"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...