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.