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.