by Colm Toibin
This reticence, however, obscures something very significant. One of Garry Hynes’s great achievements has been, as it were, to reunite the two great theatrical scions of the Dublin Protestant professional class: Synge and Beckett. This process took hold in that production of The Wood of the Whispering, which imagined the play almost as if it were a collaboration between Synge and Beckett, the former’s lush, highly charged language spoken by the latter’s homeless, tragi-comic denizens of a fractured and indifferent universe. Beckett, in a sense, was drawn into Druid’s continuing quarrel with the romantic official notion of the ‘beautiful and tradition-rich places of the West’, an argument that has shaped the company’s history from its earliest days right up to and including its staging of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy. The vision of an unromantic Playboy, with its demythologized West was carried through into The Wood of the Whispering, where the West was imagined as a broken, Beckettian world. It is not accidental that the epigraph in the programme for The Wood was taken from Beckett’s sardonic puncturing of urban nostalgia for a rustic utopia in his novel Murphy:
Oh hand in hand, let us return to the land of our birth, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – er – fens, the – er – glens, by tonight’s mail-train.
This exposure of an underlying empathy between Synge and Beckett is rooted, paradoxically, in the perception of a different kind of cultural continuity to that evoked by Charles Haughey: a continuity of outsiders. It picks up on one of the angularities of Irish twentieth-century theatre history – the deep feeling that, in a culture that was inventing a settled homeland, the real place for the artist to be was with the homeless, the unsettled, the nomadic.
The affinity between Synge and Beckett that has been illuminated by Druid is a matter both of form and content. Beckett’s mode is all about the gap between story and deed, between words and action – the very disjunction that Garry Hynes has explored in her Synge productions. Think of Winnie in Happy Days, sending out a stream of language to reassure herself that she is leading a normal existence while we can see that she is buried up to her neck in the ground. Or of the last lines of Waiting for Godot, with their simple distillation of the conflict between what the actors say and what they do:
Estragon: Well? Shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
But there is an affinity of content, too, that is rooted in the early history of the Irish theatre movement. When Shawn Keogh remarks on Pegeen ‘picking a dirty tramp up from the highways of the world’, the image now reminds us of Estragon and Vladimir, and of Beckett’s vision of humanity itself as a dirty tramp on the highways of a careless world. And there is here a chain of tradition. Some of the very first stirrings of the Irish national theatre movement from which Synge emerged used very similar images and settings. P.T. McGinley’s one-act play Eilís agus an Bhean Dhéirce, presented in Dublin by The Daughters of Erin in 1901, and Douglas Hyde’s An Tincéar agus an tSidheóg, presented the following year, were crucial forerunners of the Abbey. Both dealt with what were then called ‘tinkers’, and both ended with a ‘tinker’ departing the stage with a fierce curse on settled humanity. The image entered the Abbey tradition through the collaboration of Hyde with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in the 1902 play Where There is Nothing. This play again attempted to imagine the Traveller way of life as a rebellion against bourgeois smugness, and, indirectly, against the niceties of a respectable Protestant upbringing. The play tells the story of Paul Rutledge, a landlord, who decides to become a Traveller. John Synge, of course, became Paul Rutledge, tramping the hills and valleys of Wicklow. And he turned the rather gauche wish-fulfilment of these early plays into vibrant art in The Shadow of the Glen, The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints. Those last two plays, in turn, helped to shape Beckett’s imagination, peopled as it is by wanderers, nomads and homeless refugees from a normality that has ceased to exist.
If all of this seems no more than an abstract historical connection, it has been given flesh in Garry Hynes’s fusion of Beckett and Synge. It is, indeed, embodied in a series of performances by Marie Mullen that runs from the Widow Quin, a woman alone, in The Playboy in 1982, to the starkly Beckettian interpretation of Sadie Tubridy in The Wood of the Whispering and back to a Synge filtered through Beckett with her Mary Byrne in The Tinker’s Wedding and Mary Doul in The Well of the Saints in 2004 and 2005. Bold, mischievous, at ease with the flow of words and the stillness of silence, these performances form a living bridge between the contrary elements of Synge’s imagination, the symbolic minimalism that heavily influenced Beckett and the salty mediaeval lustiness that makes Synge’s texts so vividly alive. Mullen’s apparent agelessness (there is almost thirty years between her second coming as Mary Byrne and her first performance of the role in 1976) has given her access to a sense of what is genuinely timeless in Synge – not a vapid flight from history, but an ability to create images and archetypes that transcend it. She has incarnated a Synge at once imperturbably ancient and forever full of youthful vibrancy and cheek. And in doing so she summed up the point of Druid’s Synge: that theatre can do more than one thing at any one time.
Illustration 3: Islanders on Inishere. From J.M. Synge, My Wallet of Photographs
3 Shift ~ Hugo Hamilton
The first thing we noticed going out to Aran was the light. It was coming from the opposite direction and felt strange. To a person brought up in Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, the world seems to be turned around a full hundred and eighty degrees when you take the boat from Galway out to the Islands. The white glimmer of sunlight that you expect to see when coming ashore is right there ahead of you on the way out to sea. The feeling of leaving becomes confused with the feeling of going home. It’s like an inverse homecoming, something that must be similar to getting on the plane in autumn and landing somewhere on the far side of the world in spring. On the Naomh Eanna ferry out to Irishmore, it felt as though we were going backwards in time, travelling into the mirror. We were staring into the light over the Atlantic. We could barely see the shape of the three Islands in the distance. We could smell the sea and the diesel fumes and feel the throb of the engines in everything we touched. We could hear the murmur of Irish being spoken around us on the boat and became aware, without saying it openly, that we were no longer facing east, towards London, towards the buzz of Europe, but west, into an older, untouched world.
In my cottage I have never heard a word of English from the women except when they were speaking to the pigs or to the dogs …
A small group of us had come from Dublin after school in the summer to spend some time on the island, to see this remote place with our own eyes before it disappeared. People were talking about Aran as if it was the last part of Ireland that was left intact. The country was moving on. Yoghurt had just been discovered. Men wore beards and moustaches. Everything was going electric. New music, new cars, new fashions from London and Paris. A photographer in one of the daily newspapers had captured the change that was taking place in the country that summer in a front page shot of a slender young woman dressed in a white mini-skirt, high white boots and a broad-rimmed white hat, lifting her suitcase onto the train at Euston Station with a nun in a brown habit waiting in line behind her.
We travelled west to the Aran Islands with one eye on the future and the other on the past. As we arrived on the pier in Kilronan, the afternoon sun was shining away towards the mainland. We walked up towards the American Bar which seemed to have taken on the function of the island waiting room, where people looked out to see if the boat was coming in, where men spoke about the weather and decided whether the boat would go back out again or whether you might be trapped on the island for another night. The people leaving the island were heading down towards the pier and the people arriving were filling their places at the American Bar. Some of the tourists were already heading out along the road to see the promontory fort at Dun Aen
gus, on foot, in cars, on pony and traps, on rented bicycles. We were staying on the other side of the island at Killeanny, so we made our way past the dance hall, past the low cliffs with the ivy, out along the road towards the small fishing harbour and the white strand which they call ‘tra na ladies’ or the ladies beach.
The day was unbearably sultry, and the sand and sea near us were crowded with half-naked women …
As we began to explore the island, we took notice of the strange, empty landscape around us. We saw the small Aran fields and the high stone walls, made with sharp grey limestone rocks. We noticed how the tarred road was always fringed with a line of white sand and grass. We smelled the turf smoke and heard the sound of enamel buckets as we passed by the houses. Here and there a dog accompanied us part of the way and we understood how little traffic there was on this road and what a novelty we must have been, the strangers from Dublin. We saw the airstrip in the distance with a single red fire engine parked in the middle and around twenty-five island donkeys roaming freely on the grass. We were told that every one of them had an owner, but they had the freedom of the island to come and go as they pleased, laughing at everyone as they went. We went out to the Glasen rocks and the cliffs facing into the Atlantic, and saw nobody out there. We saw balls of foam floating in from the sea and heard the booming sound of the waves smashing across the terraced rocks and into hollow caves underneath us.
There has been a storm for the last twenty-four hours, and I have been wandering the cliffs till my hair is stiff with salt. Immense masses of spray were flying up from the base of the cliff, and were caught at times by the wind and whirled away to fall at some distance from the shore. When one of these happened to fall on me, I had to crouch down for an instant, wrapped and blinded in a white hail of foam.
We felt the jagged shapes through our light running shoes. We were used to pavements and maybe to the more rounded granite shapes on the east coast, so it took a while to get used to walking across limestone blades that were sometimes sticking up vertically. In other places, the cliffs were like a flat stage with large cracks running through them and the occasional white granite rock left over from the ice age, called the Aran visitors.
… here I realized that toes have a natural use, for I found myself jumping towards any tiny crevice in the rock before me, and clinging with an eager grip in which all the muscles of my feet ached from the exertion.
On the way back from the cliffs, we saw the men working in the fields. Sometimes we saw women or children walking along the road and we noticed that they took the side of the road, close to the wall, while we generally walked in the middle. Mostly we saw nobody at all and it was only after some days that we understood how far away and how empty this landscape really was, how hard it must be to live here, away from the mainland, away from the reassurance of shops and crowded streets. At night, it was so dark that you could see the stars very clearly, not only the main shapes like the plough, but a whole lacy spray of white in between. It was so dark sometimes that we had to hold our arms out in front of us and grope at the stone walls to make sure we were still on the road.
… no light anywhere except the phosphorescence of the sea, and an occasional rift in the clouds that showed the stars behind them.
In Tigh Fitz bar in Killeanny, we heard the men speaking in Irish and telling great stories that sometimes ran on indefinitely until they ended with a sudden punctuation; that’s my story. We heard the story of how a plane once landed on the island during the First World War and how the cows and horses were all frightened because they were not used to the sound of engines and motorbikes. There was one horse driven mad for weeks, running crazy all over the island, day and night, with all the islanders trying to trap him and bring him back to his senses. When a young man with a rope tied around his waist finally sneaked up to harness the horse in a moment of exhaustion one day, he went fully out of his mind and ran out into the waves on the beach at ‘tra na ladies’, taking the young man with him. We heard other stories of drowning and stories of the supernatural. We heard the story of the Hollywood director who once came to Aran and found a brother and sister who were so handsome that he asked them to go back with him and spend the rest of their lives in the movies in America. When they were going away on the boat, waving at the people they were leaving behind on the pier at Kilronan, the brother suddenly changed his mind and jumped off to swim ashore again, while the sister stayed on board and went to America where she became a famous actress and they never laid eyes on each other again.
They say on the island that he can tell as many lies as four men.
Of course, we had studied The Playboy of the Western World at school, so we knew that a man would invent any story around himself in order to attract the admiration of a woman. Not only that, it meant a man would fabricate his own biography in order to get shelter and belonging, that he would turn himself into anything and fit himself into any image required of him in order to be accepted. We knew that the inspiration for the play came from a story of a man who said he had killed his own father with a blow of a spade and was hidden by the islanders in a hole on the island while the police were searching for him. We knew that the word ‘shift’ had caused a riot when the play was performed first in the Abbey Theatre. It was the word used long ago for a woman’s undergarments, but had already fallen out of use by then, so the offence taken from it by the audience was belated and antiquarian. We knew that the prudish, nationalist inspiration which sparked this riot had angered Yeats and provoked his famous line ‘… you have disgraced yourselves,’ a phrase which we often used against each other in class with condescending genius. We were also aware in the meantime, that the word ‘shift’ had evolved or been recast once more with an entirely different meaning. In a devout, Catholic Ireland of closet heterosexuals, shift now took on the meaning of getting off with, scoring, or generally being successful with a woman. We never used the word ourselves because it was a country term, which came from the dancehall culture, where shifting a woman meant getting her from the inside to the outside. Either that or it came from the new car culture of changing gears to a higher speed. But we knew it meant much more and implied end results that went far beyond that, something that involved making up any amount of lies and stories to attract the admiration of a woman. We also knew that the verb ‘breagadh’ in the Irish language had multiple meaning, telling lies as well as courting, shifting, or flirting.
The women and girls, when they had no men with them, usually tried to make fun with me …
Here is my little sister, stranger, who will give you her arm.
And so it went on. Quiet as these women are on ordinary occasions, when two or three of them are gathered together in their holiday petticoats and shawls, they are as wild and capricious as the women who live in towns.
We got talking to some of the Aran girls at the dancehall. The girls from Killeanny kept accusing us of trying to grow beards to pretend that we were men. They said they had seen more hair on the back of a door. They asked if they could touch our faces and then described it with an Irish word ‘meigeal’, at which they all started grinning and looking into our eyes. The more they said the word, the more they laughed outright. ‘Meigeal’ is the Irish word for a goat’s beard, but it also has multiple meaning which we could not guess at the time.
The women of this island are before conventionality, and share some of the liberal features that are thought peculiar to the women of Paris and New York.
The direct sexual instincts are not weak on the island, but they are so subordinated to the instincts of the family that they rarely lead to irregularity.
We met the girls from Killeanny frequently along the road or outside their houses, but rarely in the pub. Even when we asked them to come for a drink, it was only early on in the evening that they would come with us, because late at night, the bar was mostly taken over by men and tourists. Instead, they invited us into their houses for tea and scones that they had made, sitting us down at the t
able to watch us eating, but never eating themselves in our company.
The complete absence of shyness or self-consciousness in most of these people gives them a peculiar charm, and when this young and beautiful woman leaned across my knees to look nearer at some photographs that pleased her, I felt more than ever the strange simplicity of the island life.
In Tigh Fitz, the old men would sometimes ask us if we had any girlfriends. When time moved on, they would start singing. ‘The Rocks a Bawn’ was like a hit single on the island and somebody had to sing it every night or nobody could go home. And the singer often needed to hold the hand of another living person while they sang, usually that of a stranger, winding it around like a barrel organ to keep the song coming.
… do you never be thinking on the young girls? The time I was a young man, the divil a one of them could I look on without wishing to marry her.
One night in Tigh Fitz, one of our lads from Dublin got talking to a young Dutch woman who was staying on the island for the summer. She had been in an accident and was recovering with a plaster around her leg, sitting on the bench with the leg stretched out and the painted toes sticking out the other end, while an old man wound her hand around and around in circles. She was so beautiful that everyone was blind to her injuries. They all wanted to talk to her and tell her any amount of lies. They told jokes and stories, and maybe it was inevitable that it was one of our lads from Dublin, the most handsome among us, the one with the deepest beard and the best stories of all, who finally put his arm around her and helped with her crutches to make sure she didn’t fall over when she was leaving.