Breath, Love and Masking tape.

A bit of a prosaic title, that one, for an organisation which could be called many things; but prosaic is not one of them.

The Madrid Players is Madrid's main  English-language theatre group. I've been involved ( a word which conceals all sorts of misdemeanours ) for a few years in the mid-1990s, and continually now since 2010.  Although the city is home to umpteen semi-professional or even professional outfits, each of them is a slave to the need to earn money from theatre, their performers indeed professionals, but condemned to an eternal treadmill of Alice in Wonderland in pigeon-English for semicoherent 7-year-olds, dusting off A Christmas Carol for a yuletide spin every 12 months. Marley's torment seems a picnic in comparison.

Ahem. Sorry about that - got a bit carried away, there. The truth, though, is that if you want to do real theatre in English,Madrid Players is the only game in town. Our strength is that we're an amateur group, a democratically-constituted organisation run by elected volunteers. This means that in a difficult year, we might stop squabbling amongst ourselves long enough to put up a few shows; but on the up-side, it means that whatever your dream show is, you've got a chance to do it. Irish drama so obscure not even its author is convinced he's heard of it ? No problem ! An intense narration of the life of Catherine of Aragon ? Sure to put bums on seats, go for it ! Robert Burns on ice ? Write up your proposal and present it to the committee.

O.K., I'm being flippant. We haven't done the Burns show yet, although I have high hopes. The Constant Quene put so many bums on seats people had to be turned away.. And the Players do many more mainstream shows ( I've been involved in the Crucible, Steel Magnolias, Oliver, Our Town, a good number of pantomimes now ). Not many groups in Madrid can put up a pantomime which attracts audiences of 3000 people every year. And we do have a particular tradition of evenings of musical theatre. But the group does offer a creative space the like of which I haven't experienced since I was at uni, when we used to put up and go and see the kind of shows no-one in their right mind would produce, perform in or go and see, without costumes, props or occasionally actors.

It's also an example of that aphorism - I think it's Kipling who wrote this - that there are two kinds of   people : those who stay at home, and those who don't. MPs is a pretty cool meeting-place for the second kind, and it's enriching to find yourself singing, doing ludicrous voice warm-ups, painting scenery, with assorted Irish, Americans, Scots, Australians, Canadians, and of course, a strong number of good Spanish folks ( it was a Spanish philosopher whose name escapes me who wrote that la patria de cada uno son las idiomas que habla - your native country is the languages you speak. Particularly if you speak them while dressed up as el Pulpo Paul, trying to recreate the Stade de France on World Cup night with only 6 performers and no sound effects.  ). In fact, probably more than enriching, there are moments when it feels like you've joined a slightly odd extended family : odd, because for the time of the rehearsal process, and particularly the 2- or 3-day run of a show, you work very closely with this disparate group of strangers, depend completely on each other for the pantomime or song or sketch or whatever to hang together - but of course, we know virtually nothing about each other's lives outside that strange and slightly magical theatre space.

But this, of course, is theatre. It depends entirely on everyone, performers and audience, believing intensely, for a short period , in something that isn't there at all, and by this shared delusion somehow willing it into being.That's why perhaps my favourite theatre photo is this one, pinched from Eva, which must have been taken maybe ten minutes after Steel Magnolias ended.

It sums it all up, really : whatever story you've just been telling - Ebeneezer Scrooge, Catherine of Aragon, the redemptive power of friendship in a hairdressing salon - there's nothing really there. It's all just breath, love, and masking tape.

 Shakespeare loved the precarious, wobbly-flat nature of theatre, I think. He refers to it in any number of plays, but never more beautifully than in The Tempest Act 4 Scene 1, when Prospero renounces his magic :

                           " Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
                              As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
                             Are melted into air, into thin air :
                             And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
                            The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
                            The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
                            Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
                            And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
                            Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
                            As dreams are made on; and our little life
                            Is rounded with a sleep."

I could blether on a whole lot more. Every show feels a bit like a personal Everest ( some more than others... ), and that's a second thing that I think connects virtually all members : apart from all being slightly nuts in a variety of interesting ways, we're all ants-in-your-pants types, uncomfortable sitting around when there's another corner to be turned, another mountain to be climbed, another ( God help us ) SHOW TO PUT ON.

                                       
                                          ( The view from the top. Audience not pictured. )

And finally, there's the sheer joy of creativity. We've just come off The Constant Quene, a play about the life of Catherine of Aragon, England's Spanish Queen. I signed up for singing in the choir, because that seemed like an easy option. Like, who knew ? We had a great time in the rehearsal process, all of us went some way beyond what we thought we were capable of in all directions, we seem to have picked up at least two more gigs on the way ( Spanish Renaissance music is apparently the new rock n´roll ), and there's talk about sticking together as a unit after Christmas ( I hope singing as well ). On a personal level, the combination of this and my school inspection seems to have set me off in all directions ( you might have noticed ). In particular, the combination of all those lovely Scottish names rolling off the Black Wall, and the wonderful performance of The Flowers of the Forest has reconnected me with... but that's a story for another time.

I'll shut up now.

Oh, here's a link to the website. You'll be able to read something that actually makes sense there.

www.madridplayers.org

The sundial

Not much to this post : when I went back to Wales in July, I found the sundial in the churchyard in St. George.

My Dad was secretary of the Parish Council for a number of years after he retired, pretty much until his last illness, and the good people of the village wanted to commemorate him. It's the perfect place, as he passed by there almost every day on his lunchtime walk to the pub.

The base is granite from the local quarry, and slate. Strangely enough, the materials Ailsa and I had originally thought of for the gravestone ( actually Mike, my brother-in-law's, idea ) : Welsh slate and Scots granite.

My Dad was a very private character, and like a lot of men with their fathers, my relationship with him was complicated to say the least : too different, and too similar. But on the second anniversary of his passing, I'm left with the words on the sundial : In memory of Michael de Salis, 2011; to the glory of God.  And the lines of Dylan Thomas : forever may he live lightly, at last, on that last, crossed hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love.

Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidence ?  I remember back in the day, when I was doing a bit of Anthropology at Uni, noticing that the difference between cultures where belief in magic is still prevalent and our own, is that in these "older", "earlier" cultures, for want of better words, everything has a cause. Your goat just died ? Someone bewitched it. Maybe it died of a well-known disease - but why did the disease infect my goat, and not my next-door neighbour's ? Because he's a witch ( although he thinks I offended the gods, or whatever.) That raven sitting on a signpost in front of you ?  Obviously a sacred bird telling you something, if only you could learn the secret language of ravens.

                                       
                                                 Answers on a postcard, please.

Now, I'm a sophisticated twenty-first century man-about-town, so when my goat dies, I just put it down to my bad luck.  And I know birds don't really fly around communicating with me, they're just doing their own birdy kind of stuff, and if they happen to do it on my head, well, it's just a coincidence. It's probably a good thing to take this point of view, on the whole : I've found that accusing your neighbours of witchcraft, and telling everyone that magpies are talking to you in their beautiful avine language, gets you off on the wrong foot with your Comunidad de Vecinos. 

"Bad luck" and "coincidence" aren't proper explanations, though : they're fall-back explanations, shorter than saying twenty times a day  "Hey, I don't have a clue what this is all about." . They don't explain anything. A coincidence is a combination of two elements, events, whatever, which look like they're connected, but they're not. Except they are : they're connected by the fact that we notice them, and, since human beings are story-telling animals, we start to weave a pattern out of them.

 Just recently, I came across the mother of all coincidences.

After the Summer from Hell 2 years ago, my sister and I spent a lot of 2012 going back to the house in Wales and clearing stuff out. One day I might develop the expressive resources to explain how strange, painful, and occasionally funny the business of packing our parents' lives into boxes and throwing most of it away was. But like a lot of stuff at the business end of death, it was a job which had to be done , and we did it, a week together at Easter, otherwise taking turns.

                                               A tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff.

By September we'd got everything cleared out. Ailsa handled the last part of it, and I'm quite glad I never saw the house empty; so much of ourselves, of what we are, is actually there in the space we occupy, in our STUFF ( for want of a better word ) that I think it would have upset me to see thirty years of our life as a family reduced to memory, as if they had never happened.

Anyway, the house in Church Street went on the market, attracted bidders, we accepted an offer, endless farting-around with estate agents, lawyers ( whose activities make the secret language of ravens look reasonably intelligible ). and in April the contracts were exchanged.

We were cheered up considerably to find that the "unknown bidder" who'd been in the shadows while all the legal folks talked to each other, turned out to be Eleri, the daughter of Jane Edwards, our next-door neighbour. Ailsa and I had wanted to sell because we're too far away to really use the house, and it's a house that deserves to be lived in, so to sell to somebody local, who we knew, looking to start  a family close to her own family, was exactly what we would have wanted. Eleri had known my family since she was a child, had been to the funerals, and her Mum had been very kind to us, especially during my Dad's last illness and in keeping an eye on the house in the 18 months it had lain empty. So this was perfect, really.

Now for the strange part : when we cleared the house, the estate agent suggested leaving some carpets in place. Apparently it makes it easier for people viewing to imagine a comfortable, homely place, than just bare floorboards. So it was left to Eleri and her husband to clear the last of the carpets out and take them to the skip, and so they found the photograph.

Now, my Dad was a keen photographer, always taking an array of battered 1950s and 1960s cameras with him on walks, always on the look-out for a photo. This meant that when we cleared, Ailsa and I threw out thousands of photos : we kept a lot, but there's only so much you can keep. But one particular photo must have fallen out of somewhere more than 20 years ago, slipped down under the carpet in the spare room, unnoticed and forgotten. Which is where Eleri found it when she lifted the carpet.

It was a photograph of her, aged about 3 years old, taken round about 1986.

I don't really believe in coincidence, or in magic ( although if my Dad planned that one, it beats most card tricks I've seen ). Perhaps it's no more a message than the raven. But it is strange to think of that photograph, lying there forgotten more than 20 years in the dark as our family life moved noisily over and around it, the last 18 months in the empty house that didn't really belong to anyone, waiting for the moment to be found. And as a story-telling animal, I'm entitled to say that it feels like the old house welcoming the new family, telling them it's a good place to be and it's good for them to be in it.

King Eystein and Mr. Mourinho

Well, I wrote this really long blog entry thingy, but reading it back it just looked bloated and flatulent and self-important. So I've done you the favor of deleting it :  here's the edited highlights. I guess this makes it kind of interactive : if you don't think it's a brilliant analysis of a complex topic,, it's because you've misunderstood my genius.

1.  Press conferences after the Spanish Cup Final.

2.  Ego, the Living Planet ( with picture ).

3.  School management.

4.  Jesse's Song from Ugly Betty. See it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiRBoewcU4k

5.  Two football quotations.

6. And where I wanted to finish up : King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh.

I've known and loved this poem for more than 25 years. Sheenagh took the incidents described from one of the Old Norse sagas . I love the way she uses the punctuation to say so much, and the placing of the word "kinsman" in the last line.When I first read the poem in 1985, I thought " Boo to King Sigurd ! " As you grow older, of course, and re-read the poem, the penny drops that we've all got a bit of Sigurd and a bit of Eystein somewhere in there.Oddly enough, for a poem written in the early 1980s, it strikes a chord with the whole Facebook phenomenon.

King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh

( From an incident in Heimskringla Saga : Snorri Sturlusson ).

"When I went to fight in Saracen country,
seven times I had the victory,
and where were you, kinsman Eystein, then ? "

Northwards in Vaage, building the fishermen
smoke-houses; they have work all seasons now.

"In Apulia I did not see you
on my crusade; where were you at that time ?"

Setting up inns on the road out of Trondheim
where night frosts used to freeze the traveller.

"I saw Christ's tomb; I did not see you there."

At Agdaness the ship-grave, I had made
a harbour, to save men's lives when I am dead,
and but for my life, it would be worse for them.

"What were you doing, brother, when I swam
the Jordan river, or when I tied a knot
by the bank, and promised my kinsman should come out
on that holy journey, and untie it again ?"

I was bringing under our rule the Jemte men,
not with war, but with good words. And a man unties
the knot he finds, kinsman, where he is.


I just love that poem : also ( English Lit. hat on, kind of Shakespearean thing with a feather in the top ) full of clever, subtle music. Look at how the brothers' words echo each other through rhymes and half-rhymes. 

King Sigurd and King Eystein is taken from Selected Poems by Sheenagh Pugh, quoted here with permission. This, like all her poetry as far as I know, is published by Seren Books.  Her website is worth looking at:

http://sheenagh.webs.com/ 

Margaret Thatcher - oh good God...

Oh dear... I don't normally go in for the political stuff - but I'm not sure my point of view about what's going on in Britain right now is actually political. I mean, I don't have any faith that Labour, the "Liberals" ( God help us ), or even Plaid Cymru are going to save us, so I'm not asking for the vote for anyone, or even civil disobedience.

I've been away from "Britain" (inverted commas, not sure how far the concept exists outside the Olympics ) for almost twenty years - apparently Mr. Blobby's not so big any more. But it seems like an increasingly surreal place. In case anyone's not heard, on Wednesday there will be a state funeral ( to all intents and purposes ) for a much-loved Prime Minister, rolling through London with military guard to St. Paul's cathedral the first since Winston Churchill to receive this honour. With a level of security to match the London Olympics. Not because of Al Quaeda etc., who probably haven't heard of the lady. They need that level of policing to stop protesters from interfering with this national heroine's honours.

Now, I'm one of the few people you might find who thinks that this woman was neither a saint nor the Wicked Witch of the West. I'm old enough to remember, from a child's point of view, Britain in the 1970s : strikes, power cuts, inflation; some of what Margaret Thatcher did to begin with looks sensible to me : get the unions back under control, privatise industries which have no need to be state monopolies ( telephones etc.), even the Falklands ( described memorably by Jorge Luís Borges as "dos hombres calvos peleando por un peine", two bald men fighting over a comb ) if you accept, perhaps charitably, that the motive was to protect British citizens from a nasty right-wing dictatorship.

But legacy... when a lot of her fans talk about her legacy, how she made Britain great again, they're using words in ways that I don't understand. Now, as I've been known to tell my students, History is always about the present, and the debate about any political figure is always a conversation about the here and now. Can these people really be saying that where we are now is a good place ?

Two aspects of this legacy I think are particularly sad. It may be that these were unintended. The conversion of the UK economy from an industrial base to an economy centered on services, tourism, financial services has increasingly made it a London-centered country ( and London is more or less now an independent enclave within the U.K., gradually being sold off to Russians, Qataris, etc. ). The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are a consequence of the way the Conservative Party has become an exclusively English affair, provoked in turn by the way those countries were handled in the 1980s. If Scotland goes in 2014 - and I would bet that the "Thatcher Dividend" some newspapers are talking about is more likely to go to the SNP than the Tories, as people get to watch on Wednesday what their taxes are spent on - then Wales will go within a decade, unthinkable even 10 years ago. And that will be Britain gone.

The other ? The dangerous little idea that imposing your views on the 50 % of the population who disagree with you is somehow admirable. In fact, that was always part of the Thatcher myth more than reality; but it's been taken up by a whole raft of idiot politicians who think that if they defend a point of view which is truly offensive to a large proportion of their population, then this PROVES that they are right.

There isn't a statue of Margaret Thatcher in London : even a bust made for the House of Commons got destroyed as an act of protest some years back, I think.I hope things are respectful on Wednesday; I'm glad I'm not paying for it, although I'm annoyed my sister, an NHS nurse, has to ( and I haven't even started on how her governments set in progress the movements which put ever greater pressure on teachers, doctors, nurses, etc., while letting bankers regulate themselves ). It would be nice to think the media attention might one day be lavished on someone who brought people together, rather than divided them.

Dermot Bolger

If  you saw The Parting Glass, and you're one of the folks who were deeply moved by what you saw and heard in the Centro Gallego, then the best place to start to find out more is undoubtedly his website : http://www.dermotbolger.com/

Dermot wrote this wonderful play which moves from realism so bare and taut that it brings tears to the eyes, through the deep poetry of life and into stand-up comedy. Apart from that, he got in touch with us when he found out we were doing his play, which meant a lot.

"Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages.
Thou on earth thy time hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimneysweepers, come to dust."

I've written that from memory, so there may be a mistake or two in there : it's the song from Cymbeline. I remember one of our supervisors on the Shakespeare paper at uni, who managed to scare the shit out of  Paul Weeks and myself with sheer colossal erudition, when we got to the last scene of the Winter's Tale, he just got us to read it aloud. Good man; there's poetry / poetic theatre whose magic runs so deep that you just have to let the words work their spell. And Delyth's playing captures this.

The rest of the CD is as good, particularly if you like Under Milk Wood.

"Llais" ( "Voice" in English ) is on Steam Pie Records.

Delyth Jenkins : Fear no more the heat of the sun

On a totally different note, I've been getting into harp music recently, Sofi bought me a nice Robin Huw Bowen CD for Christmas. To keep me calm in the run-up to the play, I've also been listening a lot to the wonderful harp playing of Delyth Jenkins, from Swansea, who often writes for the theatre : here's a link to a piece she wrote for Cymbeline, played in a tent : I don't see how it can have been posted on Youtube without her permission, so I guess it's o.k. to share.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe2tBaRGq8g

The Parting Glass : parting thoughts.

Well, that was interesting.

The Parting Glass - the play by Dermot Bolger I directed for Madrid Players, was, I think, a pretty fierce success. Certainly, a number of people spoke to me afterwards and told me how it felt like we'd put up a few pieces of their life on the stage, and situation after situation in the play touched them deeply. It's not the only kind of theatre, but it's the kind of theatre I like.

We also, I think, achieved what I was hoping for on Friday evening. We had a relatively small audience, some 45 people in all, and it was clear from the opening lines they were with us - John McClafferty's opening monologue got laughs in places I hadn't suspected. Now, the difference between laughter and tears as a physiological response isn't so great, and so all the laughter was setting up the bite of the play later on ( apart from, of course, the obvious fact that it's nice to make people laugh, and as an actor it always gives you confidence ).

And from there the energy just built, and I think we got what you hope for, but don't often get in a theatre : audience and actors so involved emotionally with the story unfolding that it creates a little community in there, and the energy coming from the audience feeds into the actors' performances.

Saturday wasn't quite the same : a bigger audience, a bit slower, I could see this rattled the actors a little early on. It was still technically a very strong show, but we didn't have that little bit of magic we'd had the night before.

I've no doubt I'll happily continue babbling later in the week.

In the meantime, I'm starting to develop a case of the DTs. More about that anon...

Not finished, just abandoned.

Storming final rehearsal last night...and tomorrow we open. And now, all the last-minute doubts and questions that I guess every director must have.

Will anybody come ? If they come, will anybody understand it ?  Is that bit too fast ? Is that bit too slow ?  Is the bit I think is really funny, like, really funny, or have I got a crap sense of humour ?  Have we got enough inflatable plastic hammers and leprechaun hats ?

Of course, no play is ever really finished...they just get to the point where you either abandon them, or go on and on and on as weeks turn into months turn into years obsessively tweaking the telephone answering machine message on page 20 or the handshake on page 42 while the actors quietly sneak off to get on with their lives. So it's good the day is finally here.

I found the final run last night powerful and moving, and I've now read/heard this play 743 times. It's been a real pleasure to work with John, James, Eimear, Jackie and Javier, and watch Dermot's mighty text evolve into...well, whatever it evolves into tomorrow night. Because that's the last link between football and theatre : anyone can talk a good game, but can you do it on the pitch ?

Final words from that great man of the theatre, Vicente del Bosque :

" Es un obviedad : el entrenador tiene su papel, proporciona herramientas, pero los autores de todo son los jugadores."

( It's a statement of the obvious : the coach has his role to play, he supplies the tools, but it's the players who make it all happen. )

Off to watch Atletí : )

Four days to go !

Four days to go... here's a few photos from last night's rehearsal.  We're still waiting for a few scarves, inflatable hammers, etc.... but it gives a flavour.

"It was all train stations once : my scenes of homecomings, reunions, destinations reached."

                                       
                                               "A surprising amount of ash for a little feller."

                          "It takes balls of steel to drive a Titleist ProV1 so far out of bounds."

                                   " Ireland in a playoff ? Trust me, it will be a fecking wake."

                            "Amid an onslaught of green jerseys and hats and plastic hammers,
                                              we board a metro for the Stade de France."

                                         " We may be broken-hearted in 90 minutes' time,
                  but what's the point in being alive if you're afraid to have your heart broken ?"

                                    "There's no barriers here now, no millionaires on that pitch,
                                             just 11 Irishmen sharing the same dream as us."

                    "I remember him doing those same dance steps with my sister in Zhivago's"

                                                                   The dressing room.

Props and scenery and all that sort of stuff.

Another ( yet another ) thing I love about this line of work is the utterly, utterly daft nature of the enterprise.

Just so you know, we have no scenery, no costumes ( I mean, no-one's going naked, I hope,  but the cast are turning up in their own clothes ), no music, and are turning up for the show with a plastic jar from the Chino around the corner, a couple of newspapers, a bottle of Murphy's ( empty ), a pair of headphones, a mobile phone, a jiffy bag, a couple of Irish fright wigs and an inflatable plastic green-white-and-orange hammer. A terrible beauty is born, to be sure.

With this collection of refuse, we're supposed to build Dublin Airport, the bar in Charles de Gaulle, a flat with a balcony in Hamburg, and the Stade de France during a World Cup play-off. It's going to be like one of those challenge-the-celebrity reality shows, only without the celebrities. Eimear, James, John, Jackie and Javier ( tempted to call them the J-team ) will be working for their money. Just as well really, since we're not paying them.

The whole set-up has enabled me to gradually scale the pecking order in the production. I started off directing/producing the thing. Now I get to do a turn right at the beginning, you'll enjoy my so-called "voice"  destroying the millenial Irish folk tradition after the interval ( at least, you will if you don't bugger off at half-time ), and I'm sneaking on the back towards the end as well.

On a more serious note, we get mileage out of that heap of junk : in particular, I'm quietly pleased with how much work the phone and the headphones put in. And part of the fun of coming to the show will be to see how we do the Stade de France bit.

Sofi just came in and said "Oh my God. This is getting worse. Who's wearing THAT hat ?"

You can probably tell how much I'm enjoying this : )

Curtain would go up on Friday week, in 8 days' time. If we had a curtain.

The Fields of Athenry

The climax of The Parting Glass takes our heroes to the France-Ireland World Cup playoff, on the night of November 18th. 2009. I've written about the odd little connections between football and theatre before, and we're having a lot of fun building the Stade de France with five actors and an empty stage in the Centro Gallego.

The thing is, you watch something like this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsnZa6MwcCc

and there's no way you can describe these folks as "spectators". They're part of the theatre, part of the story : when the 4 - 0 result is just a line in the record books, there'll still be Irish people telling the story, and Polish and Spanish guys telling their children and grandchildren about how the Irish fans were singing that night in Gdansk.

I don't want to be a bore with this point, but this is what "drama" really means. The story you tell engages the audience, makes them laugh, moves them, and the emotion you generate in them feeds back to the performers on the stage. You create a small, temporary community in the semi-circle of your theatre space : I'm steering clear of the big Greek words here, but I've felt this as an audience, and a couple of times in shows I've worked on - always in tight little theatre spaces, low-budget things, with the audience close up against the actors, and always in shows which mix humour with pathos - Irish playwrights are especially good at this. This is what we're working for, and I'll not give much away if I say that everything we're doing - even the Stade de France, which looks like the climax - pays off on page 42.

You can over-intellectualize ( and over-sentimentalize ) this stuff, but I do find "The Fields of Athenry" in this context very moving. I think it's true that watching sport, for men at least, creates a little space of time outside your normal, everyday life with its minor successes or failures, where you can share with the community of fans around you the hope of some greater, more epic success or near-success. Unless you support Barcelona, Man. United, one of the big national teams, that might come round like Irish Grand Slams, once every 61 years, or be followed by the long slide into epic mediocrity, the Welsh story : at any rate, even when you win, you know you're going to be losing again fairly soon. But you keep turning up, because, as Eoin says in the play, "in 90 minutes we may be broken-hearted, but what's the point in being alive if you're scared to have your heart broken ?"

So when you come to see the show, you'll see us working all sorts of business around football fans travelling to the game. It's probably our biggest departure from Dermot's original play, which was written as a one-man show. Having 5 actors means we can work the kind of chants the Irish fans might sing, their songs of hope and resignation, watching the clock tick down, knowing they've been cheated.

In rehearsal, this generated a situation that, as a director, I love : when your cast show you something in your play you didn't realise was there. James, John and Eimear suggested Eoin and his friends would sing the Fields of Athenry. It's a mighty metaphor for the way people endure these desperate economic times : between resignation and the determination to endure, knowing that we've been here before, a community not just with the other fans in the stadium , but with the long history of emigration stretching out behind and before them.

And yes, we will have leprecaun hats the siza of Fionn mac Cumhaill's codpiece. In fact, I'm thinking of making the audience wear them too.

Unplugged

We took a group decision last night to do the show Unplugged - sorry, we'll not be needing that ample Special Effects budget.

The right decision : the human voice, performing live, has a resonance that no recording can capture, and theatre ( and football ) is all about living in the moment.

Football and Theatre.

During the 1990s, Michael Robinson ( himself a former Ireland international ) forged a career on Spanish TV with a programme en abierto on Canal Plus called "El Día Después." The format, Robinson's own creation, was genius : every Monday evening at 8.30, his team would report affectionately about the week's football games, focussing on everything except what happened on the pitch.

So instead of the usual round of  interviews with dreary superstars, they'd tell the story of a couple who spent the afternoon of their wedding, still in wedding dress and morning suit, watching Real Madrid in the Bernabeu; or the Rayo employee who explained his job, with the intense happiness probably only attainable by the harmlessly mad : on match days, he broadcast through the stadium loudspeaker system, every time Rayo scored a goal, the first five bars of the greatest  song ever recorded : "The Final Countdown."

My favourite story from the Día Después was this : a Betis fan who every year bought two season tickets to watch his team. One for himself, and one for the ashes of his dead father. Which he took to the ground, Sunday after Sunday, in a milk carton.

Once you accept that normality is a mosaic of this sort of thing, nothing you put up on a stage can be too far-fetched.

I guess because they're two of my main interests, I've always enjoyed the similarities between football and theatre. They both have their little pre-match rituals, both in terms of psyching up the performers to give their best, and the kind of conventions of behaviour the spectators follow. They both depend on teamwork ( for 3 demented weeks in January 2011, I rehearsed the Crucible with the Players in the morning and trained with the Harps, Madrid's GAA team, in the afternoon : the groups share a number of warm-up exercises, all designed to promote teamwork ). And they're both spectator sports.

The Parting Glass lasts for 90 minutes, and it's a game of two halves : and I believe in theatre which grabs the audience emotionally and doesn't let go from start to finish - like an Atlético-Barça from the old days, or a Wales - Ireland rugby match...

"He was always going to be an architect. If he's going to be an architect, he will have to live elsewhere."

The Parting Glass in the title refers to the last drink you have with your mates before leaving - I guess like "la penúltima" in Spanish. It's also a traditional Irish song, here in a particularly upbeat version by The High Kings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvoBrhbhgk0

This play is it's a 90-minute fragment of reality - and I mean reality so real that I see more about it every day in the newspaper, in conversations with friends - visualised and re-written by a poet who could also write stand-up comedy.

 It's kind of interesting to be doing a play about the lives of people who could just as easily be in the audience, not just in terms of their general characteristics, but also the very specific details of their lives. Because we're a cast made up of emigrants ( apart from Javier  ), performing a play about emigration, for an audience largely of emigrants, in a city where everyone's pretty much from somewhere else anyway. The other night I struggled through a group of protesters venting their righteous anger outside the Bankia hq in Calle Alcala, to rehearse in the James Joyce pub : yes, we've been rehearsing a show about guys who sit around in Irish pubs... in an Irish pub.

The parallels between Ireland and Spain at the moment make so many lines in the play resonate. When Eoin says of his son, Dieter, and his plans for the future  "He was always going to be an architect. If he's going to be an architect, he will have to live elsewhere." , elsewhere means "not Ireland" - but in our performance, it means "not Spain" as well. Both countries have a generation of young people whose lives have been conditioned, and will be conditioned for a long time to come, by the greed and stupidity of the housing bubble years, which in Spain at least are talked about by those in power as if they were some inexplicable act of God.

 This has set us two challenges as we've worked on the play : I'm lucky to be working with such a gifted group of actors, and my job of course has been to stop them acting, or at least to make it so unobvious that the audience don't notice it. The other challenge I think I'll mention another time...

Este en el poster es Thierry Henry, ¿ no ?

On Friday, when I ran off a few copies of the poster, the folks who work in the photocopy shop were immediately interested : they've done posters for Madrid Players for about a year now, but this time they really wanted to know what Thierry Henry was doing in our play.

And in case anyone wants to know what Thierry is doing in the play.., this is what happened in the Stade de France on 18th. November 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QNHlFDbxvY

The Parting Glass

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on this :

( Poster by Aki Ginory )

The story of The Parting Glass starts around 18 years ago; the only time I've been to Ireland, I spent a week walking through Wicklow, with a weekend in Dublin at either end : the first Saturday night I went to the Abbey Theatre to see Sharon's Grave by John B. Keane; and the following weekend, before getting the boat back to Holyhead, I saw April Bright, by Dermot Bolger, at the Gate. And was completely blown away.

Ireland seems to turn out writer after writer with a lyrical, poetic turn of phrase, an ear for dialogue which sounds real, and above all the ability to make audiences laugh and then move them to tears within a few pages of script : but even in this context, I knew Dermot Bolger was a bit special. So it's quite something to have the chance to present one of  his plays to a Madrid audience for the first time, in the company of John McClafferty, James Duggan, Javier Gómez-Acebo, Eimear Fee, and Jackie Cresswell.

I think the one thing I love most about theatre is it's a collaborative art form : it's a privilege to be working on this with these mighty talents.

For the next couple of weeks, I'll be babbling on here about all sorts of stuff to do with the business of directing this play : starting with, of course, football !