Wednesday sees the second of the Druid Debuts (I’m unable to see the third on Friday, but have read it) - A LOCK OF FIERCE ROARS by John McManus, a piece of raw untutored exuberance which is one of the most remarkable experiences I’ve ever had inside a theatre, and certainly at a playreading. Moliere’s Miser meets Reservoir Dogs with a bodycount to rival Hamlet at the end. If I tell you that this is a vigorous, Cavan-set comedy about one man’s fierce fight to hold onto his loot, and the thieving bastards who are trying to get it off him, at the time of Ireland’s switch from the punt to the Euro, then this hardly begins to describe the fierce, foul-mouthed energy of the piece and the wonderful showmanship which a cast of four great character actors managed to bring to it.
To me, this feels like a play, and a writer with a future.
It seems clear to me by now that an equivalent to the British ‘new playwriting industry’ simply does not exist in Ireland. There are relatively few outlets for new plays, so the onus is on writers to gravitate towards those companies who put them on and for directors and literary managers to be alert to what is going on around them. The relatively few openings require everybody concerned to be quite tough in their decision-making, and this can be a good thing.
I think in recent years – and especially during the Blair years, the years of Instrumentalism – there has been a tendency in Britain to encourage ten writers where perhaps only three merited it. In the name of opening up ‘access’ I believe a lot of money has been targeted at the whole training and development end of things. A fine thing in itself, but my argument would always be, be clear about who the three good writers are and support them in a meaningful way – not encourage ten writers to think they have a future in a brutal and unforgiving industry. They don’t.
My last live performance – unless you count some of the great street music I heard (check out Mutefish, they deserve to be massive!) – was Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s reworking of Giselle, set in the stifling (fictional?) town of Ballyfeeny.
As the great Irish playwright John B. Keane once said, a play about sex in Ireland is always ahead of its time. This took a while to get to me, but its central section – the havoc wrought in this stifling small town by the unleashing of potent sexual forces – had the seats tipping up all around me – at least 15 people leaving the performance.
Well more fool them! This was about as good as dance theatre gets, and I was completely won over by a multi-national company of spirited actor/performers.
For me my trip has been a terrific experience.
The west coast of Ireland (my taxi driver said on the way to the airport: ‘on a clear day and with a fair wind you can smell Dunkin Donuts in New York') feels a long way from England – certainly much further than Dublin – and that was a bracing experience for me. In fact I barely heard an English accent the whole time I was in Galway..
There is a sense of community – and a theatre community – that simply does not exist at home. Somehow, somewhere it has values which transcend the purely commercial (although much work I saw was preoccupied with how crudely venal Ireland is itself becoming), and a sense of reverence for storytellers of all sorts.
Perhaps, at one time, there was nothing to do but tell stories. To while away the time. To convince people they were alive. In Britain we have always been more interested in selling stories, not telling them, and that’s a different thing entirely…
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