Review: MU Drama’s “The Editing Process”
Recalling his experience writing The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe attributes the moment at which the young, troubled narrator Francie commits a murder wholly to the character. McCabe describes shock and awe as he watched on helplessly while the character took up arms as he wrote.
One could pathologise McCabe’s surprise to no end, questioning whether he responded so because Francie was far more exterior (and, one can assume, more individually autonomous) to McCabe than he anticipated, or whether it was of a more guilty nature; that McCabe was appalled that Francie, as in some way a projection of his own self, would do something so morally reprehensible. The Drama Society’s metafictional Irish Student Drama Award (ISDA) submission, The Editing Process pathologizes its lead, the Writer (Ella Joyce) in much the same light, although whether it does so successfully is a curious matter.
The Writer is struggling to write a playscript throughout, centred at their desk for much of the show. The insights we receive about its contents are as follows: 1) it is a murder mystery, the murder taking place during a stage production; 2) to muddy the chances of finding a likely culprit, all its characters are written to be egregiously unlikeable; 3) the murder victim is the production’s Director (Cyan Doyle), a self-insert of the Writer, and the murderer is Alexander (Luca Devine), a nepotism hire who maintains a guise of constant idiocy. These details are eked out throughout The Editing Process, not in an order which guides its audience from one to another. This speaks to a scatterbrained quality in the Writer, who spends the play cooped in their room, incensed on their interior understanding of the script. Yet The Editing Process assumes that the audience is as aware of the playscript as the Writer is, its assured references to it becoming, in many ways, muddier as the show goes on.
Central to the show’s premise, all the characters in the playscript manifest around the Writer as they write it, viciously and blanketly critiquing its contents and the Writer themself. The Writer rationalises the characters as projections of their insecure innermost self, which The Editing Process assumes throughout, but that the characters should be so opaquely unpleasant and bitter does not leave much of the Writer’s psyche to be imagined. One character, Angela (Áine McGowan), stands up for the Writer and provides some diversity to the cast, but is silenced as soon as she speaks with frightening consistency. Scenes with the otherwise tetchy and judgemental lot will comprise of sweary shouting matches between a pair of the manifestations, or with the Writer, which the performers give their all toward, successfully creating an anxious and unpleasant atmosphere (which Joyce confronts in her role marvellously, especially in scenes with the playscript’s lead character Sarah, played by Rachel Garde). However, this atmosphere reflects an imagination and a psyche of very little more than abject cynicism.
The Writer’s interiority is most blatantly exemplified in their short scenes with the Director, whom Doyle plays with an astonishing capacity to mimic Joyce’s speech pattern and demeanour, replicating every inflection. They, too, are part of the sour number, reaffirming a picture of the Writer’s mind that is wholly embittered. Another Drama Society production, Are You Single?, faced similar issues: its ‘real’ leads conversing with characters who manifest their psyches did well to reflect the leads’ insecurity, but perhaps too well. That their conversations comprised of self-deprecation neglected the fullness of emotional and psychological experience: its positives, negatives, overlaps and in-betweens.
This is particularly apparent in the Writer’s interactions with their partner, Sam (played with a marked earnestness by Ethan Hayes), who is deeply concerned with the Writer’s self-isolation as they toil away on their playscript. They fret over the Writer not eating or sleeping properly; they try to cheer them up whenever they can; they lament that the Writer is no longer the way they once were. However, such little room is left to imagine a more upbeat Writer to be missed when any insights into their person, whether through the characters or the experience of writing depicted, show a downtrodden experience.
Though this cynicism seems to leave no corner of The Editing Process untouched, the play creates sound foundation for it when it turns to the commodification of writing. The Writer’s agent, Matt (Conor McCallig), forebodingly embodies the mechanism of the deadline: he is an agent for an unseen, faceless theatre company waiting for the finished product, alienated from its author. He suggests halfway through the play that the playscript could be submitted to a theatre competition, put against other playscripts. In his words, he considers how “usable” the script is, qualifying it as one would a shelf item. Matt is not the only agent of market demands imposed on art; the characters who manifest around the Writer espouse the gospel of crunch culture, telling them at one point to “lock the f*ck in.”
Writer/director Wilbur Pearman Howard has a penchant for archetypes in their plays: Passive Observers, which they wrote and directed for the Drama Society’s One Acts Showcase in December 2025, features medieval characters who are ‘the very extremes’ of their archetypes circulated in culture; a crybaby King who lashes out when his wants go unattended, and a Jester who scrambles to joke and rhyme to save their skin. The Writer can be considered, then, an extreme of a twentieth century archetype, who must become utterly absorbed with their work to meet a deadline. If they are as entirely infuriated as The Editing Process suggests, it is a reasonable response to the overwhelming pressure of market conditions, permeating their psyche and subsequently the manifestations of the characters in their play.
The murderer, Alexander, is a curious case in that dialogue frames him as more exterior to the Writer than the other characters: he is less so a projection of their frustrated, insecure interiority and instead an avatar for their low conception of nepotism hires. Although, by this, he is still impressed upon by the Writer’s spirit, a reflection of their personal view of nepotism hires (emboldened by the playscript’s cast also deriding him at every turn). Instead of his idiocy being an act, as scripted, it is utterly sincere, and his gripes with the Writer over this make for the most interesting of The Editing Process’ metafictional flairs. Devine realises these gripes with a welcomely benign pretence, touting Alexander as one of the most amiable characters alongside Angela. Moreover he presents a possibility for a greater sense of exteriority, an intermediary approach to a writer’s conception of a character as both inside and outside themselves.
The truth of a dilemma like McCabe and Francie’s is that a character can be seen outside oneself and as a projection of one’s inner spirit: a thread may be drawn back to oneself through a character, but one also views them as an autonomous and external agent. With Alexander, The Editing Process catches the wind of this nuanced understanding, presenting within him a colourful and authentic glimmer of the fullness of psychological and emotional experience. This can be done with the rest of the cast, were the contents of the Writer’s playscript explained with greater clarity, and the cast less explicitly projections of the interior mind. A thoroughly contemptible cast can work, though in the case of this metafictional pressure cooker of a show, the cynicism of each character could be more interestingly reflected as an exertion of the murder mystery genre, rather than of one person pushed to blanket pessimism.
Though its framing device asks for a slight degree more nuance, The Editing Process excellently strains the nerves, through the efforts of its cast and its reflections on the cold market of writing.
The Editing Process is on TONIGHT at the DU Players Theatre in Trinity College Dublin at 6pm.
