hearts of stone
Mar. 3rd, 2006 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Saw Juno and the Paycock at the Irish Classical Theatre Company down on Main St.
It was an excellent production-- the theatre, interestingly, is round, with the stage in the middle, so it was performed entirely in the round. We were on a corner and it was quite a good spot, except that one of the title characters (the paycock, John Boyle) seemed to have a habit of facing the other way-- well, the house door was the other way, so he was often shouting that direction, which meant that on top of his slurred accent it was difficult for me to follow what he was saying.
Juno was played very well, as were most of the secondary characters. The two adult children in the main family of four both came across a little flat to me-- the boy Johnny, ostensibly crippled in the Easter Rising fighting as a Diehard for Ireland, was always storming off somewhere and it was difficult to take his dramatic peaks seriously when he never really had any flat moments to compare it to, while the daughter, Mary, was a bit sharp and shrill and moved too fast to give you time to be sympathetic to her. Which is really what the genre comes down to for me-- these tragicomic early-20th-c Irish domestic dramas that are all about man's inhumanity to man etc. mostly wind up featuring a cast of characters that I just can't feel close to. Which makes it hard to be sympathetic enough to take the message to heart.
It was very timely and topical, of course-- when the mother of a murdered freedom fighter comes into the house on her way to the wake of her only son, she gives a beautiful and heartbreaking soliloquy. They say my son was the leader of the ambush, she says, and they ambushed another party, and Mrs. so-and-so's son was killed. He was of this party, my son of that, and who are we? We are two old women with dead sons, one apiece to balance the scale of grief.
And then she cries-- Oh sacred virgin! Where were you when my son was riddled with bullets? Where were you?
And then she implores the sacred heart of Jesus to turn our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, to take this murdering hate and replace it with your love.
The soliloquy is repeated later, although I suppose I shouldn't give away any spoilers. Some other senseless death for Ireland, naturally.
In between is sandwiched Boyle's drunken sidekick, upon hearing of the theft of a bottle of stout, declaiming mournfully upon man's inhumanity to his fellow man. The most poetic language of the play is reserved for these drunken, disjointed bits of fancy.
The problem being, of course, that the drunken sidekick is a pathetic creature with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever-- but the mother is little better, really. I did shed a tear at the wild lament for the dead son, but there was little enough to admire in any of them. They were all wretched characters. And, I mean, so are we, but... dang it, why do I like Irish theatre so much when it's all like this? God, now I hate everyone !
But I could still recite you the end of Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
Sigh. I almost tried to get into Trinity to study Irish Literature at the graduate school level. But then I realized that while I love it, I also hate it. It's beautiful but it's a mess and a pack of lies and a slip of moonbeams and a big suitcase of dirty money. Fie.
I used to be on Sinn Fein's electronic mailing list. We ourselves-- we ourselves alone. I'd probably be on an NSA watchlist if I were on it now. Except we're not so scared of the white terrorists.
Oh, a humorous side note is that beforehand we went to a place called Ulrich's downtown for a fish fry. It's an old German tavern, continuously in operation since 1868. Cool of cools, they actually had a framed declaration on the wall, that someone had saved from the door, proclaming that the establishment had been shut down for illegal dispensation of spirits in defiance of Prohibition.
Inexplicably, amid all the German-American memorabilia, there were old posters of Kennedy on the wall, an old framed record cover of a (rare, coveted) Clancy Brothers album, and the hifi was playing songs like "The Irish Volunteers", the one that goes "come now boys, now take my advice, to America I'd have ye's not be comin' / there is nothing here but war" (you know the one or you don't, but I don't think I ever knew the name), and a bagpipe medley that included not only The Boy From Killarn but also The Wearing O' the Green. I theorized that it was in honor of the upcoming St Patrick's Day, but Z said he thought maybe some Irish people had bought the place. I don't know, but as we were leaving a band with an upright bass and a banjo was setting up.
So it ended up being a very Irish evening, I guess.
It was an excellent production-- the theatre, interestingly, is round, with the stage in the middle, so it was performed entirely in the round. We were on a corner and it was quite a good spot, except that one of the title characters (the paycock, John Boyle) seemed to have a habit of facing the other way-- well, the house door was the other way, so he was often shouting that direction, which meant that on top of his slurred accent it was difficult for me to follow what he was saying.
Juno was played very well, as were most of the secondary characters. The two adult children in the main family of four both came across a little flat to me-- the boy Johnny, ostensibly crippled in the Easter Rising fighting as a Diehard for Ireland, was always storming off somewhere and it was difficult to take his dramatic peaks seriously when he never really had any flat moments to compare it to, while the daughter, Mary, was a bit sharp and shrill and moved too fast to give you time to be sympathetic to her. Which is really what the genre comes down to for me-- these tragicomic early-20th-c Irish domestic dramas that are all about man's inhumanity to man etc. mostly wind up featuring a cast of characters that I just can't feel close to. Which makes it hard to be sympathetic enough to take the message to heart.
It was very timely and topical, of course-- when the mother of a murdered freedom fighter comes into the house on her way to the wake of her only son, she gives a beautiful and heartbreaking soliloquy. They say my son was the leader of the ambush, she says, and they ambushed another party, and Mrs. so-and-so's son was killed. He was of this party, my son of that, and who are we? We are two old women with dead sons, one apiece to balance the scale of grief.
And then she cries-- Oh sacred virgin! Where were you when my son was riddled with bullets? Where were you?
And then she implores the sacred heart of Jesus to turn our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, to take this murdering hate and replace it with your love.
The soliloquy is repeated later, although I suppose I shouldn't give away any spoilers. Some other senseless death for Ireland, naturally.
In between is sandwiched Boyle's drunken sidekick, upon hearing of the theft of a bottle of stout, declaiming mournfully upon man's inhumanity to his fellow man. The most poetic language of the play is reserved for these drunken, disjointed bits of fancy.
The problem being, of course, that the drunken sidekick is a pathetic creature with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever-- but the mother is little better, really. I did shed a tear at the wild lament for the dead son, but there was little enough to admire in any of them. They were all wretched characters. And, I mean, so are we, but... dang it, why do I like Irish theatre so much when it's all like this? God, now I hate everyone !
But I could still recite you the end of Synge's Playboy of the Western World.
Sigh. I almost tried to get into Trinity to study Irish Literature at the graduate school level. But then I realized that while I love it, I also hate it. It's beautiful but it's a mess and a pack of lies and a slip of moonbeams and a big suitcase of dirty money. Fie.
I used to be on Sinn Fein's electronic mailing list. We ourselves-- we ourselves alone. I'd probably be on an NSA watchlist if I were on it now. Except we're not so scared of the white terrorists.
Oh, a humorous side note is that beforehand we went to a place called Ulrich's downtown for a fish fry. It's an old German tavern, continuously in operation since 1868. Cool of cools, they actually had a framed declaration on the wall, that someone had saved from the door, proclaming that the establishment had been shut down for illegal dispensation of spirits in defiance of Prohibition.
Inexplicably, amid all the German-American memorabilia, there were old posters of Kennedy on the wall, an old framed record cover of a (rare, coveted) Clancy Brothers album, and the hifi was playing songs like "The Irish Volunteers", the one that goes "come now boys, now take my advice, to America I'd have ye's not be comin' / there is nothing here but war" (you know the one or you don't, but I don't think I ever knew the name), and a bagpipe medley that included not only The Boy From Killarn but also The Wearing O' the Green. I theorized that it was in honor of the upcoming St Patrick's Day, but Z said he thought maybe some Irish people had bought the place. I don't know, but as we were leaving a band with an upright bass and a banjo was setting up.
So it ended up being a very Irish evening, I guess.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-04 05:09 am (UTC)You're stunned with the realization--my god, he was only six! But then later: wait...why on earth would a child be buried in an adult-sized coffin?
I know. I clearly don't have a poetic soul. alas.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-04 01:29 pm (UTC)And have you read his Beowulf? It's stunning.
Actually nowadays I think they do bury children in adult-sized coffins. I think they're just a standard size. I don't know for sure, though. I just never thought to doubt him.