, as in actually listens to what you actually say. Problematically, his sharp concentration disappears like a smart rabbit in to a hedge when you evade or elide something or gloss over real stuff - he just drifts off and thinks about something interesting. He’s not being rude, he just can’t help it, it’s like he’s wired up to some in-built, shock-proof bullshit detector. To the untrained eye, he’s still nodding along and engaged in the conversation - but he’s actually not. He’s rummaging in the subtext, looking for something real, inviting you to come back in your own time. So I’m exposed, so I try to hide, but the more I hide the more the fraud is exposed. So I start again and speak a little simpler, and a little truer, and it’s bracing at first without the thicket of “well, I need to pay the rent, you see”, the hedgerow of “of course Rufus Norris might see it”, or the foxhole of “well, she was in Holby City” and so on and soooo on… but eventually you end up telling him why you actually want to do something. You know, as an artist. And you’ve got his attention back. He can’t help it. I don’t actually know whether he knows he’s doing it, but he does. 

And then he’ll tell you things. Extraordinary things. I’ve no idea of their veracity, but they’re definitely true. They ring true with the man who ran an O’Neill’s on the Holloway Road when he was 20, who woke the whole street singing Bowie at the top of his lungs at 4am in Leith at the turn of the century and in whose acting Sam Shepherd placed so much faith. So he gave me this play, the one you hold in your hand, about a decade ago, and he very patiently waited, while it developed (slowly) in the dark room of my head. We had some readings, some near misses. But it’s happening now. It’s quite lucky that it’s taken as long as it has - that the picture’s sharp. It turns out it’s about my dad, you see (who I didn’t know a decade ago and I’d never told Eugene about), and my dad's mum and their ordinary tragedy and I guess therefore about my mum. It turns out it’s very simple. It’s about things I know by experience, but I’d thought / talked myself out of knowing. Eugene doesn’t know my dad any more than my dad knows himself, but by stepping from behind the hedge into the path of an oncoming car, he sees fear and instinct and how funny it all is - so he at least knows where to start. 

Phillip Breen, November 2019

© Phillip Breen