The Landscape of Irish Playwrights
The Author on the Island of Inis Mór
Blog 57
“HUGH: (As he descends)
Quantumvis curstun longum fessumque moratur
Sol, sacro tandem carmine vesper adest.
I dabble in verse, Lieutenant, after the style of Ovid…
YOLLAND: You’ll have to translate it for me.
HUGH: Let’s see:
‘“No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey
At length evening comes with its sacred song.’
YOLLAND: Very nice, sir.
HUGH: English succeeds in making it sound. . plebeian.”
Characters in Brian Friel’s Translations
When I went on a recent pilgrimage to Ireland, our leader, Phil Cousineau, asked why that holy place was drawing us there? “You must have an unfulfilled need or desire, a pull, a yearning, a pining, a craving to go,” he said. I had done keen preparation for the journey. But I needed a deepening of focus, attention to the path below our communal feet, and respect for the destination at hand. What WAS the magnet attracting me to the Emerald Isle?
I have had a yearning to go to Ireland for a while. The country seemed romantic and ripe for me: the green of the land, the lore of the leprechaun, the call of the myths, the tales of the fairies, the jollity of the pubs, the breastplate of Saint Patrick, the Celtic slant of the spirituality, the cheer of the fire inside, the pelting of the rain out. And then it came to me: the poets and playwrights were calling. Yeats and Heaney, Wilde and O’Casey, Joyce and Becket, Shaw and Synge, McDonagh and Friel. And the older ones, Sheridan and Goldsmith.
During my 25-year academic career in theatre at Samford University, when working for six or eight weeks on a show, I would dwell in the place we created on stage. For many years, I co-designed costumes, sets, props, and lights for hundreds of plays. But they were imaginary spaces. However much we meticulously researched, the locus was not real. It originated in our creative inspiration.
For instance, the above quote, "No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey, at length evening comes with its sacred song," is said by Hugh, the headmaster of the hedge school in Brian Friel's play Translations. To truly understand the quote, you must stay a while in Ireland in the summer. You soon realize the sun rises at 4:15 am, and truly, “at length evening comes with its sacred song” — at about 10:00 pm.
Translations
In the fall of 1998, I designed costumes for Translations at Samford University. While working on the play, I “lived in” Ireland for six weeks with Hugh — that learned man who knows Latin and Ovid, Greek and Homer — as well as his traditional beloved Irish. Set in a rural Irish-speaking community in County Donegal in
1833, the play takes place in the local hedge school. Hedge schools were illegal, clandestine institutions that provided education outside the established system, often hidden behind hedges (hence the name) to avoid detection by authorities. This group of folks gathering in the hedge school becomes part of my family!
Suddenly, our community's traditional life is disrupted by the arrival of British soldiers from the Royal Engineers, who are tasked with mapping Ireland and replacing the local Irish place names with Anglicized versions. Even though the play is performed in English for sake of the audience, Friel expertly highlights the communication barriers and cultural misunderstandings between the Irish characters speaking rich lyrical language to the English soldiers’ pragmatic and functional talk. Hugh's character embodies the struggle to preserve traditional knowledge and language in the face of imposed changes.
Translations kept running through my head as we traveled across the Irish countryside marveling at the Irish (as well as English) on road signs. Hugh would be happy to know that the Irish language was officially incorporated into the signs through regulations enacted in 2008 under the Official Languages Act of 2003.
Translations had not been the first Irish play I had ever worked on. In college, it was a fabulous I Knock at the Door — the play adapted from Seán O'Casey's autobiography of the same name, as well as Samuel Becket’s End Game and a faculty member’s special event of Becket’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Over the years, I have worked the front of the house for Becket’s Waiting for Godot a couple of times. I kept thinking of Becket and O’Casey as our group trekked through cities and byways.
In 1980, we produced John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, engaging an Irish director for the play. He pleaded for authentic Celtic touches for the set and one of his demands was a picture of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus to go over the fireplace. Unbelievably, I found one! On the pilgrimage, I wondered: were there similar paintings in any of these houses we continued to pass? After all, here we were in the Wild Western World of Ireland! There was a thatched roofs like the one we created! And stone supports for the cottages!And piled rock walls that stretched on and on. Such sights authenticated the work I had done to create that space. But here and now, the houses were in front of my eyes!
Besides Translations, we also presented The Cripple of Inishmaan in 2000. Playwright Martin McDonagh links the darkly comic story to the real life filming of the documentary Man of Aran. In it, the impaired Billy seizes a chance to escape his confined life on the Aran Island of Inishmaan when an American film crew arrives to make a documentary on nearby Inishmore (Inis Mor). He finds a way to audition for the movie. That spring, I spent six weeks with Cripple Billy and Babbybobby, Kate and Eileen, Bartley and Johnnypateenmike in our little created stage community of Inis Meáin. And later in 2000, I again inhabited a cottage on Inishmaan when I designed costumes for the Ralph Vaughan Williams adaptation of John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea.
But on our recent pilgrimage, we spent three actual days on Inis Mor! To get to our inn, the Kilmurvey House (an 18th century stone house built at the foot of the path up to the Iron Age fort Dun Aengus), we took traditional pony traps across the rugged, windswept topography dotted with small cottages. And afterward, we traveled to County Clare and County Galway, the Burren, the Connemara mountains, the Wild Irish Way with its spectacular views of the Atlantic Ocean, the enchanted ruins of Clonmacnoise, and so much more.
As we journeyed, it hit me: Irish playwrights have a powerful connection to their homeland. The lore of place (called “dinnseanchas") ebbs and flows into and out of their creative consciousness. The landscape itself has a personality and becomes an indispensable component of their stories. So to see the physical environment of their settings brings clarity and poignancy to their works — even ones I have intimately worked on and interpreted. For instance, when I saw the fierce Atlantic Ocean pounding the rocky shores with such terrific blunt force, I thought: How could John Millington Synge NOT write Riders to the Sea?
In most of the Irish plays I have designed or studied, the relationship between the characters and their environment is vital. The terrain we pilgrims were traversing forms not just a painted backdrop for the plays, it is what floods the works with meaning and impact.
So why was I drawn to Ireland? The playwrights were issuing to me their Siren’s Song — not to dash my body on the high stony cliffs, but they were whispering to my Soul: “See! This is what it’s like! This breathtakingly beautiful, rough landscape is the womb that gives birth to our creative siring. To be present in the lush Irish hills, our misty lakes, and those rugged coastlines is to walk into the memory of essence. That’s what gives life to us. That’s what makes our characters alive!”