Bridget O'Connor; Author and playwright
Hyfler/Rosner
Author and playwright who shone humour into dark corners
Michelle Kass
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/18/bridget-o-connor-obituary
Bridget O'Connor, who has died aged 49 of cancer, was the
author of the prizewinning play The Flags, as well as
collections of short stories, and several plays, for both
radio and theatre. Most recently she had been working on a
film version of John le Carr�'s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy, starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Benedict
Cumberbatch.
Born in Harrow, north-west London, she was the second of
five children of Bridie and Jim O'Connor, from Limerick and
Cork respectively. In Harrow, Bridget grew up amid ceilidh
bands and dancing lessons, and spent long, wild summers on
Ireland's Banna Strand, the utopian beach referred to in The
Flags. She attended Catholic schools before reading English
at Lancaster University.
After several years' writing while working in a
building-site canteen and then in a bookshop, Bridget won
the 1991 Time Out short story prize. This was followed by
two story collections: Here Comes John (1993) and Tell Her
You Love Her (1997), which were translated into several
languages, including Serbo-Croat. Her story A Woman's Hair
was included in The New Picador Book of Contemporary Irish
Fiction (2000). From 1996 to 1998 she was Northern Arts
literary fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities, where
she fell in love with the writer Peter Straughan, later her
husband and sometime co-writer.
Several of Bridget's stories were broadcast on BBC Radio 4,
for whom she also wrote plays, including Becoming the Rose
(2000, winner of the Arts Council's Write Out Loud award),
The Centurions, and States of Mind (co-written with Peter).
She was also writer-in-residence at the University of East
Anglia in 2000.
In 2001, Bridget and Peter moved from Hackney, in the East
End of London, to Ireland with their baby daughter, Connie.
During a year of Cork rain Bridget wrote her first
full-length stage play, the blackly comic The Flags, about
two lifeguards on the second-worst beach in Ireland. It was
directed by Greg Hersov (first in the Manchester Royal
Exchange studio, and then in the main house), and designed
by Laurie Dennett, who found on his research trip to Galway
that the burnt-out cars and steel lifeguard huts were not
fanciful. Bridget had been on a cycling holiday to the Aran
Isles, had headed down a hill and found herself on a
terrible beach, "a moonscape with rusty puddles and dead
fish", rather than the beautiful sight she had been
expecting.
Alfred Hickling reviewed the play for the Guardian: "As
sharp and gritty as the authentic Galway sand covering the
floor: a greyish, granite composite... you'll be shaking out
of your shoes for weeks. But it's worth putting up with the
mild discomfort, seagull corpses and rank seaweed for
characters and situations as sublimely drawn as this."
The play went on to be produced in Liverpool, Dublin,
Belfast, Slovenia and Australia, and is due for production
in France next summer in a translation by the French
playwright Serge Valletti. The Flags also led to further
(sadly unfinished) commissions from London's Tricycle
Theatre and the Royal Exchange as well as a residency at the
National Theatre studio. She was developing The Lovers,
written for Live Theatre in Newcastle, as a feature film,
and a short film called Dead Terry, told from the
perspective of a narrator who, unaware that he has died,
observes the gathering of his friends and relatives. Shining
humour into dark corners was a speciality.
The family had by this time moved back to England, and
settled in Hove, East Sussex. Bridget and Peter were jointly
commissioned to write several films, produced and yet to be,
including Sixty Six (2006), starring Helena Bonham Carter,
Mrs Ratcliffe's Revolution (2007) and The Three Musketeers.
Filming began recently in Budapest on their adaptation of
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, developed with the Swedish
director Tomas Alfredson. These three rare talents, all with
theatre backgrounds, were having a great time with a book
that they loved. Tim Bevan, of the UK Film Council and
Working Title, noted that Bridget brought "a
non-sentimental, unexpected, visceral approach to each scene
that made her screenwriting exciting and exceptional. Great
movie writers are rare in this country and she was one of
them."
Bridget and Peter married in May 2008 with invitations
designed by their bridesmaid, Connie. Peter and Connie
survive her.
. Bridget O'Connor, writer, born 18 January 1961; died 22
September 2010