The Good Room has been a long time in incubation, evolving all the time, experiencing many changes from draft to draft (with a few about-turns admittedly), and going through the necessary growth pains. The play emerged from this phase all the stronger and capable of independent survival! Perhaps that's the way of all plays. I really don't know, as this is the first play I've ever sat down to write.

It would be impossible for me to describe the motivation for the play without going back to the genesis of the idea in 1997. In October of that year I flew out to Sarajevo to attend the Sarajevo International Theatre Festival, the first such festival since the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. Unlike our own festival, an international theatre festival in that part of the world includes shows from countries such as Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Poland. I remember feeling very inadequate with my German and French skills and wondering how everyone else would cope with an Albanian King Lear bearing down on them, or how the Polish Jean Genet piece would ever attract an audience. I soon discovered that linguistic differences were not seen as barriers, in fact the crowds seemed to revel in the drama all the more. As one audience member explained to me after Genet's The Maids: – "We all know the play so well, we just concentrate on the performances." I started to do the same and found the experience highly rewarding!

I had travelled out to Sarajevo accompanied by Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, whose play Snakeskin was staged by Pale Mother in the Fringe Festival here. Snajder's latest piece, Ines and Denise, was being premiered at the festival and of course he was eager to attend the last remaining rehearsals before the opening. From the moment the first stage light went up, the play had me in its grasp, and continued to haunt me long after my plane took off for Vienna.

Set in a European wasteland post World War 11, Ines and Denise follows the story of two mothers (one French, one Croatian) who meet in the search for the remains of their missing sons, lost in the war. They keep vigil at night over the empty beds and cold fire grates in what seems like a hopeless exercise. Having no bodies to bury, they have no way of bringing an end to all their grief. The grief itself – relentless and unmitigating – seems to bring completion to their lives. Once united (albeit in suffering), the two women thrive as a unit, setting up home together and establishing a means of communication that works for them. They even attempt to reshape history, demanding (by telegram) an alternative outcome to the War. Human endeavour is capable of any achievement!

The Good Room unfolds the parallel lives of an Irish mother and a Bosnian refugee, scarred by loss but desperate to find a way out of their suffering. Both share in the desperate search for a loved one, both suffer the sense of uprootedness and dislocation which this search inevitably entails. The refugee finds himself at the epicentre of Irish society, brought into the inner circle as it were, when he plays a hand of cards in the good room of the house – a room traditionally kept for receiving visitors of note. I feel this makes a comment too on how far we need to go in assisting the integration of foreign nationals in this country. The play, in its closing sequence, suggests hope rather than hopelessness, but we have yet to find the right foundation to build upon.

Helen Casey

March 2000