As is often the case, the condition ran in his family. Gorman, now 44, managed to recover on his own, so for the most personal insight on life inside a treatment unit he turned to his younger brother, Brendan, who had spent time in several addiction centres in Northern Ireland over the previous two decades.
Brendan shared his insights and was enthusiastic about the play. But he didn’t see it open at Belfast’s Lyric theatre this weekend. He died from alcohol-related illnesses in the summer of 2004, shortly after Damian finished the first draft. Gorman has dedicated the play to his brother, but he says the play is far from a requiem.
“Certainly Brendan’s death impinged on the thing, to put it no stronger than that,” says Gorman. “More usefully, his life impinged on the thing, in that he said to me when I was writing it, ‘Make sure there’s plenty of craic in it, make sure there’s plenty of banter, make sure there’s that rapid-fire banter,’ because that’s the way it was.” Of the four subjects that he says usually crop up in his work — drink, depression, Northern Ireland and laughter — he made a particular effort to highlight the laughter in this play.
Despite the setting, and the numerous alcoholic characters, the work is only tangentially about alcoholism. (Gorman may have covered that subject enough already through a handful of television documentaries that he made for the BBC in the 1990s, some of which are still used by addiction treatment centres.) Called 1974 — The End of the Year Show, the play takes place during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and is a snapshot of a key moment in contemporary history, especially for Northern Ireland. The script refers to events such as the collapse of the Sunningdale power-sharing executive, a British miners’ strike, and the resignation of US president Richard Nixon; the addiction unit doctor refuses to let patients watch a replay of George Foreman and Muhammad Ali ’s Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight boxing championship because it airs after hospital curfew.
The handful of patients in the unit are occasionally plunged into darkness when the Ulster Workers’ Council strike causes power cuts. While watching end-of-year television specials, one patient predicts that the Miami Showband will have a “breakthrough year” in 1975; in reality, three of its members were killed by the UVF that year.
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One event is conspicuously absent from the play: the resignation from Manchester United of a 27-year-old George Best, at the start of his own battle with alcohol. Gorman, who considers himself a big fan, finished writing 1974 more than a year before the soccer player’s death last November, and says that including Best would have been too heavyhanded.
Given those events, 1974 may have dramatic potential as a watershed year in Northern Ireland, but it was also a key year for Gorman himself. He remembers the details vividly; the first LP that he ever bought was a Miami Showband tribute album that was sold door-to-door on his housing estate.
“It’s a time that I have some kind of proprietorial interest in. I feel that that year belongs to me in some way, because it was the year of opening my eyes and looking around me on my own bat for the first time,” he says. “I was 13, and at that age you do open your eyes to things.
“It’s the year in which I woke up a bit, in relation to the Troubles in the north, in relation to music, in relation to all kinds of things. As regards the Troubles, you couldn’t avoid it in that year.”
Thanks to the UWC strike, the conflict pushed itself into everyone’s lives in Northern Ireland for the first time, Gorman says. Bus routes and truck deliveries stopped, so Gorman had to hitch lifts to school. His father, a fishmonger, drove the return trip from Newcastle, Co Down, to Killybegs every morning to continue supplying his hotel customers.
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A similarly hazy awareness of the dangerous situation gradually emerges among Gorman’s characters, in a stand-alone alcohol unit of Belfast’s Donard hospital called “the Mount”. The most clued-in patient is an embittered BBC journalist who lashes out with cruel wit; the others — a confused veterinarian and an aspiring twentysomething musician with a stammer — seem largely oblivious, perhaps wilfully so, to the growing violence outside.
That backdrop distracts only occasionally from the action inside the Mount, where three recovering alcoholics — all men — squabble among themselves, each revealing their own weaknesses and foibles, and rebel against the hospital regime. Gorman accepts that the construct behind 1974 may lead to inevitable comparisons with a certain Ken Kesey novel and Jack Nicholson film.
“I could see why people would say it’s like a Northern Irish One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but with a good nurse and, I would say, with better music,” he says. The tunes in the script — such as Mud’s Lonely This Christmas, and Paper Lace’s Billy, Don’t Be a Hero — help to date the piece as effectively as any 1970s-style set and costumes.
When the unit’s authoritarian head doctor is called away for the last week of the year, he is replaced by a young woman who shakes things up a bit. She plays John Denver tapes in relaxation therapy, kick-starts dance exercise sessions and deftly manipulates the patients’ self-important posturing. Her presence in the unit is trumped only by the arrival of a well-spoken Nigerian from Queens University — also an alcoholic — who fascinates the others and compels them to have a bit of perspective about local sectarianism.
Gorman says Northern Ireland could still use an outsider’s healthy point of view. “Using the imagery of the ’70s, the Troubles were our ‘platforms’ in the world,” he says. “They raised us up that little bit. If we in Northern Ireland feed ourselves only with what we know, in terms of politics and movement, then we will be undernourished.
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“We have been too loathe, too slow, to accept a bit of advice or example from the outside, and that’s both sides of the house here. What we could have done with all along is a skylight.”
The Northern Irish men in the treatment unit — the journalist, the vet, and the guitarist — also need the sense of emotional balance that their new doctor and co-patient bring. They suffer not just from addiction, but from what Gorman calls “a kind of unease with living that you can’t put right” — a sense of being out of step with mainstream society, of missing something that everyone else understands.
“I think people find it hard to dream up a good life for themselves, to dream up a fulfilling happy life for themselves,” he says. “Those are the things that advertisers work with, and Hollywood works with, and they’re very powerful. People in our generation think: ‘How can I compete with that, that dream of how perfect a life might be, of how sweet it might be? I can’t compete with that, so what do I do?’” As Gorman well knows, that sense of longing and loss can be relentlessly destructive to people who experience, but can also make for compelling drama. He sees his job as calling people to the attention of each other, forcing them to look more closely at each other, and at themselves.
“That’s what the vocation is,” he says. “So that people can come and say not only, ‘I recognise that scenery, I recognise that character,’ but ultimately that they might be able to say, ‘There’s a play that recognises me, that play knows me.’
“That’s the ultimate ambition, that people might leave a play of mine saying: ‘That play knew me.’”
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1974 — The End of the Year Show, Lyric Theatre, Belfast, until Feb 11