A Body Bound, an Imagination Soaring Free : Paralyzed playwright Christopher Nolan can’t speak--but he can hear the applause

The applause was still thundering after the world premiere of Christopher Nolan’s “Torchlight and Laser Beams” at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre when the author appeared on the stage in his wheelchair.

He is 23 years old. He is unable to speak, to chew or swallow or to use his limbs. His words of thanks had to be read out for him:

“The critics may describe me in the morning newspapers as either a fashioned playwright or a gullible fool. Maybe they’ll say nothing at all, or that magic forged a new voice out of water and wine.”

What the newspapers did say was that Nolan, already praised for his novel, “Under the Eye of a Clock,” had now become a first-rate playwright as well. Director Michael Scott helped Nolan adapt the play from his novel, bringing Nolan’s inner voice--so unlike everyday language--to the outside world.

The play is about a youth, Joseph Meehan, who is much like Nolan. One actor (Conor Mullen) plays the outer Joseph, while another (Frank McCusker) plays his inner self, dubbed Joseph Too. Joseph Too stands back, watching and reflecting on his own life, ironically commenting on the predicament of a soul in duress.

The story begins in the womb, where the child lies sideways, the origin of his handicap. His birth is the beginning of his painful effort to free his mind from the prison of his useless body.

The play combines Nolan’s dense, alliterative poetry with scenes from his family and school life, fusing nightmarish fantasy with ordinary--and sometimes delightfully extraordinary--reality. It contrasts the sometimes shallow values of the able-bodied with the able-minded Joseph’s fierce joy of living, in spite of gross handicap.

Catherine Byrne plays the warm, solid mother who teaches her son to read the words that will liberate him, “resurrecting hope where there was no hope at all.” Clive Geraghty, Rachel Dowling and Eva Watkinson play Joseph’s father, sister, and archetypal fairy-tale grandmother, the family which nurtures his talent.

It is a play that has to explain how it was written. Nolan must tap out every letter of every word with a “unicorn stick” fastened to his forehead. Young Joseph speaks of typing as a “beauty that was nearly lost forever.”

The first time he tries to type he gets cold feet. He can’t overcome the shocking spasticity that holds his body in an iron grip. His mother, Bernadette, cups his chin in her hand and waits.

Soothed, he finally begins to jab at the keys. Bernadette expects something simple: “The cat sat on the mat” perhaps. To her astonishment, her son begins to type a poem, “I learn to bow,” full of alliteration, image, euphony and emotion.

She can hardly believe what’s happening. He can’t either. His mind unleashes a torrent of words: “Day after dawn, raw quiet rested there. As I peered through rough pastures, dewdrops listened in golden buttercups. . . .”

The play traces his liberation in a series of powerful scenes, the most effective of which are the darkly comic episode of his birth, and his entering high school, where for the first time he had no family to help him communicate.

Scott’s elaborate production is as spectacular as Nolan’s language. When Joseph’s discovery of writing launches him into a new world, he takes the plunge actually as well as metaphorically--into a tank of water, shouting words as he struggles upward from its depths.

Nolan’s poetry makes the audience work hard. It is often violent and explosive--the outburst itself, not some other point of reference, the meaning. Each word bears an enormous weight of effort. Putting that language on the stage, with equivalent gesture and movement, is a formidable task. Scott doesn’t always pull it off, but when he does, the result is remarkable.

I visited Nolan in the comfortable semi-detached house where he lives with his family in Clontarf, a suburb on the north shore of Dublin Bay. It is also a few doors from the Central Remedial clinic, which played an immense role in Nolan’s life. His parents, Joe and Bernadette, gave up their farm in West Meath when they became aware of young Christy’s astonishing intelligence. Determined to give him the best education they could manage, they moved to Dublin and completely altered their lives.

I wondered how we would talk, but I needn’t have worried. Along with his typewriter Nolan talks with his eyes, or points to passages he has written in a vivid language of his own which he has to teach his family and friends to use.

He told me about the rehearsals for the play in an old church, St. Catherine’s, and he flicked his eyes up and in wide slow arcs to underline the connection he felt to those buried in the vaults under his wheelchair, in particular to the shades of all the handicapped who had gone before him and rotted as outcasts.

He sees himself “as a light as weak as a match flame in profound darkness, but a light nonetheless.” Hence the title ‘Torchlight and Laser Beams.’ ” Torchlight is the image of his early struggles to communicate. “The newness of laser beams is indicative of how my voice has hurdled its silence-barrier and now can be heard in every corner of the world.

“I am very aware of silent folk locked within their skeletal prisons. Through my writings, and this play, I try to give them hope. I hope to master my damnable body and operate my computer by whatever means I can. The means for helping fellows like me are stunning in their ingenuity. I cannot rest happy until I sample independence.”

He showed me the score of the piano music for the play by Wim Merten, the Belgian composer who wrote the music for the film “The Belly of an Architect.” Nolan was proud to have been the occasion for the music.

Where did he acquire his vocabulary? From listening? Reading? Asking questions?

“I listen to the radio, yes. My mind is like a spin dryer at full speed. My thoughts fly around my head by the millions. Beautiful words cascade down into my lap, images gunfire across my consciousness. While trained to discipline them, I jump in awe at the soul-filled bounty of my mind’s expanse.”

Why does he express so little frustration in his books or his play?

“Just try to imagine how frustrating it is to give expression to that avalanche of words in efforts of one great nod after another. I don’t have time to get frustrated.”

No, he hasn’t read Joyce. He admires Beckett, but his favorite poet is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Where, I wanted to know, did his wicked sense of humor come from?

“Humor is my spice of life. What else can I do but laugh at myself? Just think of a fellow with a stick on his head trying to explain himself to a person blessed with coordination.

“I can’t say where my humor comes from, but ever since I was tiny I could find fun in almost any situation. Humor enters my writing through no fault of my own. Situations just lend themselves to my sense of the ridiculous. I hope my audiences can join with me in laughing a belly laugh at a fellow in straits not far removed from absurd.”

How does he keep going? Does he pray a lot?

“People imagine I am very spiritual. It drives me mad the way I am expected to be a saint. There is no big saintly thing going on here in this house. It is very ordinary.”

He wonders what happened to people like him before now.

“I want to rescue hidden consciousnesses within tongue-tied disabled people. ‘Torchlight and Laser Beams’ is a step on this crusade to reach a wider audience.”

He has drawn his parents and his sister into the fight too. They showed me sacks of mail, and a moving letter from a nurse who “has often thought that some of the people labeled mentally handicapped might have brilliant minds locked in there and are treated as if they understand nothing.

“Two women patients,” she wrote, “smile all the time and try to reach us. When a staff member said to a colleague, ‘she has deteriorated so much recently,’ the patient burst into tears. The staff member was brought face to face with the fact that the patient could understand every word.”

“When this is over,” Nolan muses, “and I haven’t changed the way people think, what are they going to do with the likes of me in the future? Prejudice and ignorance have to be moved over, turned upside down, mute man’s suffering ended.”

“This” is far from over: Producers have flown in from all over the world, from Los Angeles, Australia, Japan, and Europe to see and bid for the play. It has been invited to the Edinburgh Festival, and to tour Japan, Australia and Denmark. The Mark Taper Forum is considering a production, as is a theater in Germany--the book has already been translated into 14 languages--and Nolan hopes the play will be adapted to television soon.