Dennis Kelly: Emotion before intelligence

As I sit down with Dennis Kelly at the Traverse Theatre, two things are immediately striking about the London playwright: the frank, unassuming way in which he talks about his work, and the vigour with which he is stirring his coffee – in less than two hours his new play, Orphans, will go before its first audience, and Kelly seems understandably restless. When I ask him about the mood backstage, he hesitates: “Umm… good. We’re all shitting ourselves, though. Really, really bricking it – but in a good way. I think the cast and crew are brilliant, so it’s all positive… but that could all change tonight, couldn’t it?”

Following the success of his last run at the Traverse (2005’s After the End), Kelly has set the bar high for his latest offering. When he hears that murmurs of anticipation have been cropping up in the media, his response is a mixture of surprise and dread: “Oh fuck, I hope I don’t disappoint them! Sometimes it’s better to stay away from that stuff, it messes with your head.”

Despite early nerves, Kelly comes to Edinburgh this year armed with a track record of tense, imaginative scripts and a tried-and-tested partnership with director, Roxana Silbert. As she teases him from a table opposite, Kelly sings Silbert’s praises, speaking of her directorial flair and "instinctive" understanding of his fast-paced dialogue. “I’ve never felt quite as comfortable leaving the rehearsal rooms as I did this time,” he says and, already having formed a formidable team with Silbert for After the End, their rapport must surely stand Orphans in good stead.

Billed as a psychological thriller (though Kelly is reluctant to accept this label), the play begins with a simple, yet intriguingly nightmarish scenario: the peaceful, urban life led by Danny and his pregnant wife, Helen, is thrown into turmoil when Helen’s brother arrives, drenched in blood. For those unfamiliar with Kelly’s work, Orphans may come as a surprisingly sinister turn from a writer who recently found fame through his work on the charmingly depraved, Bafta-nominated—yet abruptly axed—Pulling, which he co-wrote with the sitcom’s star, Sharon Horgan. In his return to theatre, Kelly works his way through four acts of brutality and volatile family ties, propelled by an aptitude for almost cinematic suspense.

Clearly, Orphans does not make for a gentle ride – and it’s no accident. As a writer, Kelly is sure of his priorities; he writes to engage his audience, hoping first and foremost to elicit a reaction. “I always want my plays to have tension,” he says. “Whether the audience hates it or loves it is up to them, but I never want them to be bored.” It’s a sentiment Kelly says he shares with the late Sarah Kane, inspired by an endeavour to avoid a trend in theatre that he sees as a tendency "to forget the drama in drama": “Writers are afraid of melodrama, so they hold back and you get plays that are character studies or statements on society that feel no need to be dramatic. That frustrates me.”

He explains that this has given rise to his own approach, in which emotion is valued over intellect. It’s a remarkably simple principle—maximum impact, no conceit and no moral message (“As someone who’s not a moral person I don’t think I’ve got the right to try and teach other people morality”)—though by no means does this limit the possibility of depth and relevance. Indeed, Kelly has a knack for writing unintentionally topical plays. The apocalyptic After the End proved hauntingly reminiscent of the London bombings of July 2005, opening a month after the attacks, while the pre-recession debt and despair of Love and Money would not be out of place in today’s climate of financial doom (“I wrote it two years too early, that was the problem with the fucking thing!”).

Evidently tuned into the views shared by much of the country, he speaks with venom about the war in Iraq, the expenses scandal and the recession. It comes as no surprise, then, that the title of his new play "refers to a sense of us feeling orphaned within society. We feel a little bit like we’ve been abandoned by the people who’re supposed to look after us."

As a result, with Orphans set in an urban environment fraught with random violence, it’s difficult not to associate it with the past year’s reported surge in knife crime. But Kelly insists his inspiration is more personal: “Your mind will tell you what’s a cool thing to write about or what other people think you should write about but actually you have to avoid that and find out what you want to write about.”

For instance, he tells me how one play was inspired partly by his own experiences of South-East London, where he was seriously assaulted for knocking over another man’s ice cream before being mugged just months later. After the former attack, in which he sustained a life-threatening head injury, his immediate reaction was to seek catharsis. “I fucked it into a play,” he says, referring to Osama the Hero. “That seemed like the best way of dealing with it.”

Similar violence against strangers appears in Orphans, leading me to wonder whether Kelly’s recurrent depictions of dysfunctional families also originate from his own life – this is, after all, the same playwright who, in his debut, Debris, had a father crucify himself in the family living room.

“I don’t know what a functional family is. They’re all a bit crap,” jokes Kelly, who was brought up in considerable poverty by Irish immigrant parents. “No, mine wasn’t that bad,” he adds, “But then who knows? Maybe I’m suppressing. If a memory comes back and it’s your fault, what a great interview that’d make – but it’d be terrible for me.”

For Kelly, one of the most important qualities in a writer is versatility. Though he turned 39 this year, his debut only opened in 2003 and his plays have veered in wildly different directions ever since. He’s covered infanticide in the faux-verbatim Taking Care of Baby, peer pressure in the teen-oriented DNA, and the tyranny of fanged monsters in Our Teacher’s a Troll. This stems not from a struggle to find a voice but rather from a refusal to settle on any one style or subject: “When I was starting out somebody said to me ‘you’ve got to be careful of doing an impression of yourself’, and maybe I took that to heart too much but it made a lot of sense to me at the time.”

Relishing the challenge posed by this constant changing of tack, he believes his work should not only vary from play to play, but that each should be as fluid in tone as the next. “A play should be sort of like a person, you know, funny and kind but also capable of incredible cruelty and a complete cunt at times. It should be flexible.”

He assures me that even though Orphans is a dark, intense piece of theatre, threads of comedy have managed to work their way into even the most harrowing of scenes, so audiences can expect to be kept on their toes.

Kelly’s next step looks likely to take his talent to the big screen, having recently finished writing his first film. With shooting scheduled for next spring and director John Crowley (Boy A, Intermission) on board, Blackout will tell the story of "a functioning alcoholic who has lost his daughter and is trying to find out what happened to her." This could mark a new territory conquered in the course of Kelly’s relatively young, endlessly experimental career.

As for a return to television, he sees the necessary routine of pitches and treatments as "creative death", hampered as it is by a culture of executive interference that’s "creeping into theatre like a cancer and must be stopped." His experiences with BBC3’s Pulling proved to be the exception to this rule, though he is no doubt still smarting from the channel’s shock decision to pull the plug. His conclusion?

“I think the problem was that BBC3 had changed. They decided they were going for a different audience and we just didn’t fit anymore… so fuck’em.”