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Authors: Deirdre Madden
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home writing I donât stop when I hear the clatter of the letter box and the soft tumble of the post on the mat. I hear the click of the answering machine in the next room and I give little thought to who it might be. I do not procrastinate, I do not waste time. These mornings in Mollyâs house were exceptional in this way, and if I was going to do anything at all today I would have to start now. I left the cold coffee where it was and went upstairs.
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I spent what was left of the morning working, that is to say, given that it was the early stages of a new project, that I spent the morning wool-gathering, staring out of the window into the back garden, reading over my notebooks, writing things down and then crossing them out again moments later; and all the time thinking about the man with the hare.
Some years earlier I had been on a tram in Munich when I noticed that a man standing near to me was holding in his arms what I at first took to be a large rabbit and then realised was a hare. The man, who was in his forties, was wearing a brown flecked jumper with a hole in the elbow and a ravelled cuff. He was unshaven and looked tired; I remember that the knuckles of his right hand were skinned raw. He was holding the hare cuddled to his chest as one might carry a baby, and it concealed most of the upper part of his body, for the creature was massive. Apart from its size, the thing that struck me most about it were its strange ears, folded along the length of its back, and the curious shape of its head. The skull looked as if it had been crushed, and had a big brown eye on either side. It made me think of tropical fishes, as flat as coins, and I wondered what its field of vision must be. Its fur was mottled and neutral, so that it blended in with the colour of the manâs jumper. I could understand how in its natural habitat â in open bogland, for instance â it would be superbly camouflaged, even when it was moving. It carried to the heart of the city a sense of wild places, of exposed moorland where there was heather but no trees, where there were small dark reedy lakes swept by the wind and rain. It reminded me of home. The hare was completely still in the manâs arms. At no point did it attempt to struggle or wriggle, and they were both still on the tram when I got out at Marienplatz.
I knew that the man and the hare were the trigger for the play that I was going to write. That is not to say that it would be about them. They would not appear in it, would in all likelihood not be described or even mentioned. But Iknew that by going through them, by grasping imaginatively something about them, I would be able to get at what I needed to know and then I would be able to write the play.
This had been going on for several weeks now, and a kind of panic was beginning to settle on me. I tried not to think too much about the fact that this would be my twentieth play, for it gave me no comfort. Sitting at Mollyâs desk, there were times when I felt I had never before written a line in my life, and the idea of my producing a work that any professional company would wish to stage struck me as an absurdity. My past experience counted for nothing. This feeling was in itself a normal part of the process of writing: I knew this. I also knew that for the act of writing to become increasingly difficult rather than easier with each work was logical. It would have been easy to repeat things that had been successful, to slip into stale and formulaic writing. But I wanted every time to do something new, something that would surprise the public, something that would perhaps surprise even me. I wanted to do something of which I hadnât, until then, known I was capable. And this too was a normal part of the process. While it sometimes got me down, it was also usually what got me out of bed in the morning. It was a challenge, and I loved it.
No, there was a particular reason why getting to grips with my
  Â
I spent what was left of the morning working, that is to say, given that it was the early stages of a new project, that I spent the morning wool-gathering, staring out of the window into the back garden, reading over my notebooks, writing things down and then crossing them out again moments later; and all the time thinking about the man with the hare.
Some years earlier I had been on a tram in Munich when I noticed that a man standing near to me was holding in his arms what I at first took to be a large rabbit and then realised was a hare. The man, who was in his forties, was wearing a brown flecked jumper with a hole in the elbow and a ravelled cuff. He was unshaven and looked tired; I remember that the knuckles of his right hand were skinned raw. He was holding the hare cuddled to his chest as one might carry a baby, and it concealed most of the upper part of his body, for the creature was massive. Apart from its size, the thing that struck me most about it were its strange ears, folded along the length of its back, and the curious shape of its head. The skull looked as if it had been crushed, and had a big brown eye on either side. It made me think of tropical fishes, as flat as coins, and I wondered what its field of vision must be. Its fur was mottled and neutral, so that it blended in with the colour of the manâs jumper. I could understand how in its natural habitat â in open bogland, for instance â it would be superbly camouflaged, even when it was moving. It carried to the heart of the city a sense of wild places, of exposed moorland where there was heather but no trees, where there were small dark reedy lakes swept by the wind and rain. It reminded me of home. The hare was completely still in the manâs arms. At no point did it attempt to struggle or wriggle, and they were both still on the tram when I got out at Marienplatz.
I knew that the man and the hare were the trigger for the play that I was going to write. That is not to say that it would be about them. They would not appear in it, would in all likelihood not be described or even mentioned. But Iknew that by going through them, by grasping imaginatively something about them, I would be able to get at what I needed to know and then I would be able to write the play.
This had been going on for several weeks now, and a kind of panic was beginning to settle on me. I tried not to think too much about the fact that this would be my twentieth play, for it gave me no comfort. Sitting at Mollyâs desk, there were times when I felt I had never before written a line in my life, and the idea of my producing a work that any professional company would wish to stage struck me as an absurdity. My past experience counted for nothing. This feeling was in itself a normal part of the process of writing: I knew this. I also knew that for the act of writing to become increasingly difficult rather than easier with each work was logical. It would have been easy to repeat things that had been successful, to slip into stale and formulaic writing. But I wanted every time to do something new, something that would surprise the public, something that would perhaps surprise even me. I wanted to do something of which I hadnât, until then, known I was capable. And this too was a normal part of the process. While it sometimes got me down, it was also usually what got me out of bed in the morning. It was a challenge, and I loved it.
No, there was a particular reason why getting to grips with my
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