Last Days

At Galileo’s on bank holiday Monday night my cousin Alan tells me that August 1^st is Lughnasadh, the beginning of the harvest in Celtic tradition. Bank holiday weekends aren’t named like US holidays, and don’t seem tied to memorials the way our long weekends are. Given the fierce hold on so many things Irish in this country, I find this lack of connection with Celtic ritual surprising.

I haven’t been here quite so late in the summer before, so am also surprised to realize that August 1^st seems to be the beginning of autumn here, if not actually, then at least mentally. I arrived just after the solstice, when the night sky is barely dark at 11, the morning is bright at 4 and there is never enough dark to reveal stars. Now, less than two months later, mention of the weather also brings mention of the gathering dark. This gradual hastening toward winter is something that people here need to prepare for in a country where, in December, it will be dark by 4pm, and children will travel to school in the dark at 9 the next morning. There is a fierceness in this place that breeds strength and despair in equal parts. It is no small tribute to the people who live here that strength wins out.

On my last day for this summer I wave goodbye to Esther, Trina and the boys from the front gate of my little house. Esther, free of the garden and the tearoom now that Ballindoolin is closed for the season, is off to London with her daughter and grandsons. One final trip to the library to use the internet and drop off a box of candy for the librarians there who have made my stay so much easier. To the bank to make a last deposit of a few euros into my account, a float for next summer. On my way to Nodlaig’s I stop at the front gate of Ballinderry for a last look. I have said my goodbyes to Alan and Eleanor; now I say farewell to the house, haunting in the distance, that brought me here three summers ago. Finally, I say goodbye to Nodlaig. Although she won’t discuss it, she turns 90 this year at the time of another Celtic festival, the forerunner of Christmas, for which she is named. It is ironic that, with all the huge houses that surround me here, I leave most of my belongings in the very small bungalow of a woman who has the least chance of being here next summer. Maybe we both feel that the boxes of stuff in Nodlaig’s spare room is insurance that we will be sitting next to the turf stove in her kitchen next summer, drinking tea and talking about nothing, really, but in the most profound way.

Live Times 2

Eden is a play about Edenderry, the depressed midlands town with the long main street that I have made my home in and around for the past three summers. Edenderry has a sad reputation. Once a strong center of Quaker industriousness along the Grand Canal, then a cattle trading hub, and later the site of optimistic and furious development during the Celtic Tiger, the place suffered more than most small market towns in the Tiger’s bleak aftermath. The hulking presence of a semi-built hotel at the edge of town is a looming symbol of current difficulties.

The play is written by Eugene O’Brien, the son of a local man whose family has survived better than most through what is invariably called the economic downturn. O’Brien fils went on to become a successful TV writer after Eden was first produced about ten years ago. The play was a Dublin success, making it all the way to the Abbey Theatre, the most venerated of traditional Irish theatre venues. This summer Eden is playing in far less rarified surroundings. A small production company has ambitiously brought Eden to the abandoned bistro space of Larkin’s, the bar about 200 yards from where O’Brien grew up, the same bar that O’Brien used as the central location in the paly. It is known as Flanagan’s. The play is a two-hander, as they say here. The set consists of two stools placed opposite the bar in the old restaurant. The two characters enter from two different doors. The husband and wife never interact during the play, each telling their own side of the story of their marriage.

Billy is a drunkard who sees himself as a stud; he spends the play lusting after Imelda, a much younger woman, a central character who never appears. Breda believes the fact that she let herself go after the marriage is the reason for Billy’s lack of interest. Now she has lost weight and found a hesitant belief in her newly reborn self. The play takes place over the course of one night, the night Breda decides to get dressed up and go to the bar for the first time in several years. Besides the unseen Imelda, there is a salesman who is in town. Eoin peddles fold-up putting greens. He meets both Billy and Breda over the course of the night, with consequences for each of them. Eoin is of course the snake in the garden, only he brings the contemporary garden, the golf course, with him.

The play is hilarious and poignant. It is difficult to imagine how the 60 or so chairs in Larkin’s bistro are going to be filled each evening for the month of the run, but the acting and the writing would be worth a drive from Dublin, although very few people, given Edenderry’s low-caste status, are likely to make the trek.

Cairbres is a legendary pub in the town of Drogheda, close to the northern border and near the home of Matt and Geraldine and their family. I met Matt and Geraldine last summer. Matt, who is American, was a high school buddy of the husband of a very old friend of mine. He and Geraldine are medieval archaeologists who have written extensively on early Irish archaeology. They live in the village of Julianstown in a cottage full of wonderful chaos, with people and animals coming and going at a frenetic pace, chickens and ducks running around on the lawn and a big overgrown garden on one end of the property. At one point they built a little shed for Geraldine’s office along the back hedge, which serves mostly as a guest bedroom for overnight visitors.

 When Matt turned 50 he bought himself a stand-up bass and returned to his love of live music. Now he has a band, Slowfoot, that plays blues and classic rock with a bit of Irish trad tossed in, on Sunday nights in Cairbres. Matt claims he and Geraldine moved to Julianstown to be close to the pub, and his older daughter Nora has mentioned being named for someone there. The pub recently re-opened after the death of the longtime owner, Mrs. Cairbres. She appeared to be loved by all and sundry; the tributes to her from pub regulars went on all evening as I listened to Matt and his band play. Three people described to me how her body was laid out in the pub for the wake, how many people were there, how much music was played and Guinness drunk. Now her two mad daughters are running the place. I never quite understood in what way they are crazy, but the gist of the discussion seems to run that the customers now come in spite of rather than because of the sisters.

Only one sister was there when I went to hear Matt play. The other was in the hospital, evidently a result of a diet that consists largely of raisins. Matt’s band, whose members have names like Plummy and Willie, consisted of mostly guitars on the night I was there. We picked up the drummer on the way. His kit consisted of a snare drum; he used the drum case for the bass drum. Willie, who sounded like one of the leaders from the descriptions of him by the other members, was gone, and so were a couple of other key members. The very pregnant wife of one of the guitarists never left his side the whole evening. She drank down several Cokes and stepped outside with him every half hour or so to join him in a smoke.

 The music they played was catching, but whatever era it was from was evidently an era when I was listening elsewhere. A couple of times one of the regulars walked over to the corner where the band was set up and started to sing. One man had a lovely Irish tenor voice but got lost in the lyrics and finally apologized and walked away. The other man sang a nostalgic ballad about leaving and death, familiar themes in Irish songs. Matt told me later that he sang the same song every week and evidently knows no other. A blonde-haired man in a wheelchair recited a couple of his moving poems at one point in the evening; I forgot to ask if the poems he spoke changed every week.

The bartender, who was struggling without her sister, cut off the band about 1am. With some grumbling for the early stoppage, everyone packed up their instruments, downed a final Guinness and headed home. Matt crammed the bass back into his small car, the drummer squeezed into the back seat next to it, and we drove back to Matt’s house in the deepening, star-soaked night.

Live Times 1

I can never get enough of live performance. In Galway I saw two plays in the space of four hours. The other play was Request Programme, with Eileen Walsh. This is a play done in complete silence; the small audience was asked to respect an ‘ethos of silence’ before we entered the apartment where the play was to take place. We were led to the apartment in groups of three or four at about 5:45. Just after 6pm as a dozen or so of us were gathered in the sitting room we heard the front door of the apartment open and keys being dropped in a bowl. For the next hour we stalked Walsh as she changed, washed the dishes, turned on the telly, flipped through a magazine or two, listened to the radio (the request programme of the title), completed a craft project, washed some more dishes, fixed a small meal and then dumped it out, washed some more dishes, went to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, got into bed, got up, all while gradually falling apart, with sad consequences. Standing a foot from her while she carried on with what was left of her life was compelling stuff, of course, but what is interesting is how much that space has stayed with me, much more so than anything else I’ve seen this summer. I didn’t love the play, and wondered how someone so much on her own, especially so clearly disturbed, would never say a word to herself, but the performance was brave and riveting.

The play was written by German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. The translation—such an odd word for a silent play—was done by Katharina Hehn. Corcadorca, an experimental drama group from Cork, did the production. Claire and I saw another Corcadorca play, medEia, in Cork a couple of summers ago. This one took place on the top floor of city hall and involved, among other plot devices, Barbie and Ken dolls and a huge rolling fish tank. It was also highly memorable.

Two nights later I was in Dublin with my intrepid friend Una, who is always willing to try something new. After a day at the Chester Beatty Library to see a small but tasty exhibition of the books of Henri Matisse, we walked over to Temple Bar to get on the wait list for a new play. The End of the Road is a walking play. It was produced by a hot Dublin company, Fishamble. We arrived just in time to be first on the wait list, but with the very small audiences (eight at a time) and the fact that the whole thing was free we weren’t optimistic. Still, I had hopes that my recent string of good luck might hold, and it did.

After a brief scene-setting video two members of the video audience stood up and invited us to follow them out into the streets of Temple Bar. There we were joined by Bill, the actor who would lead us for the rest of the performance. As we moved from across one long street in Temple Bar from café to city hall to a nightclub to a pub where we ate coddle to a claustrophobic hotel room and finally to a square little patio, Bill was joined by a series of actors playing his girlfriend and then his wife. Bill didn’t physically age, but the female characters did. The plot was simple: young man plays football, breaks his ankle with career-dashing consequences. He proposes to his girlfriend when he sees he will lose her but the marriage holds, and we learn in the dark hotel bedroom that they have been happy. Meanwhile, as we move back and forth from venue to venue, there is a streetscape of actors. A young mother pushes a pram up and down the hill, a boy busks on the corner, children play street games and taunt Bill as we pass them. 

There are people sleeping rough. A loudspeaker occasionally belts a speech by the charismatic leader of the new Irish Republic, Éamon deValera. At the end of the play we leave Bill on the patio, sitting in a wheelchair in the aftermath of a stroke. A young boy leads us back to the street. He jumps up on the horse cart that has been waiting and we follow along behind as he summarizes Bill’s long, simple life. The whole play is touching and sentimental, made powerful by the strong evocation of place brought about by the mis-en-scéne.

In between scenes our Bill joked and chattered, making fun of my American accent but staying in character. There were four Bills moving their separate audiences around the streets, with fifteen-minute intervals between starts. Our Bill was the youngest; his innocence and modesty were compelling attributes; Una and I thought we were lucky to get our Bill, and were sure he was the best. Most amazingly, we realized later that we never saw any of the other groups that were circulating with their Bills. The play, the 30 or so actors and the street were just for the eight of us, and I think we all loved every minute of it.

I'm in the Irish Times

Irish Times, Saturday July 23^rd, Shane Hegarty’s column, lead paragraph:

Cillian Murphy has been in Galway for the past few weeks. The whole town seems to have met him somewhere along the way. In a pub, at a show, on the street. One tourist stopped and asked a man for directions to the Black Box, where later she would be going to see Misterman. She had, of course, stopped Murphy, who plays the only role in Enda Walsh’s play, and whose face is currently behind a curtain of hair and the brambles of a wild beard.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0723/1224301176614.html

Galway, accidental meetings, great plays

I got to Galway mid-afternoon after an easy drive. Galway is Ireland’s free-wheeling city. It sits on the eastern edge of the Connemara, the romantic coastal area that is the Ireland of fantasy. Galway itself has little of historical importance. The reason to visit there is for the craic, as they say here. Craic means a good time, and Galway provides that through its pubs, a user-friendly pedestrian walkway that extends across the entire center of the city, and a series of festivals that celebrate everything from literature to oysters. My trip to Galway was for the Arts Festival, a two-week series of plays, music and art that follows the Film Fleadh, Ireland’s celebration of film.

I was in Galway to see Misterman, a one-man play by the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The play is the hottest ticket in Ireland (if you don’t count the Blondie concert), largely because of the star, Cillian Murphy. His otherworldly blue eyes have been on the covers of every Sunday magazine in the country. Ireland knows how to honor its own, and Murphy’s Hollywood success puts him in the pantheon of stardom even though, as Murphy said in an interview, the celebrity train has left the station for him. This may be true in Hollywood, but not in his home country.

I had also tried to get tickets to the other hot play, Request Programme, another one-person show starring a less well-known but highly revered actor, Eileen Walsh. This show sold out online instantly. A lucky hunch sent me to the Festival box office where I got one of two returns to that night’s performance. The play takes place in an apartment instead of a stage, or rather, the apartment becomes the stage. It began at 6pm, to heighten the verisimilitude of a woman coming home from work. The ticket seller suggested I walk the route from the apartment location to the Black Box Theatre where Misterman would take place to insure that I got to the second performance on time; no latecomers would be admitted. I set out to do this, following a vague map and some street signs, but in the usual way of signage here, the sign for the Black Box was twisted to point in the wrong direction. As I followed it down an alley along the edge of a soccer pitch I saw someone with a backpack on coming in the other direction, cutting across the edge of the field.

“Excuse me, am I going right for the Black Box Theatre?” I called out.

“No, he said, pointing, “It’s in the other direction, past the trees.”

As I looked at him I realized that this guy with the backpack, sunglasses and an unkempt beard was Cillian Murphy, on the way to the theatre.

“I think I’m going to see you there this evening,” I said to him.

“Yes, you will. I guess I should know the way!”

We walked along a bit. I told him why I was looking for the theatre at this time of the afternoon; I didn’t want to miss his performance by being late after an earlier play.

“What play are you seeing?”

“Request Programme.”

“Ah, my friend Eileen. Several of my friends have seen that before coming to mine,” by way of reassuring me that I wouldn’t be late.

He asked me where I was from in America, and I told him that I was honored to be seeing his performance.

“I hope it’s good tonight,” he said.

When we reached the junction where I could head back to the city center I thanked him for his help and shook his hand, then watched him for a bit as he went on toward the theatre. That night I walked quickly between the two performances but by the time I got to the Black Box the only seats were in the rafter. The Black Box is a black box theatre in name only; it is often described as cavernous, and has the odd arrangements of festival seating. I managed to find an aisle seat in the next to the last row. As I walked back into the theatre from the restroom I noticed an empty seat in front row center. I asked the woman sitting next to it if it were free, and she said it was; she seemed surprised that no one had claimed it five minutes before the curtain. She turned out to be an American, from New Hampshire, over for the festival and especially Cillian Murphy. She is a huge fan, and would see Misterman seven times before the end of the festival. Once I met Shannon, I of course began to see her everywhere. I sat next to Shannon, and for the next hour and a half front row center, riveted while Murphy flung himself back and forth across the long set as Thomas, the deeply disturbed man of Walsh’s rich imagination.

Lunch the next day was at Ard Bia. The minuscule café is squeezed into what must have once been a stone shed just across from the Galway City Museum. I had passed it by the first time and walked all the way across town on busy streets to the other art venue I wanted to visit, but I couldn’t find it and ended up walking back again, taking the much prettier canal walk. When I came off the path I was in front of the café, and this time I went in. My table was against the wall, so close to the table opposite that I couldn’t help but hear their conversation. When the three women began to discuss the set of Misterman, I chanced an interruption. This is what the Irish would call being Irish; such acts of overt friendliness are not at all unusual here. Of course we got to talking, and suddenly I was being whisked off to the temporary art gallery I hadn’t been able to find earlier. 

The older woman of the three drove like a madwoman, weaving through the narrow streets and just missing several of the endless stream of jaywalkers, all the while talking and cracking jokes about Nora Barnacle, Misterman (she called it just another Irish male fantasy play, said it was only good for the radio, but commented that Enda and Cillian had had fun revising Walsh’s earlier version, which was really the point), Galway itself and Irish film. She told me that she had just finished a film about an Irishwoman; the film was called Bernadette. That would of course be Bernadette Devlin, the Irish activist turned politician, an icon of 1960s feminism. When one of the other women mentioned that the film was out to festivals, including Sundance, I realized that this woman knew what she was doing. Later I ran into the third woman of the original trio, who told me that my chauffeur was Lelia Doolan, one of the most important names in contemporary Irish film production and the woman behind a huge new project to build an art cinema in Galway. She was certainly someone who could call Enda Walsh and Cillian Murphy by their first names.

Lunch and some alpacas

6 am. A blustery Saturday morning here, with overcast skies and wind whipping the shrubbery outside my window. Instead of a trip to Dublin this morning I am staying put to have lunch at Furey’s with a new relative, or at least a relative that’s new to me. The lunch was organized by Grattan, who is excited to bring together two people with historical connections, however fragile. Our bloodline is shared through Martha Williams, who married a Tyrrell in the eighteenth century and later became the stuff of legend when she refused to submit to a rebel attack on her stagecoach during the 1798 uprising. There is a portrait of Martha hanging at Ballindoolin that has been rather zealously restored through the generosity of another Grattan, this one of the Canadian Tyrrells. The portrait is on the wall above a stuffed falcon in the Ballindoolin dining room. In the portrait Martha has a demure countenance. She wears a lace-trimmed blue silk dress and matching cap. The hands that are lightly clasped across her lap are out of proportion with the rest of her body; they look as if they belong to someone much bigger than this delicate pink lady. The assumption is that the portraitist who painted Martha finished the face and passed along the rest of the painting to an assistant, with clumsy results.

Xandria, Martha’s contemporary relative, raises alpacas. She lives in London but travels to Ireland a couple of times a month to check on them. As it turns out, she is practically my neighbor; her alpaca farm is just up the road. I’ve gone by the place a few times and never seen any alpacas lurking about; they would seem almost shocking in a countryside that is dominated by placid herds of cattle with a few horses scattered in.

This will be my third lunch out this week. Lunch, eaten generally no earlier than 1pm and often quite a bit later, is a popular meal here. Part of the reason is historical: midday dinner was the main meal here until very recently. Nodlaig, who is ninety this year, still has her dinner at midday. For traditional Ireeland tea is the late afternoon or evening meal. Nodlaig’s tea often consists of bread and butter, a biscuit or cake, and maybe an egg. Her dinner is the traditional Irish meal of meat, potato and veg, followed by some kind of sweet. At Furey’s today there will be soup as a starter, a meat special, some kind of curry, a steak sandwich served open-faced, burgers. If you order a plain burger that’s exactly what you get: ground beef between two buns, with bottles of catsup and mayonnaise on the table. No lettuce, no pickle (Irish food barely acknowledges the existence of the pickle). The chips at Furey’s are, I’m told, among the best around. Chips here are thick and cut into different shapes. They are slightly greasy and very soft and don’t remotely resemble french fries in the States. Here they joke about MacDonald’s fries, saying that MacDonald’s has managed to eliminate the potato from its fries, since those skinny crisp sticks don’t in any way acknowledge the true nature of the potato, about which the Irish may know more than anyone else.

Of course in the urban areas lunch would be updated—salads, wraps, soups, light sandwiches—but here in the country salad for lunch can be a hard sell. Having the leisure to linger over lunch is the real pleasure here and a rhythm that is difficult to get used to.

My lunch with Xandria, who is a naturopath with a long string of degrees and some twenty books under her belt, was immediately followed by an invitation to visit the alpaca farm the next day. I had plans for a hike in the Slievebloom Mountains, but the weather was foul when I got up, cold with the threat of gale-force winds, and I opted for a trip to Marks & Spencer to do some shopping. I had stupidly left my coat in the States and needed something to replace it. Marks & Spencer also has a lovely food hall that sells lots of prepared meals and some hard to come by British cheeses. When I got back I headed up the road for Xandria’s. This was one of her open days at the farm. The idea was to watch the alpacas mating, a rather unlikely scenario that involves the female sitting down and the male making loud, high-pitched yodels. Xandria insisted in pointing out to all and sundry the size of the male’s thing, as she said, and although that was more information that I wanted it was pretty tiny.

Xandria’s house is quite modest, a wooden cottage built from a kit by a couple who evidently took Xandria in at about the age of 18 after her difficult childhood. The couple have since both died; the alpacas came about because a friend wanted to start a herd on Xandria’s property and in the way of these things, the friend move on and Xandria found a new part-time passion. After the rest of her visitors left Xandria and I had a glass of wine in her sitting room. The room is filled with the heritage of her adoptive couple, for whom she has an obvious abiding love and gratitude. Outside the alpacas, not visible from the house and back to being silent now that the excitement of the coupling is finished, turn their absurd little faces toward me as I pass by them on the way back up the driveway. 

Morning walks

This morning I set out, as I often do on fine mornings, for a walk in the woods. I start out down the drive toward the house, but, just as I catch sight of the house around a curve in the driveway, I veer off to the right and lift the rope latch from a field gate and head toward the woods. When the Molonys developed—rescued would be a better word—Balldindoolin they established, along with the garden, a nature trail through the woodlands adjacent to the fields. Visitors to the Ballindoolin gardens can walk the trail, about a mile and a half altogether if they follow along its entirety. The trail begins at the edge of the garden and goes briefly through cultivated lawn before crossing a field. If cows are present many people stop at the field gate, a sound idea as there is likely to be a bull among the cattle. Just to the left of the field gate is the ruin of a dovecote, built in 1781 by the original owner of Ballindoolin, Christopher Bor.

 Pigeons would be raised here for the family table, although Esther points out that, given the unusual form of the dovecote, which was built in a shamrock shape, it might have been meant strictly as a folly. Back to the right, the trail passes an ancient mound, possibly from the Iron Age, planted over by Bor in 1760 but otherwise undisturbed. Down the hill there is a lime kiln tucked into the hillside. These kilns were common on larger estates as a way of creating lime for farming; the lime would also be used to make putty for mortar used to construct the original house, now gone.

After these heritage landmarks, the trail dips into the woods. When I begin at the field gate I bypass the hill with the mound and the dovecote and instead go along a path between two fields and then into the woods. There is a short loop trail, flat and damp and quiet in the morning except for bird song and the distinctive haunting call of the woodpigeon. At one point along the trail you can see the ruins of Carrick Castle, one of the small and relatively undistinguished such tower houses that dot the edges of what would have been medieval territories and are now county borders. The large castle in this area would have been Carbury Castle, several hills away from Carrick and much more menacing even in its ruined state.

I don’t see many animals along the trail but they are there in abundance and there are tracks in the thick mud (the area was once underwater but was drained for tree planting). I could be passing badgers, pine martens, minks, stoats, voles and foxes as I walk. The wolf is no longer a danger, as was hunted to extinction in Ireland in the seventeenth century. There are no rabbits at Ballindoolin (although why is a mystery; Ballinderry is overrun with them), but there are the much larger hares, which look exactly like rabbits on steroids and can be a bit scary to an eye used to cute, bouncy cottontails. There are many badger holes up and down the hedgerows. From time to time Esther sees a pine marten moving along with its characteristic slink across the grass in front of her sitting room. A baby vole lives just outside the entrance to the tea room and often sneaks in, unruffled by Esther’s foot stomping which doesn’t work to keep it away. Trina says there are many foxes up near the dovecote; she has even seen them in the daytime. I have only ever seen foxes at night, walking in an unhurried and dignified manner across the pasture or crossing the road and getting caught in the headlights. What the woods doesn’t have, of course, is snakes, but there are also no poison plants, only nettles and briars. The nettles can sting badly if you accidentally brush up against one but the sting is nothing like the rash from poison oak, a nuisance more than a danger.

What I love most of all about my walk is the fact that I am absolutely alone unless the garden is open and someone has ventured out. It’s a private walk, a luxury of circumstance and one more evidence of the generosity of Esther and her family out of their own good fortune.