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.

"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...

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 !