Druid's Spell

On Tour with Druid Theatre in Lisdoonvarna and Inishmaan, by Kevin Dawson

THE PARISH PRIEST OF LISDOONVARNA HAD HEARD OF THE Druid Theatre Company alright, and knew they were coming to play in his village tonight, but he probably wouldn't be going to see them. No, he had other things to be doing - that's what he'd told all the journalists who'd come annoying him during the week, looking for quotes about the Bachelor Festival. "I told them I'd more to do than help them write paddy-whackery stories for their Dublin papers or their British rags," he said. Damn journaalists were all the same: only looking for funny stories about country folk, never interested in the truth. "And what is it," he asked, as his shiny Toyota covered the last few miles into his over-publicised parish, "that brings you to Lisdoonvarna?"

What indeed. Franko was from Dublin and had been selling kebabs from a mobile stand in the main street all during the previous week. He said the bachelors only appeared in force at the weekends - hundreds of them, he said. Monnday night would be quieter. Franko said the man to talk to was Jim White, who owned the two big hotels and ran the whole show - publicity, American girls, the lot. Franko had sold kebabs this summer at Tralee Races, the Kilkenny Beer Festival, and at the rock festivals at Lisdoonvarna and the Phoenix Park. But he said he'd never in his life seen as much drinking as here, during the Bachelor Festival. Until he'd seen it, he said, he wouldn't have believed that so many people could be so intoxicated.

At four o'clock on Monday afternoon, in a hall in the bowels of the Kincora Hotel, Druid director Garry Hynes was going over entrances and exits with her cast, making them familiar with their new stage in preparation for the eight o'clock show. Like her brother Jerome - Druid's manager and administrator - Garry Hynes is small, enerrgetic, dedicated, and immensely capable. She is the main reason among all the reasons why the focus of excitement in Irish theatre has switched from Dublin to Galway over the past five years. But now she and her troupe were in a small dark hall in a Munster village, preparing for the first one-night stand in their first-ever village tour, and beginning to appreciate the risk they'd taken. 'The Wood of the Whispering' had packed out in Galway, and could have run for another four weeks there in Chapel Lane. Here in the

Kincora Hotel, just two hundred yards and a bend in the road away from the main street, they were already well out of town; and Lisdoonvarnaseemed to have other things than theatre on its mind.

On the stage in street clothing, Martin Jaimsie practised his first stage entrance, balancing imaginary baskets on either arm. He and Mick Lally trundled Ray McBride across the stage in his wheelbarrow to make sure they'd be able to lift him off in it in the second act, stage left. And Mary Ryan and Mary McEvoy squirmed in behind the big iron gate they'd have to stand up on to tease Maeliosa Stafford and Michael O'Sullivan. As Jerome Hynes counted all the chairs in the hall, Garry asked technical manager Steve Plant why one of the lighting stands kept wobbling. He said the floor wasn't level, but that it was safe enough. Jerome counted a hundred and fifty chairs. He'd been promised two hundred and fifty. Garry explained to her actors that this flat hall would require a clarity of speech and diction unnecessary in their raked Galway theatre. "I want you to concentrate on clarity tonight." Jerome and crew member Padraig Breathnach set off in the truck to get more chairs. They admitted that everybody would be happy enough if they filled more than three dozen seats tonight.

When the session was over, the Druid Theatre Company went back into the village to check into their rooms in Jim White's Hydro Hotel. On, the telly in the corner of the Hydro Lounge, White was telling an RTE Countrywide reporter about the Bachelor Festival. That morning the Irish Press had run a story about the American 'girls' who'd been flown in the previous week, and had reported that they were only travel agency employees on a group holiday, not spinsters off some mid-Western shelf on a last desperate search for a mountainy Irish man. White said he'd never said they were. Nobody knew where Jim White was right at the minute. But he was around.

All over the main street were red and orange notices adverrtising the services of an official matchmaker. Available daily. Or on request. Druid posters were harder to see, but they were there. The official matchmaker was Jim White. For fifteen pounds you could fill in one of his multicoloured questionnaires. For another five pounds he could arrange an introduction. Between seven o'clock and a quarter past the Druid players crossed town from the Hydro to the Kincora as the pubs filled up. In an hour's time they'd know whether places like this really were untapped wells of theatrical interest, or just so much boozy barren ground. Perhaps they should have left Lisdoonvarna until after the Festival. Perhaps they'd come at the wrong time.

They needn't have worried. At eight o'clock the hall in the Kincora was packed, and the people of Lisdoonvarna were still coming in. Groups of teenagers, gangs of children, families, old folks, the whole town. Hardly any tourists just looking for something else to do. Garry Hynes watched the hall fill with the kind of people Druid had gone on the road to find: the provincial villagers who miss out on even the occasional city tours, and to whom Irish theatre has - since the days of Anew McMaster and the 'fit-up companies ˜been one big rarely-opened book. Someone from the village came in and asked if they could hold the curtain till a quarter past, so's the people who'd gone to eight o'clock Mass could catch the Gospel and then come across for the show. At twenty past eight in the warm hushed hall, after the thin taped voice of Eamon de Valera as an introoduction and a haunting Irish song, 'The Wood of the Whisspering' began with Mick Lally as Sanbatch Daly standing in the corner of a Galway forest and picking the nits and lice out of his hair.

THE THREE HOURS THAT FOLLOWED, THE PACKED HALL SAW A characteristically vibrant Druid performance ofM.J. Molloy's 1953 drama of a western village on the brink of terminal decline. The few youthful women must go away to marry, or remain as spinsters; and the young men seem doomed to bachelorhood. Only Sanbatch, the imaginative tramp who fears his own imminent induction into the county mental hospital, can see in the sum of these individual dilemmas the mortal threat to any village that finds itself without weddings or children. Molloy's play is a remarkable mixture of violence and word-play, of cartoon villainy and the real shadows of lunacy and loneliness, and encompasses gunnshots and fairy magic while holding constantly before the audience the dreadful picture of a population that emigraation is bleeding to death.

For three hours the audience of three hundred was ennthralled. Maeliosa Stafford's and Michael O'Sullivan's caricatures of eccentric old bachelors went down a storm - Stafford in particular managing a powerful combination of hilarity and menace in a 77 -year old idler who boasts that he has literally driven young women mad. Every major exit was applauded, as if the players were familiar friends just finishing a pub-floor recital; and Sanbatch's barbs about the absurdity of old bachelors threatened to raise the low Kincora roof. During the quiet moments, as when Sanbatch calmed Marie Mullen's unspeaking Sadie, or when Ray McBride as an old man spoke of his approaching death, the faint sounds of clattering dishes or wheezing accordions could be heard from the other quarters of the hotel. But there could be no distraction from the stage: when the lights faded at last on Sanbatch and Sadie, the applause was tumultuous. Everything Druid had set out to do had been vindicated.

Three elderly women sat in shawls of multicoloured wool. Not all the performers confined their talents to the stage. In between his scenes in the second act, Ray McBride had slipped out of the hall into the Kincora lounge and danced a reel in grey beard and old man's clothes. After the show he went out again and danced and told jokes, capping the lot with a spontaneous sketch based on a dancer's need to change his shoes before performing.

Back in the village, another show was under way. Middleeaged couples mingled in the hallways of the Imperial Hotel before going in to drink and sway to amplified accordion ballads. A bear-like American named 'Silky' Sullivan prowled about in a luminescent green kimono sporting the name of his Irish pub in Mephis, Tennessee. Two bachelor brothers in the Hydro came to the point of blows before Jim White, the former Donegal Fine Gael TD who'd come to Lisdoonvarna to start a tradition, switched momentarily from matchmaker to peacemaker. In the lounge nearby the farming men were waiting and watching before approaching the seated women in the hope of an introduction. Jim White spoke of the number of people he'd helped, the happy marriages he'd made. Next year he was going to bring over a thousand American girls, he said. Silky Sullivan had promised him 250.

In the Inisfail bar a satisfied gentleman addressed Maeliosa Stafford over the froth of a pint and an enormous paunch. "There'll be a lot of girl-eens with heavy bellies after this week," he declared. "But sure boys will be boys," he added· "and women will be mothers." And he went in search of romance.

Most of the Druid folk got to bed by three or four. The young barman who'd worked until 6am was serving breakkfasts in the dining-room at 9. Service was slow. Ray McBride and Martin Jaimsie washed down their rashers and sausages with rancid-looking pints of lager. Sean McGinley couldn't manage any breakfast at all. Most were beginning to regret having drunk so much the previous night. Last year the crossing to Aran had taken place in a force seven gale, and every breakfast had made a second coming before it was done.

DRUID HAD BEEN TO INISHMAAN JUST ONCE BEFORE, WHEN IN the autumn' of last year they brought over their classic production of 'The Playboy of the Western World' in celeebration of John Synge's formative summers there and of the people who had told him the story out of which the 'Playboy' grew. So they had acted out their play before an island audience which listened in English and watched and then murmured in Irish from man to man, comparing the play before them with the story of the fugitive murrderer that all of them knew from old. Druid had formed a special relationship with the people on that evening. And now they were going back.

The two-hour crossing from Ros a Mhil was rough but bearable. Only Michael O'Sullivan suffered badly, huddled on the foredeck in fierce concentration, wearing the thin blue jacket that offered him no protection against the regular lashings of spray. Marie Mullen, all in black save for a brown woollen headscarf, stood stock still and gazed over the port side. McGinley and Maguire and Stafford cracked jokes and lit cigarettes at the prow of the boat, where the going was toughest; and Martin Jaimsie, still suffering from the long night in Lisdoon, slept the whole journey out in a bunk below deck.

There was a special welcome for Druid on Inishmaan, and particularly for Mick Lally and Martin Jaimsie, two men well-known to the islanders. Inishmaan is a special place. High on a cliff there is a spot known as 'Synge's Chair', and from it you can see the waves beating mist and mounntainous breakers off the cliffs on Inishmore, across the sound, or look east to the Twelve Bens hunching up out of the brown bogs of Connemara. Many of the fields are fertile ~ some are nothing more than vast sheets of cracked stone, bordered by stout walls just the same. If Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Moon only to find it riven with ditches and careful fences, he would scarcely have seen anything more strange.

If the physical centre of the island is the massive prehistoric fortification known as Dun Conchuir, the chief figure among the population is Tarlach de Blacam, a young Dublin man who came ten years ago to live on the island with his wife, a native of the island, and who has since helped the islanders reverse what was a considerable tide of emigration by building a modern knitwear factory and an airstrip. Electricity and hot water have also been introduced in the last five years. Without them, Inishmaan would slowly have been suffocated in its own primitiveness.

Just down the hillside from Tarlach's house, Garry Hynes assembled her players in the school hall on Wednesday afternoon and began discussing points learned from Lissdoonvarna. Her manner is friendly and understanding, but authoritative. The actors accepted her points and offered her and one another all kinds of criticism and encourageement. It was an intelligent collective session, with Garry at the centre. She wanted a lot of ad libs cut out, and the third act thus tightened up - "It's quite understandable that they should creep in like that but it's not acceptable." She spent some time with Eamonn Maguire, working on the first scene. She asked Mary Ryan to be less agitated during the first act, and not to giggle later on when 77-year old Maeliosa Stafford proposes to her: "The others will giggle behind his back, but not you. That would be rude. Nobody would giggle to his face." On a seat by the wall, Sean McGinley repeated a set of lines to himself, over and over.

THAT NIGHT THE AUDIENCE ASSEMBLED IN A MANNER AS naturally ceremonial as the beginning of any drama. From all quarters of Inishmaan they came walking, making their way to the tiny hall along the gritty tracks running hither and thither between the innumerable miles of dry stone walling that cover the island like the veins of a leaf. Chilldren came skipping across the fields of stone that slope down towards the sea behind the school building, and lined up on the 'single bench between the stage and the rows of chairs. Young men and old men came together, the old men in flat grey caps they would wear throughout the show. And in pride of place, in the front seats at the right, three elderly women sat in shawls of multicoloured wool, their hair tied back in traditional style. Only one spoke any English.

If Lisdoonvarna was strange new ground for a professional theatre company, Inishmaan remains more extraordinary again. Most of the audience that night could speak English, and the majority of those fluently. But as the night passed, and audience warmed to players, it became clear that it was not the language that mattered most. All eyes stared closely at the people on the stage, following their passions and fortunes intently. The linguistic jokes were scarcely heeded, the visual subtleties devoured. Old men lit pipes, pointed at the stage, and smiled: The women seemed captivated by Ray McBride's dying Stephen Lanigan, sighing every time he spoke in his remarkable old man's voice, or stroked his stick with delicate fingers. When he was carried in on Martin Jaimsie's back, or wheeled about the stage in a barrow, the rooflifted.

Only during Sanbatch's fairy-challenging scene was the audience utterly still. It is eighty years now since Synge wrote of the beliefs of Inishrnaan, and of the strange mixxture of Christian and supernatural beliefs then current among the people there. When Mick Lally's San batch pounded the stage with a crozier and called up the demons, the children on the front bench turned back towards their parents with faces that mingled excitement and concern; and when he mentioned the daoine beaga and the siogai; the three old women in the front seats turned to one another, without speaking, and smiled.

It was a remarkable night's theatre. It was - as was Lissdoonvarna in its own way - the kind of evening Druid had gone on the road both to find and create. Afterwards the people flowed back up the hill towards the island's only pub. The previous night it had stayed open all night while songs were sung and performances given. Ray McBride sang and joked and, at Mick Lally's request, offered a sketch based on the RDS Horse Show which involved his playing both radio commentator and horse at the same time. Later he danced to the tin whistles of Sean McGinley and Aine de Blacam - whose sister, Peggy, is married to Mick Lally. Ray McBride is a star.

But tonight the pub was closed. The woman in charge was in a bad mood, and had thrown everybody out at a quarter past eleven. Young men and old men stood outside at the gate in the pitch dark, silently, lighting an occasional pipe. There are no policemen on Inishmaan. There was not the slightest suggestion of disorder. In a house nearby an old bedridden man was sleeping. When he was a baby he lived in the cottage below Dun Conchuir where John Synge lodged. Sometimes, when the woman of the house was out, Synge played the fiddle beside the cradle, or rocked the baby boy asleep. There is now no other human link with Inishmaan's most famous visitor.

In 'The Wood of the Whispering' Sanbatch Daly draws three young couples together and brings the prospect of life and happiness back to a village that had been dying. Early on Thursday afternoon Druid set off for Inisheer for a single performance before bringing the words and themes of their Connaught playwright back to the people of the western mainland. People who wouldn't otherwise have had the chance to hear them.

Throughout the day the tiny planes of Aer Arann ferried young people from Inishmaan to Galway, making seven round flights instead of the usual one. A young island couple were to be married in Galway the following day. There'd be a big do in Salthill afterwards, then the honeyymoon. By the time the Druid tour had reached the Dublin Theatre Festival, the young couple would be back on Inishmaan, beginning their lives anew. •

'The Wood of the Whispering' finishes at the Edmund Burke Hall on Sat. Oct. 1 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival