decade ago, David Ireland was invited to Belfast’s Europa hotel to seal a deal to write a play called Sadie for Stephen Rea’s Field Day theatre company. “Surreally,” recalls the playwright, “Richard E Grant stopped at our table to say hello to Stephen.” The English actor was making a documentary on interesting hotels, for which the Europa qualified, as Ireland notes, “by being the most frequently bombed in Europe”. When Grant was told the third person at the table was a writer, he “actually asked me then to do a play for him and Stephen. It’s always been in my mind that one day I’ll write a two-hander for them.” That play hasn’t happened yet and Sadie was only recently completed. The rehearsal script I read was marked draft eight. “Actually,” says Ireland, “it might be the 20th version. Generally, if it gets that hard, I give up. But there was something about that character that somehow demanded to be heard.” Sadie lost its scheduled premiere at the Lyric theatre, Belfast, to the lockdown, but has been rescued by BBC Four recording a performance in the empty auditorium. The protagonist is a Belfast woman in her 50s who starts an affair with an English-Portuguese colleague three decades younger, during lockdown. “Stephen and others wondered if Sadie’s relationship was a metaphor for Brexit,” says Ireland. “But it certainly wasn’t in my mind. Then, when the pandemic happened, it struck me that this character, who is facing lots of crises in her life, had this additional catastrophe of the pandemic, which forces her deeper into herself.” Critics are used to withholding surprise endings of plays, but Sadie is harder to discuss as it begins with a twist – a device allowing Ireland plausibly to have a modern-day character who has never heard of Brexit, Netflix, the Good Friday agreement or Covid. Ireland is “amazed the BBC wanted to do it”, not from modesty but a feeling that an organisation with so many editorial guidelines would balk at the content: “I like stuff that goes to dark places and, if you do that, you have to risk being offensive.” Walk-outs and calls for trigger warnings resulted from Cyprus Avenue (2016), in which Rea played an Ulster unionist who commits a family crime that would make an Ancient Greek dramatist queasy, and Ulster American (2018), where a bloodbath ensues from a Hollywood actor’s attempt to turn a Protestant playwright’s script into a celebration of the IRA. Did the broadcaster demand rewrites? “The BBC has not been at all censorious. To my surprise. They queried the section about genocide, which had a rhythm to it that would normally be associated with comedy, although it wasn’t intended to be funny. The problem with the way I write is that everything is rhythmically comic, even if the content isn’t. So I changed some dialogue to remove that confusion.” Ireland remembers being taken as a child to an “Ulster Says No” rally, at which the Rev Ian Paisley excoriated the Anglo-Irish agreement, the 1985 precursor to the peace process. Although Ireland lives in Glasgow, where he met the wife with whom he has two young children, the playwright remains true to the politics of his roots on an east Belfast housing estate. “People often think the plays – and things I say in interviews – are critical of unionism. But I’m a very proud unionist myself and have the misfortune to live under Scottish National party rule, a party that wants to rip the union apart.” It can be argued, though, that the British government in Westminster is putting its own pressures on the United Kingdom. Some have expressed fears for Northern Irish peace due to border tensions and trading problems caused by Brexit legislation. Hadn’t Boris Johnson cynically used the unionists to achieve ends that now disadvantage them? “Irish nationalists will often say to unionists that ‘the English don’t like you, they don’t want you!’ But there’s a misunderstanding – we know that. It happened over Brexit, with people saying, ‘The DUP are going to get stabbed in the back!’ But I remember being taught that from a very early age – we are loyal to the British but they will always stab us in the back. I find it hard to believe the DUP didn’t know it was going to happen. Everyone I grew up with knows that’s part of the arrangement. But that unhealthy relationship is still more preferable to us than a united Ireland.” For years, he has been trying to write a “big epic play” about the Good Friday agreement. Whereas his plays to date have featured a handful of characters in domestic settings, Ireland initially wanted this one to be “a big David Hare/James Graham thing”, with real people and researched speeches. “But I’m not sure I have the discipline for that. So I’m thinking it will be a big absurdist history of the Troubles and the Good Friday agreement. There are so many great characters to have fun with – Paisley, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton. I hope that will be my next play.” Apart from Sadie, he has also completed in lockdown Take It on the Chin, a dark farce about “woke wars and the cancel culture”, featuring a male married couple, one of whom has embraced hashtag liberal sensitivity politics that his reactionary partner resists. “Everyone I send it to says: this is a very funny play but no one is ever going to put this on!” In reserving the right to make jokes about anything and everything, is Ireland fighting the prevailing trend? “Yeah. I feel that anything I say about this is going to get me into trouble. I feel a need to be socially responsible in my private life. But, as a writer, I want to be socially irresponsible. I genuinely don’t understand people getting upset about art. If you don’t like it, switch it off or don’t go. I don’t mind people not producing my plays because they’re not any good, but, if you think a play is good, but you won’t produce it because of the reaction, that’s a very frightening place for us all to be in.” Sadie will be broadcast on BBC Four this spring.