Pop Up Theatre, in association with Directions Out Theatre Company return to the Dublin stage with a revival of Tracer by Stewart Roche. It is a contemporary black comedy on corporate intrigue and suspense. This will be the third production by Ireland’s only Stanislavski ensemble, whose previous work includes Irish classics by Lady Gregory and the Irish premiere of Amid the Clouds by Iranian playwright Amir Reza Koohestani.
Gary Canton talks to Stewart about his acting and theatre background as well as his love of popular culture, classic horror, and European Art House films. We also see gender-swapping roles in his play to let the audience know what to expect from this very funny and dramatic thriller that is Tracer.
First things first: Tracer is such a great play, but what was the kernel of the idea? What drove you to write it?
I’ve been lucky that my debut play in 2013 had a measure of success. It had been nominated for a Stuart Parker Award, so I was conscious of what my ‘difficult second album’ was gonna look like. I have written a couple of monologues. I didn’t want my second play to fall into that trap of ‘that’s all he writes’. Even at that stage in my career, I knew that my strength was dialogue. I found myself working in a market research company, and I was struck by the fact that there was such a wide spectrum of society that would come and go. It was constantly in flux, and there were people you might be sitting beside for two weeks, and then you’d never see them again. The whole transient nature was appealing when you’ve got a setting that allows for people from all walks of life. Workplaces tend not to be the setting for plays.
The company moved out to the suburbs, and I think we had the first three floors, but there was also a fourth floor that nobody went out onto. Nobody ever got out of the lift at the fourth floor — nobody ever pushed the button, so I found myself slightly intrigued by this, and I went ‘’What if?”
It is set in 2014, and if you remember, there was a financial crisis in 2008/9, and companies had to come up with all sorts of different ways to make ends meet just to get through this. I had the setting; I had this intriguing 4th floor. So I asked myself the question, what and how far would people and companies go to survive and then it just sprang from there.
Another element of this was (when I was trimming it for the revival) that this wasn’t long after the Gulf War, and I found the company missives of the time; I don’t think they were even aware, but there was a militarisation of language. I found that intriguing and slightly disturbing. So all these elements came together, and I just took it from there.
This is a play from early in your career, a year after Revenant, itself a darkly satirical comedy with a good dollop of thriller/horror. Your subsequent plays also contained elements of thriller/conspiracy/horror, which we might call ‘Pulp’ content in them. How much do those kinds of books, films and plays influence you?
I became a dad for the second time, and financial necessity landed me where I was. I wasn’t desperately unhappy, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do, and so you really engage with your fantasy life. I have always been interested in Horror, and Spy thrillers as well. My favourite author is John Le Carré. I wrote an Irish spy thriller some years ago called the 20 Club. Horror would have been huge when I was a kid growing up.
My parents would allow my sister and me to stay with my uncle and grandmother. On Saturday nights there used to be a double bill of horror on BBC on a Saturday night. My grandmother and my uncle knew I shouldn’t be allowed to watch those things, but, in the way of all grannies allow when the parents were away. There are a huge number of us who write horror for the stage; Peter Dunne is someone I would be aware of, Lauren-Shannon Jones is another, and we all know each other.
I used to work in a theatre company called Purpleheart, and we specialised in international plays; that’s when I probably met Joe Devlin. I was the literary manager and would have been responsible for reading the plays, and we wanted to get away from the obvious David Mamet and Sam Shepard revivals. This was pre-internet days when you had to order from the Royal Court and the Bush Theatre. So the upshot was that I read a huge amount of plays. On top of John le Carré and Hammer, I would have been heavily influenced by Jez Butterworth and Joe Penhall. Their style of writing is very dialogue-heavy and in-your-face theatre. Sarah Kane was also part of that in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. They begin to seep into you.
How much influence did contemporary playwrights, screenwriters and directors have on Tracer? I see Mark O’Rowe’s Intermission or Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges and Roddy Doyle writing with your Dublin slang and wit. It also appears to have a modern European sensibility with an edge of threat and violence. I am thinking of directors such as Gaspar Noé with Irreversible, Enter the Void and Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure and The Square. That sense of threat in the Square where the actor is performing as a gorilla, and the posh people are into the performance, but also terrified. Do you think that Tracer fits into that context of these contemporary voices?
It’s not a parallel I would have made myself, but I’ll absolutely take it! One of the things about Tracer, when I went back into it, was the second half I really, really liked and the first half I felt needed to be tightened up a bit because with time and with detachment you can be a little more ruthless with it. But back to your point, the Square is a brilliant film because it touches on that, the social norms get stretched to breaking point. I think there are a lot of those in Tracer, and I just love that for all intents and purposes it is in as normal a setting as you can get: a fairly nondescript office setting and yet without giving away spoilers, there is something very untoward and distasteful happening in the room upstairs.
There was a house around the corner from where we live, and I touched on this in my play, The 20 Club, which is a play set in Dublin during the Second World War. There’s literally a house around the corner from us – a house I would have walked past a hundred times – that was a Nazi safe house during the Second World War. I just find that kind of stuff intriguing. We live near Terenure which is the very definition of suburban hell yet…I just kind of wanted to see if you could have an office comedy with that…
One of the striking aspects of your writing is how you tonally balance the tension, paranoia and unease with almost absurdist dark comedy. This feels quite contemporary, particularly in our current society. It could be said that we have similar threats and absurdities in our political discourse. How does the comedy help the audience engage with the uncomfortable subject matter? In retrospect, are there moments in the play that feel less satirical and more realistic than you intended?
That’s a very good question. It’s interesting when you give something a little bit of time. Regarding the comedy, it helps the audience to get through what happens. I am wary of giving too many spoilers, but if you ask the audience to sit through something that becomes as grim as parts of the second half without the opportunity to breathe, I think that’s a very difficult thing to ask of the audience and slightly irresponsible. You do need to allow the audience a moment to go ‘Oh my God….Ok’ because this is an absurd situation, because this is a guy we’ve seen navigate office politics and suddenly he’s in extraordinarily choppy waters.
I find it difficult if it is overwhelmingly bleak, and tonally you need to be careful as well if we’ve had a play that had a lightness of touch and then suddenly it becomes a Uwe Boll (laughs) that will really have them queuing up for tickets! The play really needs to maintain the through line from the beginning to the end; it has to be the same world, even if the world becomes extreme in places.
There is a kind of skill in it too, and also it was one of my earliest plays, and there were things you still needed to learn and probably my biggest cast as well…
One of the things that happened in 2009, the bones of this play are linked back to that [The Bailout]. There were a couple of interesting companies around at the time because of the situation that happened; we were all kind of let go by the funding people. People have talked about trying to fix it over the years with mixed results, but writers at that time, unless you were extremely lucky, were faced with a difficult choice: if you wanted to get your work on the stage, if you had a cast of over, say three, that really wasn’t going to happen. Then plays became much narrower in focus, out of necessity, and I faced that reality as a writer who worked with a bigger cast, but after that, everything came right back down.
On a personal note, my favourite moment/speech in the play is Campbell’s advice to Richard when he brings in the calendar. To me, as a writer who became a carer and is struggling to return, it was such a gut punch and a kick up the bum. It really is a hard thing to admit to yourself that the person you promised yourself you’d eventually be may be slipping away. How much was that Stewart Roche speaking to Stewart Roche directly?
A fair bit, I think. That speech was inspired by someone I used to see going into work. He was just as Campbell described: he would wear, say, civvies from 8:30-9:30, then you might see him in the bank, and he’d be in his suit, and then on the LUAS home he’d be back in the civvies. And you’d go like “What are you doing, man, like, you work in a bank, it’s Tuesday, and whatever”, but then one day you saw him not in his civvies, and it was like “Aw, Jeez, like he’s gone now!”
That, to me, was a point where I don’t know what the dude’s deal was because you just wear the suit when you’re going to work unless you’re going out to the club that night, and there was a moment when there were kind of milestones where you needed to make a decision, and it is difficult.
When I was living in the US for a while, I was working at a transportation company, and I was an actor at the time. I felt I was lacking in screen acting training, and I was taking classes while working in this mundane job. There was this other guy who kept to himself. He more or less told me that he ended up in this place because his girlfriend got pregnant when they were both quite young, and that he was also in a band.
Which brings me to your earlier career as an actor and forward now to your filmmaking. Was it organic for you to adapt, or does change come to you as a forest fire, devastating and final? Was necessity the mother of invention, or do you feel like you’re growing?
I think I always wanted to write for films deep down. When I was a kid, I told you about watching horror films with my irresponsible grandparents. I would have gone to the theatre occasionally when I was young, but I watched films all the time. My parents, especially my Dad, were into movies – his brothers, too. I devoured films as a teenager. I went into theatre as an actor, and I grew to love theatre through that, but I think some of my early stuff, like Revenant, was like films masquerading as plays. In fact, Revenant was almost made into a film a couple of times. Which was a useful introduction to the frustration of being a screenwriter now. I enjoy writing screenplays, and I have been in that world for some time now. It is where my biggest strength lies. Dialogue has always been the strongest part of my writing. At the moment, that’s where I have positioned myself.
Tracer is being revived, and my other play, Shard, also came back recently. I don’t really have any plays demanding to be brought into the world at the moment, and that’s fine. I may take a break from films. If history has taught me anything, I will need to. It would then be refreshing to go back again. In terms of my writing, films are my focus at the moment.
Your dialogue never feels forced. The cultural references with time and place are so well put in relation to the Bailout. How do you feel about the new production with this completely different cast? You know there’s gender-swapping, and it’s multi-ethnic and representative of a new Ireland. How do you feel the play will manage that despite no changes to the references in 2014?
When Joe [Devlin] spoke to me about the cast, I said: “Absolutely Fine!”
My youngest son plays basketball out in Clondalkin, and he’s grown up with all different ethnicities, and I love that he accepts that this is how Dublin is – that’s really refreshing and brilliant. Regarding the switching of genders, Joe asked me about that, and I said: “No problem whatsoever except for one character.” And Joe said, “Oh?” I think he expected me to say something else, but I said: “Ken has to remain a man because I can’t see a woman being that much of a gobshite!” (Laughs). He was happy and relieved to hear that.
I am looking forward to seeing it, particularly one character who has been gender-swapped; I won’t mention it, but I’m definitely intrigued by how that plays out, and it will be really fascinating to watch. I mean, the setting lends itself to that with a disparate group of people coming and going. It’s an office where people seem to come into the place for a couple of months, and then they’re gone, which is sort of central to the plot.
I think writers are always looking for what makes an interesting setup; sometimes it’s an image, sometimes a nub of information that you store away, saying “I’ll come back to that later”. For me, it was that fourth floor and also the transient nature of the workforce. You meet somebody for a while who was kind of interesting, maybe you sat beside them, and then they were just gone.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how it registers now. We talked about whether we should move it up closer to now, but I felt it needed to be linked to the financial crisis; it’s about how we emerged from that. Also, COVID loomed large, and you can’t really ignore that. The other thing as well: I watched a programme with one of my kids from about 2010, and it was so refreshing, the lack of Social Media, the lack of phone use. People had phones, but they weren’t living on them. If there was a crisis around drama, it happened between two or three people, and it happened face-to-face. It didn’t happen online. There are aspects of the internet and social media; there are hints of it, but it’s still not online. What Richard has to discover, he has to do it through shoe leather as opposed to triangulating a Google search.
Photo credit: Hans Peter Beinert
Tracer by Stewart Roche is co-directed by Karen O’Connor and Joe Devlin.
Pop Up Theatre is a Multi-Ethnic Stanislavski Studio-trained ensemble in Association with Directions Out Theatre Company.
- Venue: The International Bar Studio Space, 23 Wicklow Street, Dublin 2
- Dates: Preview Wed 12th August 2026. Runs: 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th & 19th, 20th, 21st August. Doors 5pm.
Matinee Sunday 23rd August. Doors 2pm.
Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes approx. No interval.
To Book: www.eventbrite.com/e/tracer-tickets-1990320464086
