When in doubt, tell the truth

Colin Murphy speaks to Oscarwinning writer John Patrick Shanley, whose play Doubt: A Parable is currently running at the Abbey

'It was New Year's Eve, 1982. My marriage was falling apart. I was poverty-stricken. My plays had hit some kind of a barrier. I thought, I'm just going to write exactly what happened."

He wrote "a little 15 minute play", Welcome to the Moon, and put it on.

"I saw this reaction that was just different to anything I'd gotten before. And I had a feeling of disappointment. I thought, 'Oh, that's what they want: the truth,' Which I valued so little.

"And from that tiny base I started to write in a different way. I stopped trying to show how smart I was, how different I was from other people. That's when my true bond started with the audience."

John Patrick Shanley was 32. He grew up in the Bronx, was thrown out of kindergarten, then high school, then college, spent five years in the Marine Corps, went back to college for a degree and spent the subsequent years working as a bartender and writing plays that were badly produced in small theatres for no money.

He built on that moment of truth in his next play, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. A film producer saw some acting students do a scene from it and got in touch. Shanley gave him his just-finished first screenplay. The producer gave it to the head of a company. Next thing, they were making his film.

"I was living in a tenement in Washington Heights at the time, with broken mailboxes and dog shit on the floor. I went down to my broken mailbox one morning and there was a cheque for $85,000 in it. And I looked at the other people collecting their social welfare cheques and I thought, 'Hey, my life just changed.'"

He wrote his next film, and it was snapped up: Moonstruck.

"The following year I won the Oscar. I ended up getting up on stage and getting my Oscar from Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn and I thought: 'How did I get here? I had no intention of doing this'

"... I never even had a fantasy of winning an Academy Award. The only reason I did it was to earn some money."

He has been a prolific screen writer since. There have been quieter successes (Alive, HBO's Live From Baghdad), some critical flops (Congo, about a giant gorilla) and plenty of films which haven't been made. But it pays the bills and pays for the plays.

Doubt: A Parable, which opened off Broadway in 2004 and has just opened (in a new production) at the Abbey, was his first play to make "serious money". It is nominally about clerical child sex abuse but Shanley disavows any political intent.

"I'm not interested in polemics. I don't like plays that espouse a theme. Doubt tells a story. The play does not preach at all."

As he sees it, it does what it says on the tin.

"I felt that I was living in a time when doubt had gotten a bad name. When I was a kid, I was a great reader. Wise men were always depicted as being consumed with doubt.

"I thought that exercising doubt was something that could be done with passion and real pleasure, as opposed to this idea of doubt being only agonising. I thought that doubt was an incredibly potent tool in life and we had as a culture forgotten that."

The play doesn't really conclude, he says. "The last act of the play occurs after the play is over, when people talk about it. It's not simply a whodunnit. It has an aspect of a mystery. But it's really about how you can never know."

However, there is one thing he knows.

"I think I was born to be a playwright. Once I started to write my first play, I immediately recognised that this was what I did and I never looked back."

More: John Patrick Shanley will give a post-show talk at the Abbey on Thursday 26 October. Doubt at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin until 25 November. 01 8787222 www.abbey theatre.ie