Welcome to the “News & Views” section of the website. None of the articles below have been edited since they were first published, so they represent shifting viewpoints over a decade. I have linked only to opinion pieces and personal essays (omitting old announcements). Some articles are short, others quite long. Enjoy!
Welcome to the “News & Views” section of the website. This is a selective Table of Contents – in reverse order – of my very occasional blogs/essays going back to 2011 when I first set up this website. None of the articles have been edited since they were first published, so they represent shifting viewpoints over a decade and a half. I have linked mainly to opinion pieces and personal essays (omitting certain out-of-date PR announcements). Some articles are short, others quite long. Enjoy!
NOTE: For the more recent essays, click the box containing the title to read. For the older ones just click the link.
THESE ESSAYS OPEN IN ‘THE SAME TAB’, SO TO MOVE FROM ONE ARTICLE TO ANOTHER AFTER READING, YOU NEED TO USE THE BACK ARROW (TOP LEFT OF SCREEN) TO RETURN TO THIS TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: Re-published from one of the last ever editions of the great local newspaper The Northern Standard – this is the journalist’s largely verbatim summary of my keynote paper at the 2025 Patrick Kavanagh Weekend. The paper was in memory of the late Seán Rocks, broadcaster, actor and old friend.
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: The second (and longer) of two articles in one week on the messed up system of arts funding in Ireland. This one sets out some solutions. February 28, 2025
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: The first and shorter of two essays in one week triggered by a much-hyped overspend (or misspend) of public arts money on a failed IT system – a scandal that generated a lot of hot air in the media – the same media that almost never reports on the true financial scandal in the arts: the one whereby underpaid or unpaid artists subsidise the nation’s culture while the State basks in the refracted glory of it all. 24/02/2025
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: Having concluded a piece of theatre based on Frank O’Connor’s biography of his erstwhile enemy Michael Collins, and while still immersed in a work based on writings by another of Collins’ enemies, Dorothy MacArdle, I wrote this short reflection on the occasion of the centenary of The Big Fellow’s’ assasination.
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: Not typical of these pages, this is a political opinion piece without any artistic context really, about the state of things in Northern Ireland as I perceived them five years after the disaster of Brexit. Published on
CLICK THE LINK ABOVE TO READ: Celebrating an innovative project undertaken with a community drama group in Cavan during Covid – and ruminating of what was learned. March 30, 2021
By far the most widely read of my past blogs: this was re-published by RTE Digital and generated a lot of chat. Written just as the 2009-16 recession was coming to an end, it traces the highs and lows of a 30 year career (up to that point). Oct 2, 2016 at 2:39 PM
One of my own enduring favourites. Inspired by a remarkable weekend of debate and exemplars of Irish and international theatre in the name of justice, peace and resistance. Jan 25, 2015 at 10:32 PM
Announcing my launch of myself on an unsuspecting public when I decided to my own surprise that going back on stage after many years behind the scenes, might be just the trick to rescue a career set back by a recession not of my own making. May 25, 2012 at 12:56 PM
I am six months behind, publishing this piece! In November 2025 I had the remarkable honour of delivering the annual Patrick Kavanagh Lecture at the Kavanagh Weekend in Inniskeen. Due to a computer crash and lack of general ability to get my act together in the real world, I no longer have my original paper to hand. I am grateful to journalist Veronica Corr who sent me a copy of her abridged but largely verbatim summary of my presentation, which was published in full in one of the final issues of The Northern Standard.
I dedicated the talk to the many artists present at the event and recalled in particular the work of the late broadcaster and actor Seán Rocks – like myself a Monaghan native. The abridged version below includes anecdotes of my time working with Seán in the early 1990s, a matter further parsed in a wonderful post-lecture interview on the stage with journalist Frank McNally – yet another creative giant of Monaghan. (The interview transcript is not available.) I hope you enjoy Veronica’s precis which manages succinctly to capture my account of my life and times in the shadow of the original Monaghan giant and genius Patrick Kavanagh.
Giants! Sean Rocks with David Gorry in Pat McCabe’s “Frank Pig Says Hello” (1993) – directed by Joe O’Byrne
Theatre Practitioner Declan Gorman Delivers Keynote at Kavanagh Weekend Launch
By Veronica Corr
The Kavanagh Weekend is one annual event which always marks the passage of time for this reporter, and Friday night last was spent soaking up some culture. Declan Gorman was the keynote speaker at the launch event. Darren McCreesh, Manager of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre and Director of the weekend of events, welcomed Declan who he said was not only one of Ireland’s great theatre practitioners and arts activists, but was also from Monaghan Town. Darren recalled that Declan adapted The Green Fool for the 2004 centenary of Kavanagh’s birth.
Declan’s autobiographical paper was heartfelt and humorous. He dedicated it to all artists in attendance at the Kavanagh Weekend and went on to pay tribute to the late great Sean Rocks, for whom the arts community is in mourning.
He stated that he was delighted to be back in Monaghan county, especially the part of it that straddles Louth, as his mother was from Hackballscross. He recalled a time not long ago, struggling through the recession, wondering if art was powerful enough to sustain him, and noted that when Darren McCreesh invited him home to County Monaghan a decade ago to do a residency, it was a turning point.
SEÁN ROCKS REMEMBERED
“It’s been very much on my mind preparing for this evening, that we lost a great Monaghan man very recently. A giant of the arts who died too young and too suddenly. Sean Rocks was my colleague and friend for many years. I knew his family growing up in Monaghan Town. I toured with him in 1993 when he created perhaps the most memorable theatrical performance that I had ever witnessed, that of Francie Brady, the butcher boy in later life looking back, in Pat McCabe’s resonant drama, Frank Pig Says Hello … I had the grand title of Producer. My main job was to write the paltry wage checks every week for the actors, and also to ensure that the actors and Pat got out of bed in one town early enough to travel by the hired car to the next!”
Noting that the distances weren’t huge to begin with, the play went on to tour internationally, but Declan bowed out in the UK: “That original production of Frank Pig Says Hello went on from Dundalk to London, and from London to Australia and America. But I was like the lad that left The Beatles just before they got famous! I left at London. Amicably, it has to be said, before the show went further abroad.”
“I miss Sean dearly, even though I had less direct dealings with him in recent years. I miss him in my car as I drive along that same zig-zag route in Cavan and Monaghan about my business as a rural community artist. I miss Sean on the radio, bringing culture to the people. His lovely Monaghan cadence echoing down the airwaves in every home, car, and van in Ireland, reminding us that art is mainly good fun, joyful and accessible. There for all of us if we care to look and listen, even when it is earnest, puzzling or provocative. He did that very well. May he go gently on.”
CURATING THE COMMUNITY ARTS
“That was 1993: I was already two or three years into a job as a curator and programmer at a community arts centre in the rundown Docklands of Dublin. I had previously worked as a producer and actor in the independent theatre, as we called it, The Fringe. I had set up a company, Co-Motion, in 1985, along with Joe O’Byrne, and we made a few memorable waves in and around Temple Bar before it was Temple Bar. Our work was overtly political, raging against apartheid, urban poverty, and other social ills of the day. I cared very deeply about these things, about politics, about the marginalised in society, but I sensed increasingly on The Fringe that we were talking among ourselves, preaching to a tiny, converted handful of left-wing graduates and activists in the bohemian back streets.
“But all of that changed when I moved to City Arts Centre. I spent a lot of time out and about in the inner city and the bleak suburbs, meeting with community activists who were using drama, dance, and visual art, as we used to say, to give voice to the marginalised. in a city that was just acknowledging the true ravages of a decade of mass unemployment, emigration, and drug damage. I found this alternative emphasis intriguing,” Declan observed, before continuing:
“What might be the impact of artists engaging directly with submerged and broken communities and enabling spaces wherein the people’s own voices might be heard? … I sat in a darkened pool hall in Clondalkin and watched young women from a lone parents’ support group rehearse sketches and songs of struggle that they had written themselves with guidance from a drama worker called Joni Crone and I quietly wept in the dark, suffused with heartbreak and joy.
“I befriended a young Castleblayney woman, Kathy McArdle, daughter of Tommy of this barony and she invited me out to Rialto in Dublin 8, where she was working with older teenagers from Fatima Mansions and Dolphin’s Barn, alongside writers John Bissett and Grainne Lord, to create a true-to-life fictional drama about a young couple dying of AIDS. I learned that the 11-acre flats area known as Fatima Mansions had the highest concentration then of heroin-related AIDS mortality on the entire continent of Europe. In due course, we hosted that drama by the Rialto Youth Project in the little 60-seater space at the City Arts Centre … and as the play unfolded, I wept in the dark again,” Declan revealed.
He debated whether the critics might consider it art, but he didn’t care. It was great because it was true. He wondered if slicker productions could claim to be as authentic, but conceded “upon mature reflection, I acknowledged that nobody has the monopoly on creativity, just the same way nobody has a monopoly on truth.”
In paying tribute to his fellow artists, he said: “Most artists strive for truth. That’s why so many of them over history have existed on the margins and suffered for their difference. I couldn’t help but love the theatre, even in its more bourgeois settings. Try as I would to be a hard-left radical, I knew within me that just as I had a foot in more than one county, I had a foot in more than one culture club.
“I was and still remain, a passionate advocate for community and participatory art. I believed in its potential for radical social upheaval. But equally, a high-brow show … could also move me to tears in the dark. Tears of sorrow, Tears of joy, and take me to places beyond the earthly streets of inner Dublin. Art, and theatre in particular, are transformative.”
IN THE SHADOW OF PATRICK KAVANAGH
Aged 38, after a decade of observing from the sidelines, Declan decided to give up curation and adopt again the mantle of artist. Artists, it seems, like the rest of us, appear to suffer from imposter syndrome. They think of other people as artists, rather than themselves. Declan described himself as a “socially conscious interloper with a broad Monaghan accent.” He discovered that he had something in common with Kavanagh.
“The artists conundrum, how do you write your truth in a close-knit community, and yet retain and develop your audience? And astonishingly, it took me until 2004, by which time I was 45 to realise that one man more than any other seemed historically to have embodied and expressed intuitively a great many of the contradictions that I had been trying for 20 years to resolve and navigate.”
Declan went on to share the hilarious tale about the time he talked himself into a job: “I attended a launch event in the year 2003 in this very building and a lady known to you all, Rosaleen Kearney, came up and she said to me, ‘Your theatre company might think of doing something for the Kavanagh Centenary.’
“The then Minister for the Arts, John O’Donoghue, was present, and there were hints that some Government money might be floating about. So, without as much as blinking, I told an outright lie. I looked the Minister in the eye, and I said, ‘As it happens, I’m working on a stage adaptation of The Green Fool, so I am!’
“There was no turning back. I went home that night and took my 30-year-old copy off the shelf, and I re-read it in one sitting. And two things occurred to me. One was that it was very enjoyable, laced with precisely the rustic humour I had enjoyed so much from working on the Macra plays. A fast witticism on every page, a pure joy like a comic book.
“The other was that no matter what way I looked at it, there wasn’t a play in it! The Green Fool is a series of rambling anecdotes. It has no tension no conflict, no dramatic arc. There might, at best, be a night of comic sketches and capers for the local parish hall in it.
“That’s how I felt, and I couldn’t sleep with the horror of it! In front of a Government Minister, in front of Rosaleen, the kindly and scholarly manager of the Kavanagh Centre, in front of the assembled poets of Ireland, I had committed to something I could not do and that could not be done! “The Green Fool had never been done and now I understood why!” he said, as the audience laughed with him.
Declan mulled it over for a while and recalled that he read about Kavanagh rejecting The Green Fool in later life. “Why would a twinkle-eyed rogue reject his own early effort and it to be so entertaining and accessible? I ran out the next day and bought Antoinette Quinn’s magnificent biography, and I read it in a week.
“It was a question of truth. The artist rejecting himself or the untruthful part of himself as he rather harshly judged the situation. There was something in that: judgement. The courtroom drama, the most enduring of theatrical genres, the case of Kavanagh versus Kavanagh, and bingo, I had it!
“I placed Kavanagh at 50, played brilliantly by Padraic McIntyre, opposite young Patrick, played by rising Monaghan star Nick Lee, into a philosophical combat interspersed with hilarious physical scenes from the book … peppered with Kavanagh’s most quotable quotes and a few of his finest lines of verse, concluding with a nightmare trial scene derived from Patrick’s own legal downfall at the hands of Oliver St. John Gogarty.”
Padraig McIntrye and Nick Lee in The Green Fool (2004) Adapted and directed by Declan Gorman. Designed by Inniskeen native Paul O’Mahony
Declan said that The Green Fool was the most successful thing he ever composed, having its world premiere in the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, as it was before the refurbishment. It went on to tour all over the country and headlined the Belfast Festival at Queens.
Reflecting on the experience, Declan confessed: “It also brought me very close to Kavanagh. I spent a lot of time in his company that year, and it was a strange kind of reconnection for me, like a grudging fondness you might develop in midlife for an eccentric uncle you had half loved but half rejected in adolescence.”
He also quoted from a letter written to The Irish Times by Alice Leahy on the occasion of Kavanagh’s Centenary thanking him for inspiring her to do charitable work with homeless people, “Kavanagh was a true outsider”, she wrote, citing his lack of formal education, his difficult personality, his loneliness in times of extreme poverty in his flat on Waterloo Road, and the solace he found in alcohol and the pain it brought. “The enduring power of Kavanagh”, Leahy concluded, “is his ability to make us feel uncomfortable about a culture which places an almost disturbing emphasis on conformism, with scant, if any, regard for those who do not or cannot fit in.”
(Abridged)
Post script: Man and Monaghan: I have written elsewhere about the importance to me of my Monaghan roots and my connections with artists and writers from my home county: Mary O’Donnell; Evelyn Conlon; Orlagh Meegan-Gallagher as well as Kate Beagan; Louise Loughman and Liz Christy who are particularly associated with the Kavanagh Centre. These along with Kavanagh (the Godfather) and the artists mentioned in the summary paper above, have been my constant source of inspiration as was learning the basics of language (and comedy!) as a child in the rural schools and homes of North Monaghan where I grew up and South Monaghan/Louth where I spent my Summers among my mother’s people.
This is the second of two essays, arising from recent revelations of expenditure by the Arts Council on a non-functioning IT system. The first and shorter one, published on Feb 24th, looks only at the immediate impact of the breaking news. This one delves into the real crisis facing the arts: the absence of a functioning system that remunerates artists in a consistent and cohesive manner for their work.
REFLECTIONS ON AN OUTRAGE
A meeting was held by the National Campaign for the Arts on January 20th to canvas artists’ perspectives and views on the unfolding Arts Council crisis. There was palpable anger among delegates, at the misspending of €5.3m on a failed IT system. The anger was matched by a deep anxiety which arises not only from the fact that artists in the main are underpaid: but equally they are left in a constant state of uncertainty concerning livelihood. And this precarity causes a lingering sense of vulnerability to the spectral threat of ignorant public commentary: “What if this mishap leads to calls to reduce funding to the arts?” Artists, the articulate, visionary, hard-working makers and shapers of our nation’s image, music and stories: celebrated at home; heralded abroad, feel disempowered in the State that trumpets their value!
Given the reports coming these weeks from the USA about the new regime’s attacks on arts organisations, and occasional noises that emanate from right wing complainers at home, this new pang of an old fear is understandable. I think, however, we can have greater faith in the Irish public and even politicians to separate the victim from the accused in this immediate situation. Even though they may not have a full comprehension of the complex and ill-suited mechanisms of funding, Irish people generally understand the value of the arts and are sufficiently intelligent to know that a thriving cultural sector must be part-financed by the modern State. The whole debacle, however, reminds us that the very means of providing for artists’ livelihoods is outmoded and unfit for purpose.
The place of the arts in Ireland is one of the nation’s comic paradoxes. The arts are generally embraced as a good news story. An Irish movie wins an Oscar: we celebrate. An Irish band wows Glastonbury, we celebrate. Artists appear on the Tommy Tiernan show and everyone applauds. The arts equally are easy fodder for ridicule the odd time a thing goes wrong. A work of public sculpture displeases a rustic County Councillor: the news goes viral. The Abbey Theatre has one of its periodic financial or governance crises, and the press goes into overdrive. And so on.
In the space of three days in February, the Irish Times gave over 12 separate articles plus an editorial to the Arts Council’s IT failings: in the same month, revelations of enormous expenditure by the Department of Social Protection on IT merited just one. Responses to arts and culture matters are inevitably disproportionate: too much excitement about the wrong things; far too little concern about the consistent failings when it comes to a modern, grown-up system of State investment.
2. AID AT ARMS LENGTH
All of this distracts even artists themselves from reflection on why the current provision systems are so unfit for purpose. Participants in the January 20th webinar were incensed at perceived Arts Council failings, and yet protective of our beloved institution. In particular, the age-old worry arose about potential threats to the ‘arms length’ principle. Artists treasure, as a matter of faith, the system that ensures that grant-aiding decisions are undertaken by an agency which is independent of political control. It is an excellent principle and one that should be guarded. The notion of local councillors or an incoming Minister for the Arts determining what art can and cannot be made or shown is anathema to the fundamental European value of freedom of expression: witness the horror show of America these very weeks as an uncultured president instals himself as Chair and chief censor of a dignified arts centre.
Solidarity with the Arts Council and it ‘arm’s length’ ring-fencing is a reassuring quality among mature artists, many of whom have been dealt crushing rejection blows by the same institution. But the centrality of the Arts Council in our thinking and our financial microsystem becomes problematic when we face the probability that a huge number of artists applying to the same Council depend on what is correctly termed grant “aid’, not only to fund their precious projects, but for their very livelihood. It is quite astounding, quarter way through the 21st century that an antiquated system of prize-giving continues to be the sole or primary source of livelihood for so many artists: more now than ever before. Imagine if nurses had to enter competitions two or three times a year; fill out absurd forms and upload letters of support, just to have wages for perhaps six to twelve weeks!
It is worth noting there are additional, complementary mechanisms whereby artists’ livelihoods are part-supported by the State. Members of National Symphony Orchestra are paid. The injection of funds from Creative Ireland into community initiatives, and improved allocations from various Local Authority arts schemes in recent years, have augmented Arts Council supports towards finite artistic work outputs, leading to improvements in livelihood opportunities for public artists, particularly in rural areas. The Creative Schools programme (est 2018) is a source of direct contract employment to approx. 130 empanelled artists nationally whose practices and qualifications include arts-in-education and inclusive participatory values.
Adding Value – Creative Ireland (Courtesy Laois County Council)
These are commendable additional initiatives, easing the livelihood stresses of differing cohorts of working artists for periods. None operate at “arm’s length” and yet they are functioning. Artists receiving fair pay or contracts (as distinct from grants and prizes) from State and local authority agencies, are generally quite comfortable responding to commissions and criteria, such as the modern school curriculum or the intelligently canvassed ideas of a community where a public artwork is to be sited. Most have independent practices outside of their commissions where other dimensions of their creative vision can find free expression. But these augmenting schemes, while showing that there are other ways to finance the arts, are piecemeal, inadequate and tend to reach only certain niches within the overall mosaic that is art making in Ireland.
3. BASIC INCOME
In 2022, a new and radical idea was piloted, which for the first time in history seeks to separate the matter of livelihood from that of specific projects and artworks. The innovative concept goes under the official title, Basic Income for the Arts. The title is slightly problematic, as discussed below: but in 2022, it represented innovative thinking, although not an entirely new idea.
Some moves to secure artists’ livelihoods have been made historically, but the scale and nature of the initiatives have always been too little, too late, or too fraught. Aosdána was established in 1981, out of a genuine concern that a coterie of established and respected artists of the era faced penury. It has come under scrutiny from time to time and while it certainly has alleviated poverty stress for a minority of artists – and sought to do so in a dignified way with the veneer of a noble function – it has been described by many as an anachronism in the modern age.
The BIA pilot scheme is not dissimilar to Aosdána in the practical sense that it guarantees income to certain artists, in a way that respects the unique nature of artists’ work and productivity, but without the public elevation and odd pomp and ceremony of the old institution. Entry to the BIA scheme is more egalitarian and discreet than is the case with Aosdána. Recruitment to the pilot was based upon a lottery among thousands of artists deemed eligible, rather than arbitrary barometers of grandeur.
The BIA trials, however, have scarcely scratched the surface numerically, and the future of the scheme is anybody’s guess. Its primary champion, former Arts Minister Catherine Martin, is no longer in office. The pilot phase saw benefit for 2000 artists (out of 14000 deemed eligible). It runs out this year. Expanding the scheme is a key demand of the National Campaign for the Arts. Given that the new minister has distinguished himself so far only in his outraged reaction to the Arts Council IT mess, which he regrettably inherited, and his plan to expand his “waste removal” crusade to other cultural bodies, it is difficult just yet to see him in the role of magical dispenser of a radical and costly payment scheme, however necessary, directed towards the bank accounts of artists.
On the plus side, re-elected cabinet members are bound – up to a point – to accept the evaluation reports on the pilot they signed off on, and take some action. The new Programme for Government includes a commitment to ‘assess the Basic Income for Artists [BIA] pilot to maximise its impact’. It would be politically regressive to abandon the programme completely; expedient to repeat or expand it in a niggardly way. If we are optimistic, and the number is – say – doubled, it will ease distress for a few thousand more artists. However, it will still leave thousands of hapless applicants to its lottery selection not so much disappointed, as terrified and despairing when the letter of rejection arrives.
All parties need to take a helicopter or space satellite view. If we value the Arts as we value Justice, Education, Environment and other non-tangible public benefits, then we as a society (including artists) need to rethink what an artist in 21st Century Europe looks like, and how modern artists should be paid and protected. What is certain, is that the Arts Council is not equipped for the absurd task it now de facto faces. No artist, recognised as an artist, in a European nation should go hungry while waiting on annual or bi-annual bursary and project award schemes, in the hope, if they are truly excellent, that they might get lucky once every three or four years. Right now, we are working with twentieth century, cobbled-together solutions, and hidebound by nineteenth century perceptions and definitions of the artist as so utterly ‘other’ that simple systems of recognising work as work cannot apply.
Cobbled together – actor Brendan Laird at work
HOW ABOUT “BASIC WAGE” FOR ARTISTS?
This is where the concept of Basic Income may need re-naming and some re-design. The current title is borrowed from the Utopian and humane “Universal Basic Income” idea which negates conventional industrial notions of productivity in an ideal world, and provides unconditional payments to all citizens. In the harsh politics of this century, there needs perhaps to be a more forthright assertion, not of the right of artists in some exceptional way to a unique, unconditional stipend, but of the hard fact that artists work and are grossly underpaid for their work!
Most professional artists work all the time. They live in society, and their work – even the wildest and most esoteric – benefits society. The ways of benefit are so many that listing them inevitably drags the conversation into reductive and outmoded mutterings about instrumentalism: yada-yada tourism spinoff, mental health of the nation, creative learning, taxes paid on earnings, spectacle, festivity, family fun, fodder for necessary outrage, and of course Art for Art’s sake – yada yada, I could fill another page. It is all noise! Either we value the arts for their intrinsic value – regardless of how this kind of art or that kind of art impacts in this parish or that neighbourhood, yonder gallery or some fringe theatre or burlesque somewhere: or we do not! And if we do, then it follows that we pay our artists to get up in the morning and continue to work, as they do, day-in-day-out.
It pleases me to say that in Ireland, notwithstanding the occasional daft view, we do value the arts! It is imperative therefore that we provide intelligently for the livelihood of working artists, just as we provide for our guards, teachers, state foresters, tax collectors, nurses and lifeguards. They get a thing called a wage. Why did we fail so completely for so long, to think of this? Possibly because the true cost was always going to be considerable, although ultimately still but a drop in the overall public spending ocean. Equally likely, it is because, although the solution is so obvious and right in front of us, we have been unable to see it for the silly noise and flashing screens of media chatter that continually distract us. And when a move was finally made in 2022, to pilot a livelihood scheme that separated the holding of a skilled profession from the act of showcasing, it was clumsily named to fuel further the sniggering myth that artists don’t really work at all. Call it a wage and let it be a transparent and accountable transaction!
One thing is for certain, the task of providing essential income to artists cannot be delegated by default any longer to The Arts Council. The institution is unfit for such a purpose, not because its IT machinery is not up to the job, not because its overworked staff are anything less than dedicated, and not because the principle of financing fabulous projects by fine companies and artists is not commendable, but because the ask facing the Council in the absence of a parallel income scheme is impossible. For every 5% increase in Arts Council funding, comes a 10% increase in demand, as more and more young people and new Irish residents, trained and qualified as artists, come forward, aware in the information age of the competitive schemes that exist. We rely far too heavily on our beloved ‘arms-length’ awards agency not only to fund our ideas, but to provide many of us with our only hope of a wage, doing the only thing many of know how to do, and which so many of us do, so very, very well, to the benefit of so many around us.
The Two Five Ones: Culture Night Co. Monaghan 2018
In summary, we need a system of secure and long term waging for artists. Continue to call it Basic Income if you must. Or perhaps create an opt-in, transparent and accountable National Artists Panel, where those registered are openly and proudly identified, entrusted and waged so as to be enabled to make their art in the million different ways of artists, with all of the intangible but visible impact of art, however diverse, however sporadic, however socially engaged, however bafflingly impenetrable, without dependence on the whims of markets or competitive award races. Provide a livelihood to artists to work as they do, over full years of sometimes frenetic, sometimes quieter periods, just as we provide livelihoods to our soldiers in peacetime as well as in conflict; our park attendants in winter as well as in spring; our librarians even on the days when only one or two people come in the door.
And then, like the public engineer who is paid a wage and – separately – provided with a budget to build a bridge or canal, our waged (not “aided”) artists can tender for the additional finance and resources to build their imaginative bridges and roads and fabulous flying machines.
Constantly working! The author along with lighting specialist Veronica Foo
And of course, people will ask: Ah, but what about abuse? Simple: treat it the same as abuse in any other field! I have almost never met a lazy artist. If a handful of messers exist, referring to themselves as artists but never working as artists, they can be quickly exposed as con artists. There will be ways to identify and exclude fraudsters from ill-deserved earnings, just as we root out corrupt police officers, expose millionaires wrongly awarded telecoms contracts, and (if only we would) vote out unfit politicians. But having worked as an artist among artists and nothing else for 40 years, and having sat on some of those benighted local authority and Arts Council peer panels that assess funding applications from young and mature artists, desperate to just work and be paid, I would wager that slackers in my sector are very, very few. The real abuse is the false sense we give to our young theatre graduates and stressed-out mid-life artists that just because they work hard and bring us joy and stimulation, they can live and make a career.
So my simple plea to the new minister, once he has fully sounded his bark and completed his sniffing around for suspected waste: Rearrange things! Demand all-of-Government engagement: create a viable public art register and system whereby we pay a wage, not to two thousand but several thousand of our artists.
And once the immediate governance questions are resolved, leave the Arts Council, without interference – and with adequate funds and IT systems – to look after quality assurance; funding of sustainable organisations; and yes – continuing with their prize-giving competition schemes that recognise particular individual excellence. In this way, Arts Council money is used intelligently to underwrite the researches and the outputs, but not the mortgage payments, the nappies, the dinners and the human right to a regular wage, of our nation’s artists.
The news that the Arts Council has lost €5.3m (confirmed figure) on an IT system that was unfit for purpose has caused understandable concern among the general public and anxiety within the arts sector. This is a serious matter which requires investigation and accountability, but also perspective and measured responses, particularly from artists through their representative associations.
The widely reported debacle has left artists worried that the cost of fixing the situation may be met by reductions in the Arts Council’s overall allocation from Government, leading to reduced grant levels for an already cash-strapped sector: in short a worry that artists will ultimately pay for errors not of their making. This is hardly surprising. Few sectors were more unfairly punished in the 2008-2013 period for the catastrophic errors and corruption of the then government, the banks and builders, than the arts. This is a rather different situation, however.
The Arts Council has given strong reassurances to the National Campaign for the Arts that whatever the outcome of the current investigations, grant supports will not be affected. Some may ask if it is within their gift to make such assurances since their Government paymasters might punish the agency to a degree that will leave the Council’s hands tied. But it bespeaks a reassuring determination, and one which should remind artists that for all its inherent flaws, moments of human error and its own impossible financial situation, the Arts Council was always and remains committed to support for the arts and the rights in principle of artists to fair livelihoods.
Since the precise nature of the failings are now a matter of formal investigation, it is unhelpful prematurely to leap to judgement or apportion blame here. The new Arts Minister and the Minister for Public Expenditure were quick to suggest that the Arts Council’s actions “likely” breached public procurement rules. Time and independent audits will tell.
What is clear is that the moneys being paid out by State bodies generally to private sector IT companies is exorbitant. In the same week that the Arts Council story broke, a parliamentary question brought to light the fact that the Department of Social Protection in the same period was paying €5.6 million PER MONTH to IT contractors! One Netherlands-based company alone is reported to have been paid a total of €48m of Irish taxpayer’s money over two years. This company reported a pre-tax profit of €8m in 2023. At least those costly Social Protection systems appear to be functioning. But this disclsure of the scale and cost of State dependence on the commercial IT sector helps put the level of the Arts Council’s wasted expenditure into some kind of perspective.
While our gaze is naturally turned on the public servants within the Arts Council and the Department of Arts and Culture who watched this money slip between their fingers, nobody seems to have asked how such highly paid IT wizards managed to misread so badly the needs of a relatively small Irish state agency and take them for such a ride over four years, failing, by all accounts time and again, to provide the service they promised to deliver. Will the enquiry include an option to blacklist such companies from future tendering, should incompetence or deliberate spinning out be uncovered?
As to how the Arts Council loss impacts upon artists, the very mention of a €5.3m loss causes natural anger and trauma. That kind of money could have funded an awful lot of arts projects. It rings dreadful in an underfunded sector. But as against that, these moneys were never intended for artists supports; rather to improve systems of assessing grant applications, as well as other internal corporate needs. And as the DSP statistics (and the ongoing Children’s Hospital overspend of 1.5 billion euro) reminds us, the sum involved is not ultimately a catastrophic loss to the State coffers. It should not have happened, it must be rectified and persons help accountable, but correcting it will not send the economy into a tailspin in the way that the bank guarantees and bailouts of fifteen years ago did.
Let the matter, therefore, be cleared up and let us hope that the crisis might cause renewed examination of the real problem alluded to above: the precarious position of artists and arts workers in Ireland.
WATCH HERE FOR A SECOND ESSAY LATER THIS WEEK, LOOKING AT CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS TO “THE REAL PROBLEM: THE PRECARIOUS POSITION OF ARTISTS AND ARTS WORKERS IN IRELAND“
I am pleased to announce that playwright David Joyce and I will be working together to bring Dave’s beautiful play “A PERSONAL PRISM” to the Black Box Theatre Galway, and thence on a mini-tour to Portumna and Tuam this November.
Dave and I wish to acknowledge the support of The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. We were pleased to win a Theatre Projects Award 2024 to bring “A PERSONAL PRISM” to the stage and undertake an integrated programme of regional workshops and conversations over coming months.
The play introduces Lee Hanley a young man with a disability living in a small regional town, who struggles with anxiety, family pressures and the myriad of additional challenges faced every day by wheelchair users, all the while pursuing a dream. It raises themes of creativity, community, isolation and friendship in a humorous and yet searingly honest story.
In April, shortly after winning our award, Dave and I went on a whirlwind trip around Co. Galway to meet some of the key partners who have worked with us over months and years to get to this point. (See photos). This project would never have happened without the support of these local arts partners: Town Hall Theatre Galway; Portumna Town Hall and Creative Places Tuam; and our local disability partners The Galway Centre for Independent Living and Irish Wheelchair Association, Galway.
Additional national and regional partners with whom we shall work over the summer are: Arts & Disability Ireland, Disability Federation of Ireland; Spinal Injuries Ireland and County Roscommon Disability Support Group.
We owe special thanks to Pamela Mc Queen whose previous input as dramaturg was invaluable: also to actors Eoin Ó Dubhghailll, Joe MacCarrick and Cáit An Fhile who took part in developmental workshops in 2022.
FULL DATES AND BOOKING DETAILS WILL BE PUBLISHED HERE IN DUE COURSE
IMAGES:
Above: Dave and I received a warm welcome from Phil and the staff at Galway Centre for Independent Living: Top row below: Dave at IWA Galway; with Fergal McGrath at Black Box Theatre; with Jim Hynes at Portumna Town Hall: Bottom row below: Planning meeting with Carolann Courtney of Creative Places Tuam.
Capital City! Relaxing before the first performance of the Canada tour.
A highlight of 2024 so far has surely been my 9-day June trip to Ottawa, Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, to perform from the works of James Joyce as part of the Global Bloomsday 2024 festival.
Why Canada? Well, a couple of reasons. In conversation over Christmas 2023 with my old friend, noted Joycean and authority on modern Irish history Des Gunning, it came up that a number of significant commemorations would arise in 2024. The 85th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Canada would coincide with the 85th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and indeed the 100th anniversary of the first controversial appearance in print of a segment of that famously difficult book, in a transatlantic literary journal.
To a sociable Joycean historian, and a travel-hungry troubadour, that led to the obvious conclusion that what Canada needs now is a celebration of James Joyce, ideally one involving me! Canada is not without a significant tradition of honouring James Joyce already. Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa have active Joycean groups and a tradition of Bloomsday celebrations involving some truly gifted actors and scholars. Toronto is home to One Little Goat theatre company which is toing and froing across the Atlantic these very weeks, gradually creating a podcast performance of the entirety of “Finnegans Wake” to be ready in time for its 90th anniversary in 2029. But, I reasoned, Canada has not yet had me.
The difficulty that morning of dreams appeared to be that my work with Joyce has tended to draw from the earlier, more accessible books, “Dubliners” in particular, while the occasion seemed to call for a remembrance of “Finnegans Wake”. In fact, it called specifically for a revisiting of “Mamalujo”, the episode of the book which was brought into the world by Ford Madox Ford in 1924. Or at least so it seemed to Des. And so was born the idea that I might create a performance around that seminal episode.
Conspiring with Des Gunning
Perhaps if I had actually read it first, I might have baulked. I certainly entertained second thoughts in the intervening months as I worked frantically to try to engage with the 688-page monkey puzzle that has divided opinion ever since that short excerpt first popped up innocuously under the title “Work in Progress” in The Transatlantic Review.
I did articulate to Des that if I was going to put my head in the guillotine and attempt FW, I should also be allowed to revive my old reliable (and favourite) Joyce performance, “The Dubliners Dilemma”. I also quickly determined that I could not, in all honesty, create nor sustain a full, off-book solo performance based on the Wake nor any part of it in six months, given that scholars have given over their entire adult lives to its many layers of meaning. And so it was settled that I would look at “Mamalujo 1924” as the transitional moment between Joyce’s early work and his final great book which is written in a ‘new world language’ that took him 15 years to complete and takes many people 15 years to read. I would pose the question, how did Baby Tuckoo, Joyce’s alter-ego in the cradle, fascinated by words and songs, progress from a love of sounds to the invention of a language.
Oh yes, and it would be kept short enough to fit into a double bill with a rumbunctious revival of “The Dubliners Dilemma”. I would be like an old rocker who performs the new album but keeps the fans happy with a few of the old classics. And there we had it, all planned over coffee and muffins in a café at Ashtown Gates in January, with just two glitches. Nobody in Canada knew about it. And we had no money.
The James Joyce Association of Ottawa Committee: June 13th 2024.
We managed within days to elicit an invitation from the notable James Joyce Association of Ottawa who had bravely undertaken to mount a few events in 2024 specifically to highlight “Finnegans Wake” in its anniversary year. And I now submitted what seemed like a shoo-in proposal to Culture Ireland with a not-unreasonable request that the Government of Ireland might provide the modest sum of money it would take to cover my flight and my accommodation in Ottawa.
Being a master of the ulterior motive, I had another reason for wanting to visit Ontario. Members of my father’s family had emigrated there from Donegal in the last century, and I have living relations in Ontario that I had never visited on their own turf. I have a fascination with migration and it has featured as a theme in my work. Also, the older I get, the more I regret not keeping in closer touch with wider family: I have grown to understand the importance of heritage. So, privately, I thought I might pop down to Toronto to visit the folks!
I began the stern task of writing what became a not-too-stern spoken word piece about James Joyce, his wonderful book “Finnegans Wake” and how it is anticipated in his earlier works, and all was good in my world.
Until Culture Ireland, overwhelmed this year with applications, declined to fund the trip. I was dismayed but sanguine: tendering is a gamble: you win a few, you lose a few: they have generously funded some of my earlier work. But the deliberations had been delayed. By now it was April of the year and I was knee deep in a plan for June that could not be realised.
Until…. the good people of Canada, my own remarkable cousins among them, rallied around. Even without State imprimatur, the James Joyce Association of Ottawa announced it would honour its commitment to a fair professional fee if I could find my way to their fair city by other means. My cousins Ann Gorman McKinney and Seanie Gorman committed to finding viable gigs for me in the Toronto region to help defray the costs. And so it all took flight again – on a wing and a poem.
“Welcome O Joyce” Work-in-Progress: James Joyce Centre, Dublin
I previewed “Welcome O Joyce” co-conceived with Des Gunning, at our partner venue The James Joyce Centre in Dublin, in early June. It suffered the kind of teething problems that uncertain new works often have. I went home that evening marginally chastened by the realisation before a live audience that our new chicken had come out of the egg a little wobbly. But I listened to the constructive feedback of scholarly friends, pruned ten minutes off the running time and – in correspondence with a by-now very busy pre-Bloomsday Des – recalibrated the performance somewhat for Ottawa.
With Gerard Lee in rehearsals (screengrab – Bloomsday FB reel)
I had already indicated that in Toronto and nearby Hamilton I would only perform “The Dubliners Dilemma”. But even that old familiar work involved much preparatory work, and I was grateful as ever to have trusted director Gerard Lee back in the rehearsal room with me as we reassembled our much-travelled show, after a gap of five years and a pandemic. Memory is a curious friend – it did not come easily but when it came, it felt like an old forgotten hat that sits on the crown comfortably again after years in the attic.
Sharon Cromwell my life partner and great pal travelled with me. At 9.00 Irish time on Tuesday 11th June we left our cottage home at Loughshinny on a 33A bus to Dublin Airport. We transferred from Toronto Pearson to the Via Express at the magnificent Union Station and travelled onwards to Ottawa by rail, arriving at our destination nineteen hours after we left home. We were warmly greeted on the platform by Dublin friend and Ottawa committee member Paula McCann, and her wise and wonderful husband Don Cummer, who whisked us to our hotel in the evocative Byward Market area.
Suffragette City: Sharon and an earlier feminist in Ottawa
Wednesday was spent sightseeing. We were moved by the tomb of the unknown soldier; the tale of assassinated Irish founding father of Canadian democracy Darcy McGee; a visit to the Parliament Building on the Hill, and in particular by “Women are Persons”, a fabulous public art work by Barbara Paterson depicting the Famous Five suffragette women who won a significant battle for women’s franchise. An evening meal and a few songs at Don and Paula’s rounded off a wonderful day.
Thursday’s performance in the converted St Brigid’s Church – now repurposed as an arts centre – was a great success. Following a beautiful harp recital by the elegant Nora Pat Marshall, the evening was introduced in eloquent Irish and English by Rosemary O’Brien, Chairperson of the hardworking committee. The new work “Welcome O Joyce” (presented as a reading) was warmly received, its extracts from “Finnegans Wake” appreciated and its sideways segue into Molly Bloom’s dreams eliciting a fabulous, choral ‘Yes’ response from the lively crowd. Part 2 of the evening saw my first Canada performance of “The Dubliners Dilemma”, reminding me that this mini-work, which tells of publisher Grant Richards’ difficult relationship with Joyce, has universal appeal. Joyce’s gleeful tales of the grimy underside of Dublin are as rich and tangible today as 110 years ago when the book first appeared (another anniversary!) They are a gift to the storytelling performer which is how I suppose I describe myself. The warm reception was crowned by the full house rising to sing me a Happy Birthday. There was cake and wine in the bar afterwards, but we took it easy as the following evening would see a livestreamed performance of “The Dubliners Dilemma” from the Annette Studio in Toronto. Among those attending the Ottawa show was former RTE producer John P. Kelly who lives now in Ottawa. John produced my only ever radio drama in 1987!
The Toronto event was hosted by the Alive Poets Society, of which my cousin Sean is an active member.
Post-show reunion with Paul Farrelly: At the Annette Studio, June 14th 2024
There was barely time after our six-hour train trip to dust down before a super-fast tech in the intimate and charming Westend jazz studio. Seanie, his wife Monique and poet accomplice Billy Heffernan had ensured that all the required stage furniture was in place, including a wonderfully elevated antique table on a wooden box for sightlines. I have seldom enjoyed a live show so much and the international audience was with the work all the way. A few contacts in Canada and USA who knew about it tuned in to the live stream, and messages of appreciation trickled in overnight. The evening continued with a perfectly curated selection of spoken word performances by the poets, and – once again – a song and a cake for what was my actual birth date, 14th June. The audience included Paul Farrelly a venerable stalwart of Irish and Joycean culture in Canada and – out of the blue – Dublin theatre director Alan Kinsella, an old pal and peer with whom Sharon and I had lost contact, now domiciled in Toronto.
With cousins Alice, Ann and Seanie Gorman: Corktown Pub Hamilton, Bloomsday 2024
Saturday was another R&R day, spent mainly chilling in the revamped Distillery Quarter with live outdoor jazz, cool cafes and bars. Then, on Bloomsday, we moved on to the final show, a matinee in the unlikely but wonderfully hospitable Corktown Pub in the industrial steel town of Hamilton. Ann Gorman McKinney had done sterling PR work and they came from far and wide, many travelling over two hours to hear the words of James Joyce in this tucked-away haven of traditional Irish culture. I made a short thank you speech after the Hamilton performance, reiterating remarks I made in Toronto. My father’s brother Sean (deceased) had been very active in Toronto Irish circles. He was particularly supportive of music, so much so that after he died, the Toronto branch of Comhaltas Ceoltoirí Éireann was co-named the Gorman-Langan branch, honouring both Sean, for his organisational drive, and the great Chris Langan, a renowned maker and player of the uileann pipes. I was genuinely moved to thank the assembled musicians and singers for that honour. A suitably lively séisiún ensued, led by maestro John O’Gorman (no relation!) and crowned by Sharon’s wonderful Kimmage rendition of Molly Malone!
Our last full day was spent getting soaked and giddy on a tour boat under the magnificent Niagara Falls; followed by an all too brief visit to the pretty town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, home of the Shaw Festival, and a final meal with extended family on the hot evening terrace of a restaurant ovelooking Lake Ontario. After dinner I waded out and took a souvenir oval stone from the lake bed. I am looking at it fondly here on my desk now, a week and an ocean-crossing since, beside a few pebbles from my local Skerries beach, as I conclude this happy personal essay of a frantic but fabulous working vacation in the beautiful country of Canada.
Photos courtesy of Lensmen (Dublin); The James Joyce Centre (Dublin); The James Joyce Association of Ottawa; Don Cummer; Ann Gorman McKinney and Sharon Cromwell
Canada memories: People of all colours and creeds united in joy on the Niagara boat! Photo Ann Gorman McKinneyCousin Seanie’s Toronto houseWith Bruce & Ann, above HamiltonDistillery visit with Sean & MoniqueDowntown TorontoPost-show drinks with Alan KinsellaWith Paula at Parliament HillDubliners: St. Brigid’s OttawaWelcome O Joyce ReadingWith cousin Mickey QuinnBefore the live stream frorm TorontoFirst of 3 birthday cakes!What it says on the wall!Birthday cake No. 2Ok – a shared welcome cake!!!With Ann at the famous CorktownThe clan – including Bob (and Kara the Dog)Drenched at Niagara Falls!The history of Canada, by Don!Fare Thee Well Ontario – by the great lakeSombre pause: Toronto Irish Famine Memorial
What a fantastic night was had by all: actors, writer, crew, me (director) and audience at the world premiere of THE HALF COAT by Tara Maria Lovett in Cavan County Museum on Culture Night, Friday 22nd September 2023! As promised,the show programme is now available to view here! (Just below the photo) It is designed to download and print onto a double-sided A4 page. Try it and see!!! Further down in a lovely review in the Anglo Celt newspaper. It was an item in the first edition of the Celt in 1846 which inspired Tara Maria’s play about a condemned rebel in Cavan Gaol and the Quaker woman who visits him, and the ramifications of their actions down the generations.
Joshua McEneaney and Niamh McPhillips in The Half Coat by Tara Maria Lovett
DMAPP* in association with an Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk
presents
PRISON NOTEBOOKS
based on the Civil War gaol journals of DOROTHY MACARDLE
performed by Sharon McArdle
directed by Declan Gorman
choreographed by Ella Clarke
with songs by Sophie Coyle
Basement Gallery, An Táin Arts Centre, Dundalk.
15th, 16th & 17th September 2022 at 7.30 pm
(and subsequent performances as mentioned below)
Dorothy Macardle was an outstanding Irish woman of the 20th century whose legacy and achievements are coming only now to wider public attention. She was a novelist, playwright, Hollywood screenwriter, historian and pioneering human rights campaigner.
Daughter of Sir Thomas Macardle, founder of the Macardle Moore brewing enterprise in Dundalk, she rejected her family’s imperial values and became – in her own words – “an unrepentant propagandist” on behalf of the Irish Republican cause. She was already an established Abbey playwright when she was imprisoned without trial for her Anti-Treaty propagandist activities in 1922. Upon her arrest, her literary manuscripts and private papers were maliciously burned on the street by Free State soldiers.
In later life, her original playscripts were part-damaged in the Abbey fire of 1961. Upon her death, her brother burned most of her remaining papers. So much memory of Dorothy is thus obliterated even though in her lifetime she published a significant history and a number of Gothic novels one of which became a major Hollywood film, while also distinguishing herself as a broadcaster and laterally a human rights rapporteur.
In prison in 1922-23 she kept a series of six handwritten diaries, three of which survived and were found in the DeValera papers held by the Irish Jesuits and now in the UCD archive. Sharon McArdle has painstakingly transcribed these diaries (over 50,000 words), and it is hoped that this work will be published in due course. Unique in gaol journaling, Dorothy’s diaries include accounts of dreams, nightmares and uncanny future visions as well as moving testimony of deprivation, loneliness and hunger strikes among her fellow women detainees.
The prison diaries have now been adapted into a solo theatre performance by Sharon McArdle and writer/director Declan Gorman. They reveal Dorothy not just as a committed political thinker but a visionary artist, whose connection to the uncanny, and meditations on time, trauma and loss place her among the literary innovators of the early 20th century. Warm, humorous portraits of fellow women prisoners, tales of ghostly apparitions and devastating accounts of deprivation and violation blend with dreamscapes and paranormal episodes in this original performance which premieres at An Táin Arts Centre after almost five years of archive research and workshop exploration.
The Dundalk shows will be presented in the intimate and confined basement workshop space (off the gallery) in An Táin. A private performance is also scheduled at Kilmainham Prison on Nov 22nd, for historians and scholars who have engaged with the artists’ research over the past five years. It is hoped to have two public showings at Smock Alley Theatre on November 15th and 16th.
Seating strictly limited. Booking essential.
Research and development of this work have been made possible with the support of the Arts Council (Theatre Projects Award); Create Louth – the Arts Service of Louth Local Authorities; Fingal Arts Office; Bank of Ireland Arts Awards and Dublin City University. The artists wish to acknowledge the encouragement given in the early stages of their researches by the Dorothy Macardle Society of Dundalk as well as the constant support of An Táin Arts Centre.
* DMAPP is acronym for the Dorothy Macardle Archive and Performance Project. Other upcoming work includes a Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and RTÉ funded radio documentary (with Lyric FM) to be broadcast on November 13th, and a short film in collaboration with An Táin film artist in residence Colm Mullen (release date to be announced).
I was nowhere near the place where Michael Collins was assassinated, this week. Honest!
I had thought once that I might be giving The Big Fellow a send-off of my own in this, the week of the centenary of his assassination. I had imagined myself perhaps, in a packed Broadway theatre … or at least back in the hall in Clonakilty where you might get a middling house and pay the actors a middling wage.
But fate and perhaps a little prescience guided us otherwise. Our little band, me, Cillian MacNamara (lighting), actors Gerard Adlum, Cillian Ó Garbhaí, and later Ian Toner (accompanied by Colin Blakey’s tunes), parted amicably and we each moved on to other projects and lives, having spent a couple of years (2016-19) touring from Bandon to Bangalore with our version of Frank O’Connor’s version of the life of Michael Collins.
In truth, it was O’Connor as much as Collins who drew me into this reflection on war, leadership and aftermath. I was fascinated that O’Connor, a gauche boy soldier on the Anti Treaty side should choose to write in adulthood a biography of his erstwhile enemy and find redemption in so doing. The epilogue to our play, beautifully delivered by Gerard Adlum, had O’Connor reflecting ruefully on his own grimy Civil War traumas and the impoverished infant State where he now served as a librarian.
Collins appealed to me as a classic tragic hero who rises and then falls in the lonely valley to an epochal mix of his own flaws, the vengeance of enemies and the callous gods who planned his itinerary. O’Connor appealed to me as the artist who reflects on the futility of all this and finds in art, storytelling and myth his own truth.
I am now deeply immersed in and nearing completion of a collaborative work with performer/researcher Sharon McArdle on another Civil War figure, Dorothy Macardle, in whose book The Irish Republic – published around the same time as O’Connor’s biography – Collins is a mere irksome footnote. History is contested and constantly politically misused. More frighteningly, in this country and in Britain, it is misunderstood as Brexit and its legacy remind us.
The “Decade of Centenaries” was something of a contrivance by the Irish State to help us navigate the complexities of our nation’s difficult origin myths. Artists walk a tight rope, attracted by opportunities for funding but also for genuine research spaces, while wary of appropriation and assimilation into convenient commemorative narratives. I am uncomfortable with actual centenary events – be they of books by Joyce or the stray bullets of history – but I have gained much learning and creative understanding among outstanding artist colleagues, communities and academics this past ten years.
That is worth a quiet celebration today, at home, away from the centenary crowd.
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Michael Collins was killed in an ambush in County Cork 100 years ago on this day.
See archive images and text for our past productions and tours of THE BIG FELLOW here.
On January 6th 1982, a young Irish emigrant borrows an English language book from a library in Munich. He reads it over one evening. The course of his life is changed…. Forty years later, he walks onto a stage to recreate the magic of that night and perform one of the greatest short stories ever written in the English language.
Declan Gorman mixes memoir and the magic of live theatre to bring to life James Joyce’s much-loved January classic, “The Dead” in this warm and moving performance.
“A compelling performer” Irish Theatre Magazine
The early development of this play and initial Work-in-Progress presentations (December 2018) were made possible with generous bursary support from Fingal County Council and The Arts Council.
My very occasional blogs are usually about my practice and observations as an artist. The link between this article and my work is tenuous in that it does not arise from a particular ongoing project. But it speaks to a theme as embedded in my psyche and my creative output as family and self: the balance between Hope and Despair in my native country – or more pin-pointed – in the disputed territory that is Northern Ireland
While Artistic Director of Upstate, (1996-2010),I spent many enriching years as a playwright, director and public artist engaging with communities, audiences and fellow-artists in Northern Ireland and in my home ground just south of the border. I would define that era as a time of peace building.
I continued this “engagement” work, but with less urgency, in a freelance capacity from 2011 to 2015, when peace appeared finally to have settled. Then, in 2016, Brexit hit us, confusing, incongruous and potentially lethal as any ticking bomb might have been, post-Omagh.
In 2018, when I was appointed Theatre Artist in Residence for County Monaghan, I made a few efforts to engage with this new reality through artistic work, but drew back from the enormity of it. While I have avoided it in my work, through all this time, I have journaled obsessively – but never published – my turbulant thoughts on the implicatons of Brexit.
This year, Northern Ireland is 100 years old. In recent days, controversy has gathered around President Michael D Higgins’ decision not to attend a church service which set out to mark the partitioning of Ireland in 1921. Some commentators have stated that his decision was retrogressive. Did we not, after all, relinquish our claim to Northern Ireland when we voted to remove Articles 2 and 3 from the Irish Constitution in 1998? Can we not move on and let bygones be bygones? That particular remark has caused me to return to a journal entry I wrote some weeks ago, before the Higgins controversy erupted, and finally publish my personal views.
I hope this essay (1400 words) might find a few readers and stimulate some honest reflection on the irreparable damage Brexit has done and the subtle way it has changed (utterly!) the context of all talk of peace and reconciliation.
Above all, I hope that the finest and most imaginative minds on this island and beyond might begin to think up new pathways out of the brewing disaster we are living in but failing to name. Certainly tinkering with a trading protocol and providing reactionary forces with phantom causes will do no more than postpone a looming tragedy …
WHAT HOPE FOR NORTHERN IRELAND?
A reflection
One of the reasons so many people in Ireland were, and remain, appalled by the Brexit Referendum is that no political event in our lifetime better illustrates the failure of a people (the people of Britain) to understand or learn lessons from their own history.
In 1998 voters in both parts of the partitioned island of Ireland collectively set aside centuries of enmity and polled in favour of the Good Friday Agreement.
By an even greater majority, the people of the Republic voted to repeal Articles 2 and 3 of a constitution that had staked claim to disputed northern territory which had remained in Britain’s keep for almost 80 years after their occupation of the southern regions of Ireland ended.
While this momentous 1998 peace accord is usually analysed in terms of its impact within Ireland, it is helpful to reflect on the gift that the Good Friday Agreement was to the people of Britain.
After centuries of sporadic warring between the two nations, and bitter strife locally between British colonisers and their descendants on one hand and indigenous Irish people on the other, Irish voters agreed, en-masse and for the sake of peace, to allow Britain retain dominion in Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement also allowed one million ethnic Britons with by-now deep roots in Irish soil to live and look ahead without further fear of armed rebellion.
The key condition was that Irish identity would be recognised as wholly equal in what would remain a British territory but be reinvented as a shared society.
Underpinning or – perhaps more accurately – overarching this concept of a shared society was the relatively new 20th century context of a peaceful and largely borders-free Europe, where Britain and Ireland co-existed as equal members of the European Union. It was a sensible modern-day compromise and an apparent conclusion to a centuries-old history of colonisation and land theft too embedded by now to be reversed, but until modern times ever-raw and ever-oppressive.
And then, no sooner was accommodation reached but, within 18 short years, this generation of British political leaders, and so many of their unthinking followers in England in particular, threw the gift of the Good Friday Agreement back in the faces not only of Irish people and their European allies, but of their own fellow British-identifying people in Northern Ireland.
In extracting themselves permanently from the European Union, Britain removed overnight the only context within which ethnic and national identities on these islands might evolve outside of the historically exclusive tenets of territorial ownership. In simple language, the Brits took back the North. The people of England reclaimed Northern Ireland as exclusively British, and no longer shared-European. Ignorant British voters may not have known – but their leaders most certainly did – that it has never been, and never will be, possible to live at ease in an exclusively British part of Ireland and identify freely and equally as Irish.
The reality, therefore, is that the Good Friday Agreement is to all intents and purposes dead in the water. Irish and European negotiators are currently struggling to protect some of the economic and bureaucratic structures enshrined in the accord which are now in disarray. But nobody appears to be acknowledging that the Agreement itself has no basis anymore. That ship has sailed and with it the only apparent hope of a mutually acceptable accommodation.
If the people of a disputed territory can no longer be “British, Irish or both” as the generous dispensation of shared EU membership allowed, then it follows that Northern Ireland and her people officially can only be one or the other: British or Irish.
Northern Ireland is currently exclusively British once again. You can hold an Irish passport and enjoy rights just as Indian or Dutch people in Belfast may hold Indian or Dutch passports and be entitled to certain rights. But you have no ownership. You cannot be loyal to the only recognised governing polity. You are once again a foreigner in your own land.
While there have been disturbances and the young journalist Lyra McKee had her life taken away in one such catastrophic incident, by and large nobody has taken to armed warfare about this just yet. Sinn Féin, however, are pushing for a poll that would – they anticipate – swing things so that Northern Ireland would secede from the United Kingdom and be “re-united” into a new all-island Irish Republic. If that happened, then Northern Ireland would become exclusively Irish. Republican advocates of this strategy tell us with blithe confidence they are certain one million ethic Britons will accept this four-hundred year reversal and welcome the economic benefits of a future United Ireland.
As if economics has ever had anything to do with identity in Ireland.
While some romantic ideal of a United Ireland may appeal to the naïve among us as well as to more belligerent Republicans, anyone who has ever studied Northern Irish history will know that it can never come about without bloodshed, counter revolution and a different kind of counter repression. Consider Unionist and Loyalist reaction to every perceived threat, however minor, to the Union with Great Britain, from Home Rule to the Civil Rights movement to Sunningdale to the lowering of Union flags over certain public buildings. Every such move has been greeted with mob mobilisation and violence up to the level of murderous pogroms and random assasinations of nationalist Catholics.
Perhaps the reason so few people are facing the reality that the shared identity solution is now off the table is that eternal warfare seems the only corollary, and it is simply too terrible to contemplate. So, politicians tinker around the edges, seeking to salvage or undermine this Protocol or that Annex designed to preserve institutions and trade corridors that were viable only in the brief time of our shared EU history.
It is almost impossible to see how the safeguard of European Union membership can be replaced in the future with any framework that could allow Northern Ireland to be neither one thing predominantly nor the other.
The only possible hope may lie not in an overarching, protective super-national community but through radical new investment in the concept of community at the most local level.
Unless and until the peace-preferring people of Northern Ireland can turn respectively to London, Dublin, Brussels and their own enslaving dominant politicians and say, “Step away for a while and leave us to talk and figure out a way of our own”, the hovering menace of renewed division and suppressed violence will fester until it once again explodes, as it has done cyclically over the past 100 years and for centuries before that.
In short, extreme devolution in tandem with meaningful cross community local dialogue and empowerment may be the last and only hope. But right now, the only people with the means to do this, the power-greedy politicians leading the dominant parties within Northern Ireland, are offering no hope. No real talking, no honest acknowledgment of the true problem – just position-taking and subtle, incremental incitement to violence.
There is some light – it peeps in, in little chinks. While violence has simmered, it has not yet ignited. There is much talk of new identities – gender, intercultural, ability and so on. Young people in a global world, we are told, are ahead of and bored with all that old national identity politics.
But we thought that to be the case too in the heady, progressive 1960s when Protestant and Catholic marched together for Civil Rights, and look what happened. One bomb, one sectarian assassination, one deadly riot, one Twelfth march that turns violent, one street of houses set alight. That is what it takes to drive the well-meaning in a society without safe structures back behind barricades as the old warmongers reclaim the streets. Without structural support and great acts of letting go by current power-holders, young people with all their new ideas and identities will not make it alone. Enmity, hatred and hurt have long memories.
It is pitiful, five years after Brexit, to see politicians still playing games that stir up divisive sentiment. It took just 18 years for Britain, true to form, to unravel the only apparent basis for peace in Ireland. It may take 18 years and more for Ireland to experience the worst consequences. But if things continue as they are, with bad faith now a badge of honour in Downing Street, misguided band-aid approaches from Europe and incendiary cynicism the main currency in local Ulster politics, those consequences will eventually play out.
It would suit all concerned better to prevent this: to speak honestly to the insecurities and ancient fears of the “other” in this still bi-polar society rather than play to their own gallery just now. Ah but that takes local leadership! And where, oh where, will that come from?
It is quite something that an amateur drama group in a small town in County Cavan, Ireland, have recently created The Pilgrims of Slieve, one of the very, very few full-length Zoom Dramas ever made in the long history of the world!
So – apart from the obvious ….. switch on the laptop and click on the link …. how exactly should the viewer watch such an event? Well, the general advice for watching any online theatre event applied to this collaborative community production which I was privileged to direct for Aisteoirí Muinchille (Cootehill Payers) in March 2021.
My friend Paul Hayes, Director of An Táin Arts Centre in Dundalk, says that when he and his actor wife Leah Rossiter sit down to watch theatre online, they make certain preparations. “We might rearrange the furniture; dim the lighting to create a more theatre-type environment; have drinks prepared in advance. Above all, we switch off mobile phones, just as we would in a real theatre.”
And that is the key: “Just like in a real theatre!” You would not bring a barking dog with you to the Abbey. Is there somewhere the dog could go for 90 minutes while you watch your play online at home?
But then, why should you go to these lengths to watch a play when you often sit comfortably through a feature film on Netflix without any such fuss? That is what this article sets out to explore.
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As someone who not only works in theatre, but loves attending plays, I can say two things with absolute conviction.
Firstly, in any situation and in any normal time, going to the theatre is different to taking in a movie or going to a concert.
Secondly, there is really no such thing as “online theatre”! Like theatre itself, the whole thing is a pretence, and it require the audience to take part in the pretence.
When I assert that theatre is different to taking in a film, I’m not saying it’s any better than cinema or live gigs, (although personally I prefer theatre). But in obvious ways, it is different.
You arrive in good time; you do not eat popcorn; there are no ads or trailers; you sit among your neighbours or complete strangers pre-curtain and sense the unique communal anticipation; you absolutely turn off your mobile phone! In short, even for a light, local comedy, you prepare to zone in and concentrate. When the first actor finally takes the stage you lean forward to listen. If (as is usually the case) the actor is talented and trained, you embark with her or him upon a journey that takes place partly in front of you but partly in your own imagination.
Great theatre leaves a lot to the imagination – largely because, unlike film, it cannot show you everything. We rely on the power of the text and the physicality of the actors mainly to create the sense of place, time and context.
What is the online equivalent of that unique contract of the imagination? Well, quite simply, there is NO equivalent on your laptop! It does not exist. The audience is at home, not in a darkened auditorium. The dog is barking; there are people coming and going…. the actors are not at all impressive in their physicality, existing only on a small, very flat, two-dimensional screen. …. Unless…
Unless a different “contract” is negotiated, suited to the time and circumstances of this odd period in world history.
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When Aisteoirí Muinchille contacted me last November and asked if I might lead some kind of drama process with them online during the pandemic, I agreed, but on condition that they would travel with me on a mutual learning journey. With extraordinary courage and enthusiasm they said, “Yes!”. Every Monday night Zoom workshop after that was an experiment (16 weeks in total!). Not only would the usual values of community-engaged devising apply: inclusiveness; good humour; gender equality and so on – but we would dedicate time to road-testing totally new ideas. How could we create a new play that might engage the audience’s imagination on little computers?
You cannot have choreography in the normal sense of the actor’s physical presence, but what is the effect of ten heads all turning simultaneously to look up at an aeroplane? What is the effect of having eleven actors in black tops speak verse against a virtual black background? When is enough and when is too much of poetic speaking or of black t-shirts against black backdrops? And so on.
In the 16 weeks of rehearsals, 20 hours of filming and one intensive week of editing to whittle it all down to a 90 minute drama, it was my instinct as a theatre director – not a film-maker; not a film-editor – that guided my choices. We were very clear that we had made a piece of theatre! Although I have only ever met one of the actors face to face; although the play was performed by the actors sitting at their laptops in their 12 separate, isolated home locations, we had created a community play not a Zoom conference. It looks like theatre; it almost smells like theatre….
But to complete the arc of the journey, we needed the audience to agree to take part with us in a final imaginative process. We needed them to pretend they were at a theatre of some kind!
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Theatre is often described as “the willing suspension of disbelief”. Like children playing in the garden, the audience undertakes to believe the deception of theatre: the man in the wire mask is a great horse; the Greek woman describing a massacre is actually seeing it, and so on. The design of the auditorium facilitates this: the curtain rises; the house lights go down; the stage lights come up. Silence falls. The actor moves or speaks. We move with her.
But now, in a new, emergency situation for theatre, we ask that the “online theatre” audience undertakes this “suspension of disbelief without the aid of the dimming lights, the community in the room, the physical presence of the actors.
In short, we ask that the audience comes at the work prepared.
At home we do not often prepare. We flop down in front of the telly; we grab lunch as we move around the house; we flick through Whatsapp messages almost unconsciously. But we do prepare for some things! We prepare to go out for a special occasion, with make up and perfumes or a clean shave and a fresh shirt. We prepare for the arrival of visitors by digging out the good crystal, laying the table, cleaning up the place a bit.
So, for this “online theatre event” we unashamedly ask the audience to prepare!
While they might well enjoy “The Pilgrims of Slieve” on a mobile phone as they shuffled around tidying the kitchen, it was unlikely! Having paid good money to have us in their homes., we wanted them to get full value from us: to think of us as visitors, arriving, bearing gifts.
Get your house and your head ready, we said! Prepare to relax! Prepare to travel with us on a journey of the imagination.
Precisely what might this involve? A list of simple, practical tips to achieve it was published on a resource page accompanying the show. It applies to most online theatre experiences. You can read it below:
THE PILGRIMS OF SLIEVE
TOP TIPS FOR VIEWING:
Watching a 90-minute online play is very different to just flopping down to watch a TV show.
Here are 10 top tips to make the most of your Ten Euro Ticket.
We recommend that you:
“HOLD THE PLAY, HOLD THE PLAY, I’M JUST OUTSIDE THE THEATRE!!!”
1. “Arrive on time and ready”: Don’t find yourself running around after the play starts, looking for speaker cables or whatever. Once you sit down, sit down!
2. Watch on a laptop rather than a phone. (You can also watch on a Smart TV, but the medium scale of the laptop gives the best picture).
3. Arrange the viewing room so you can sit comfortably in front of the laptop.
4. Dim the lighting in the viewing room, even if you don’t normally do this for TV. This is theatre, not television.
5. Use external speakers, if you have them! Sound is important. The better the speakers, the better the experience.
6. TURN OFF ALL MOBILE PHONES!!!!!
7. You might like to pour yourself a drink: maybe even indulge in a box of chocolates! But have it all ready in advance. Don’t be getting up mid-way through to go to the fridge or the loo.
8. Think of anything else that might disturb your viewing, and do your best to deal with it beforehand: the barking dog; the roasting dinner; the children’s bedtime. We know that every home has its own circumstances and some interruptions are inevitable. YOU know what is best in your “home theatre”!
10. ONE FINAL INSIDER TIP! You can (and preferably should) watch the full 90 minute drama in one sitting. But if you really need to step away, you can of course pause it after 35 minutes (End of Act 1) or 70 minutes (End of Act 2)!
Big Work Hug! NYU students of Applied Theatre share a moment during devising. Giant’s Causeway (2017)
In Ireland when I was growing up, hugging was not a thing. As a boy you hugged your Mammy, but that stopped at around 9 years of age. I probably hugged my Dad but I don’t remember it. That would have stopped even younger.
While some of the trendy teenage girls in Monaghan in the 1970s probably hugged each other on meeting, I don’t recall it being done in the presence of boys. I don’t recall ever being hugged as a teenager, except as part of my terribly awkward courtship efforts with equally awkward girls. I never hugged a boy. Professional footballers were beginning to do that on the television, but in St. Macartan’s school for boys, to hug a fellow would not have been a wise idea.
I may have hugged my Mother goodbye when I left home to move to Dublin at 17. If I did, it would have been a stiff and perfunctory gesture. In Dublin, I dropped out of teacher training college after a few weeks and went to work in a rather dull office job with Dublin Corporation. Some of the people there were remarkably modern and free thinking – philosophers and a few philanderers – but still no hugging. A manly handshake maybe, at a moment of achievement or a formal occasion. No hug.
Then I left and went to France for a long Summer. “Je t’embrace!”, relative strangers would say, and they would hug you. I liked it, although I was initially confused. The middle-aged farmer woman who was my employer hugged me. Is this OK? I wondered momentarily. But I understood intuitively that it was no more than a more “expressive” way of saying “Good Evening, the dinner is laid out!” At home, on the streets and via British television, we would have said “The French are very expressive!”, with just a little hint of sexual innuendo. For we knew no better.
Then I moved to Germany and everybody was hugging – at least all the young people were. Big bears of men welcomed me into their friendship circles with a hug. The Turkish men on the assembly line where I worked hugged each other. I befriended an Algerian man and the first time he hugged me, I felt safe in his companionship. I met and fell in love with a young German woman. Her girlfriends became my women friends and they always hugged me. I went on anti-nuclear marches and gay rights protests and everybody hugged everybody. I grew to love a good hug.
Meanwhile in Ireland it was the mid 1980s, and hugging was becoming more evident – perhaps with migrants returning, perhaps in tandem with the liberalisation of secular society. I moved from Munich to back to Dublin in 1984 and went to Trinity College where I joined the Players drama society where much hugging went on, and the Modern Languages Society which had a more mixed membership, from arty bohemians to earnest young academics, but hugs were acceptable there too. My German girlfriend could not settle in Ireland and left for home. My new life began. I joined the theatre and became involved in left wing protest politics. Gradually, invisibly, across society and age groups, hugging became common. My mother died young of cancer, at 62. I held her in my arms the day of her terminal diagnosis and we wept together.
I have been missing hugs. We hug at home, but for four months I have not hugged anyone outside my household. On March 12th, I attended the funeral of my dear old friend Gerry Morgan, who died – like my mother – too young, from cancer. It was the day before Lockdown and social distancing was being phased in. All the old pals, most of them theatre people and inveterate huggers, went around touching off each other, elbow to elbow in a strange new dance, while we still thought that such an aloof but proximate gesture was safe. At least we were there to see Gerry off in a moving ceremony.
Since then, I have lost a further four people who were either very dear to me or who were significant figures in my professional life. I have mourned their deaths alone at home: Larry McCluskey, an older man who loomed large at various points of my career – not an intimate friend but a man I held in some esteem and at whose funeral I would have met many dear friends; Liam O’Neill an ex-colleague I had warmly loved, who died of COVID 19; Mary McPartlan the singer, my mentor and beloved friend for a short period a decade ago when I worked at NUI Galway – another woman who died too young of cancer; Phil Taylor, exactly my age, a noted theorist and Head of the Educational Drama school at New York University who I grew to know after I began to work with their Dublin Study Abroad program in 2006; others in my local community I might not have known well, but were my good neighbours.
Last night I lay alone awhile in my bedroom listening to a beautiful recording of Mary McPartlan singing a song of loss. Mary was a woman who gave a good, powerful hug. I missed her hug. It occurred to me that I had not hugged anybody in the mourning of her untimely death – no former colleagues, none of the artists who worked with Mary and me those two years in Galway, none of the former students with whom I have stayed in touch; no member of her family. I felt a new kind of loneliness and loss.
We need to greet. We need to grieve in community. I need a hug, not a “virtual hug” – they don’t cut it. I went back to work outside the home for just one day this week, into a rehearsal room with fabulous colleagues, for a play reading. It was good to see them all again and to hear their voices echo in real airspace and not on headphones. But the smiles and coy waves on arrival, across our socially distanced work table, were as awkward to me as a hug was when I was 14. I look forward to the day when a hug is a thing again.
VIDEO: Mary McPartlan in performance. Courtesy of TG4.
Last night, when I heard Gerry Morgan had died, I could find no suitable words and so I kept away from Facebook. Instead, I went onto YouTube to search for a version of “Mary from Dungloe” that might capture the haunting anguish of actor Niall Murray’s rendering, in Gerry’s debut play “Farewell to Kind Relations” – an event seared in my memory. I couldn’t find one. There are about 100 versions – most pretty awful. Christy Moore does a nice opening verse on a Late Late Show special, but then he is joined onstage by Daniel O’Donnell, and – no disrespect – but it sort of goes downhill from there. Gerry would have loved the irony of my dilemma. As a party piece, he did a wonderful impression of Daniel. He even wrote a song to his beloved mother and performed it in perfect Daniel style.
That was back when we were all young. He was my great companion. We went separate directions in more recent years but kept in touch from time to time in the modern way, by liking or responding to one another’s Facebook posts: he from Carlow; me up here in the North East. I enjoyed his posts: they were the same mix of intelligent mischief and righteous outrage that made him so charming as a young, innovative theatre artist – years ahead of his time. He had a fierce, adult passion for justice. But he had the impish grin of a ten-year old Ballyfermot boy.
He was a walking contradiction. He was the original of the species when it came to devising and improvising in the theatre workshop and on the stage, but he was the least “arty” person I ever met in an arthouse. He could have become a leading theatre director, but he had zero interest in fame or status or hierarchies. He made theatre because he cared about people and their stories.
I was in my first few months of a five-year term at City Arts Centre when I met him. My job, incongruously then, was as Enterprise Officer – allegedly overseeing business aspects of a community arts centre. I only later became theatre programmer. It was 1990-91, and the tiny studio venue was just opened. It was managed by the wonderful Noel McHale who knew everything you could possibly know about the live music scene but, by his own admission, almost nothing at all about theatre. Noel would ask me for advice occasionally, when groups came to hire the space. One day he told me he had a proposal in but didn’t want to waste my time with it. “There is no script; they’ve done nothing before – other than bits in college; there are no actors yet. There’s just a few notes about the Famine”. I had a look. A spiral bound five-page document with a crude drawing of a ship on the front. A proposal to find ten willing actors to research the darkest ancestral pain of our people and come up with their own stories which Gerry Morgan – abetted by his artistic pal Conall O’Connor and co-director Declan Drohan – would weave into an immersive drama. Some deep instinct was stirred. “Look. Maybe we should take a chance,” I suggested, and to Noel’s credit, he did. It was a decision which would change my life in more ways than I could have imagined.
The show, “Farewell to Kind Relations” was terrific. The audience sat on tea chests, as though trapped in the hold of the coffin ship of dreams which he and his collective of largely unknown young actors created. They called themselves Galloping Cat. They were not the first company in Ireland or elsewhere to devise a historical drama; they were not the first to blend monologue and movement; they were not the first to wear their political message on their sleeve. But there was something unique and empowering in the blend. It may have been Gerry’s utter absence of ego and vanity. He was an exceptional facilitating director. He was much more concerned that this should be the actors’ recall of the ancestral story than that it be his. He knew that this act of trust would yield a rich, collective tale – a true communal memorialising and dissection of a communal disaster. In 1990, nobody else was doing this, quite in this way. And the trust was two-way. The actors loved Gerry and gave of their best.
Sharon Cromwell and Nicole Eve Rourke in “Farewell to Kind Relations”
And what actors; what artists in the making! Others will write, I hope, about Galloping Cat’s (and later Theatre of Joy’s) continuing ouvre – plays concerning Cromwell; the Bible; the Shoah; and about the great work they did in association with aFri- Action from Ireland – animating tribal walking paths that were used by Irish famine refugees in different parts of the country, with primal outdoor theatre. And I am sure others will write of Gerry’s more recent career as an influential college teacher and supporter of the arts in Carlow. But what particularly strikes me is just who those actors were, that were drawn in the early 1990s to this small, quiet man’s vision and invitation. Some have gone on to international TV, theatre and film fame; others to campaigning work; others to theatre teaching and facilitating. There are 15-year olds in youth theatres today who are learning techniques and values from facilitators who in turn were trained by facilitators whose first theatre gigs were with Gerry Morgan. His influence is everywhere. I know that my own work draws from things I learned from watching, arguing with and listening to Gerry Morgan. He joined our team at City Arts Centre and we worked together closely and happily for four years.
I befriended many of the Galloping Cat actors and in due course married one of them, Sharon Cromwell. Gerry Morgan was groomsman at our wedding. Sharon is one of the many people who have acknowledged that their own paths – in Sharon’s case as Artistic Director for many years of Droichead Youth Theatre – might have been very different had they not learned from Gerry Morgan. He brought care, compassion and rare humility to bear on his great gift for directing theatre. His influence continues to extend far and down the generations. My thoughts are with his mother Ena and daughter Abaigéal, both of whom he held dear. I hope it may comfort them that he changed our world for the better.
The Arts Council of Ireland /An Chomhairle Ealaíonn published a useful report and set of guiding principles yesterday, Feb 11th 2020, on the matter of the remuneration of artists. A link to the report can be found at the end of this short essay. This is a set of personal reflections on livelihood, politics, the value of networks and the need to take care of ourselves and one another.
Maybe because they value their lives, nobody has offered to pay me in the currency of ‘exposure’ for a long time. I have been lucky and happy this past two years, (after 8 years of struggle before that), to have had a range of artistic projects on the go, from which I earn a modest living: some self-started (solo shows etc), others by invitation, through tendering or awards won; some funded, some self-sufficient; some vividly exciting, some less exciting – gigs to pay the mortgage etc – but all enriching once I got stuck in.
Next year might be barren again – that’s the way this business can be and it is vital as an individual artist to have strategies to engage with this reality. One is to be active and articulate in the politics of arts investment – read and act upon the National Campaign for the Arts manifesto; read blogs by John O’Brien and others who are proposing solutions as well as pointing out the problems; attend election arts hustings, network meetings of colleagues etc.; hang around afterwards to chat; have no truck with entities who think to engage you without proper payment; learn how to influence parliamentary decision-making; protest … all of these.
And where you might consciously volunteer to work for free or for your base expenses (e.g. in a young cooperative or at a showcase), let it be your call with a clear goal and timeline that you have worked through, and absolute transparency from those engaging or collaborating with you. For instance, I will quite happily take part in a few weeks, for the third time, in the Monaghan Arts Network Showcase, where professional and non-professional artists gather monthly with the public, to listen, share, promote and converse about the value of art in a rural county. I know that arising from this, when I come to present my new James Joyce solo show in September at the Garage Theatre, there will be an informed and keen audience for it. I know too, that – far from the cliché of indifference, there are swathes of people in my stomping grounds of Monaghan, Louth and Fingal (and I am sure many other regions) who care a great deal about art. I derive joy from meeting them and performing with and among them in mutually respectful circumstances – like trad musicians who meet every now and again for a session.
Chatting with visual artist Kate Beagan: Monaghan Arts Network Showcase, Íontas Arts Centre 2019
I acknowledge that not every artist can work as I have happily done for most of my career – as a jack-of-all-trades ‘public artist’, equally at ease engaging with communities, dropping in and out of schools, working collaboratively with top professionals on productions, writing my own stuff, performing solo shows and so on. Some phenomenal actors I know and respect will only act, and will act only within professional theatre and film/TV settings; some opera singers will perfect their craft and only sing on the top stages; some composers need to be left alone to compose. Others – some happily, some unhappily – will pursue what visual artist Jesse Jones eloquently described, in her stirring speech at the Arts Council report launch yesterday, as a “side hustle” – a part-time job to keep meals on the table. All are part of the mosaic of Irish artistic and cultural life and should have guaranteed opportunities to thrive, pay the rent and, if they so wish, raise families, while pursuing their art and enriching the nation. Future arts provision, from implementing copyright legislation to direct state investment (call it funding if you prefer) needs to take constant cognisance of this imperative.
The new Arts Council principles are a step in the right direction but only a beginning. They address the days you will be working. That’s a good thing. They don’t – and cannot – solve the bigger issues of livelihood, rent exploitation, the decline in employment protection in the world generally, and so on.
And that leads me to another observation: until the world changes for the better, beyond what seems possible right now – there WILL be times and situations where even the finest artists will be without work, stressed with doubt and fear. I personally know actors and directors of the highest calibre who have not had respectable work opportunities for a long time. The destruction of the independent theatre sector by the Arts Council in 2010 was part of this for many of my best friends; the changing emphasis in the Abbey Theatre has impacted on others; the decline in film production – and so on. So personal strategies to face up to societal and industry changes do matter. This is not to say, “get over it” or “get on with it” – I have railed and protested about the disastrous disinvestment in independent theatre consistently since it occurred. Protest and political action, however, are a slow game; we will not change the world overnight. And so I am inclined to ask, what can we do personally to stay strong? Activism is one strategy: it does create community, if we gather to talk and campaign together. And community is a good thing.
Activism …. and whatever else it takes. In your life, in my life; in your home, in my home. Creative artists need to use their creativity to survive, protect their families and also protect one another, while never losing sight of the imperative to make art nor losing sight of their own immense (if under-valued) place in a functioning society. I am talking here about our mental health; I am talking about information-sharing and solidarity. I have been to dark and low places over the past decade. I did not necessarily advertise the fact at the time: one doesn’t. I had supports, from family, colleagues and mentors. I had my own mantras and philosophies. Like many of my enduring friends, I am still here – and it is going well for me, for now.
If anyone I know – or don’t yet know but maybe should – is on that rock or in that hard place where it is not going so well, I would be delighted any time to chat.
I have not been shy to criticise The Arts Council over the past eight years for certain flawed and damaging policy decisions it foisted upon the arts sector in the months and years following the banking collapse. So I am happy now to acknowledge some positive changes.
The new ‘Arts Grants’ scheme, following on from the ‘Strategic Funding’ programme recently rolled out, will help to restore structure and common sense to the financing of the performing arts in Ireland (and other art forms that I know less about).
Arts organisations, as well as individuals proposing collaborative approaches, can apply for funding for programmes of work over 18 months whereas hitherto unfunded bodies could apply only for a single project. And unlike under the ‘Strategic Funding’ strand, there are no requirements to have been the recipient of a recent Arts Council award in order to apply.
In other good news, once off project funding will continue to be offered, running alongside the new Arts Grants. You may apply under one strand or the other, but not both.
What this means is that those artists who have shied away (or turned away in distaste) from the unseemly competitive aspect of the once-off awards can now propose longer, slow-burn, multi-faceted programmes. In short, companies can behave as companies naturally incline to do and hope to be financially supported. They can plan, say two or three shows over an eighteen month period while developing another in the laboratory or commissioning a writer or engaging in some way with a community. They can also anticipate a modest contribution to the overheads of running an active organisation.
Meanwhile, individuals and small collectives that genuinely prefer to meet up for single projects and then scatter again can still apply for Project Awards. Gradually some beneficiaries under both these strands may choose to pitch for Strategic Funding – and so on. A degree of order and progression and continuity is restored.
Of course it is not a simple business. As lucidly explained by Arts Council staff at clinics in Dublin and Cork this week, the application process for Arts Grants is arduous and complex. You don’t just write your three good ideas on a page and sign your name. The density of form-filling, of partner-searching, tax clearance requirements, financial information, verification of additional funding and so on, simply to apply, will deter many individual artists or younger ensembles without the requisite adminstration training and resources. I would safely speculate that a solid proposal could involve the equivalent of five to seven working days on the part of an applicant – with the deadline only six weeks away. That’s five to seven days without any pay (you cannot pay yourself retrospectively even if successful and you certainly cannot if you lose out); five to seven days you will never get back. If you were to hire someone to do the work, even at cut down ‘arts consultancy’ rates, you would need to invest €1000 – 2000. What unfunded artist or ensemble has that to gamble?
Also, the Arts Grants category, like every other Arts Council scheme, by its nature is still highly competitive and exclusive. There will be more applicants than awards, more money sought than is available. It was ever thus and it shall continue to be thus for as long as Ireland remains bottom of the European league in the matter of percentage GDP and GNP invested in culture. To be fair, however, that anomaly is not of the Arts Council’s making – it is a broader political issue. The Council can only work with what it is allocated. My frustration with the Council over recent years has not been because of the level of funding it distributes: I know the blame for that lies elsewhere. It’s been to do with how the Council chose to approach its national investment responsibilities.
For all the drawbacks, I think that this new scheme begins to address a gaping hole that has existed since the cuts of 2009. That fissure has been very problematic for promising young artists at the point of wanting to make serious career choices. Into that crevice also have fallen quite a few mid-career and late-career artists who were unceremoniously cut out in the thoughtless rationalisation of viable companies seven and eight years ago. Some disappeared. Others have fought to survive, making art in new and different and usually unsatisfactory circumstances. Some of these may dare now once again place trust in a system that can recognise quality, respond to the real way in which artists work and provide space for longer term thinking, imagining and relaxing. Not relaxing by the pool on taxpayers’ money, but approaching their work – the development of the world’s new ideas and visions – in a non-stressed-out or less anxious state of creative readiness
The devil will be in the decisions. There are no new funds from Government underwriting this new strand, only a more strategic redistribution of current limited allocations, and therefore there cannot be winners without losers. Also, in the super-politics behind all this, the implications of the new body, Creative Ireland, which does not appear to be part of any dialogue leading to these developments, may queer the pitch. But focusing on the Arts Council as the historic statutory institution for the development of the arts in Ireland, an institution which, in the view of this writer, lost its bearings for a while but is regaining its ballast, today is a good day.
The introduction of structures that seem to reflect the way things organically form rather than trying from on high to rearrange the very way artists and organisations think is surely a step in the right direction.
I would say, with hand on heart, that ‘Frank Pig Says Hello’ was one of the best pieces of theatre with which I was ever associated; a genuine groundbreaking event.
And everything comes back around eventually. These past three weeks I have mainly been preoccupied with producing ‘Frank Pig’ along with ‘The Leaves of Heaven’, the double bill of plays by Pat McCabe at the Dublin Theatre Festival for Co-Motion Media. I don’t produce any more, other than (reluctantly, because nobody else will) my own plays on tour. But this collaboration between Pat and my fellow Co-Motion director, Joe O’Byrne, is rather special. That’s partly because the last time we all collaborated was exactly 25 years ago when the first part of the double bill premiered; ‘Frank Pig Says Hello’, the stage version of Pat’s award-winning novel ‘The Butcher Boy’, but with a different title and a somewhat different take.
The wonderful new pairing of Darragh Byrne and John Ruddy in ‘Frank Pig’ DTF 2017
I take no artistic credit for the work – my job as producer then, as now, was to confirm bookings, write cheques, ensure posters went up and so on. But to witness Pat, just emerging in 1992 as a soon-to-be superstar of Irish literature, and Joe – a wizard of the stage – collaborate on this magical production was a real privilege.
The show opened at Lombard Street, the original TCD Drama Studies performance space, a former coffin-maker’s workshop. Much of my limited experience of theatre management to that point had consisted of discreetly removing the front row of seats to make the sorrowful numbers look a bit better for actors, in the small independent shows which were all the go by the early 1990s – often quite excellent plays, but definitely minority sports. Suddenly I found myself on box office duty every night with a hit on our hands, gaping down the coffin-maker’s stairs at queues that wound around the corner onto Pearse Street.
Frank Pig was the sensation of the 1992 festival. I recall my heart sinking as I sold the very last ticket on the final night, and then looked down the stairs at the disappointed waiting list only to see the brilliant human rights journalist Mary Holland who I knew and hugely respected. She had no ticket: we had to send her packing. The house was bulging. It helped, of course, that the novel of the same story had appeared a month or two earlier and had suddenly and deservedly been short-listed for the Booker Prize. But there was more to this phenomenon than an opportunistic adaptation of a bestseller.
A THEATRICAL MASTERPIECE
Pat’s tale of the wide-eyed provincial boy whose disappointments become epic and whose innocent confusions charm us all the way to his dreadful murderous deed, is unique in how it succeeded in novel, movie and play form. The play stands out however as a theatrical masterpiece in its own right. We have grown rather accustomed nowadays to the smart two-hander where one or both actors plays multiple roles. In 1992 such clever plays did exist, but none quite like this. The world of Francie Brady, trapped in a pathetic childhood even into early manhood, was conjured up through two extraordinary performances guided by the most subtle direction. To this day, friends who saw the play only once or perhaps twice, still quote from it to me: ‘Ah, the Old Pig Days’, or ‘Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello… helloooo!’ or ‘Am I doin’ good sweepin’, Da, am I doin’ good diggin’?
Two weeks ago I attended the first read-through of the new production by two young actors, one of whom wasn’t even born when the original ‘Frank Pig’ burst onto the scene, and I felt the immense excitement, sorrow, awe and painful laughter that I recall from those days. The current cast are superb, just as the original guys were. And the play is as fresh and immediate as the day it was written. Plus, there is an added bonus. ‘Frank Pig’ is re-presented at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival alongside ‘The Leaves of Heaven’, a new companion work by Pat, and the two will form a unique double bill. Theatre enthusiasts can, of course, choose to see just one or both. But both, being short, is highly recommended. ‘The Leaves of Heaven’ finds Francie Brady 25 years later, preparing to leave Dundrum Mental Hospital for a new facility, reflecting on old ghosts and new visions. A mature and exquisite work of words, images and moments of belly laughter, it enjoyed a brief run in The Complex last year and is now about to be seen by a much wider audience at Draiocht, Blanchardstown and Axis, Ballymun.
David Gorry and Sean Rocks in the original 1992 production
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THE CRAIC WAS NINETY IN ’92
Returning to 1992, when the Dublin festival eventually ended, I sat down one day with Joe O’Byrne in the old Co-Motion office in a run down building on Thomas Street, discussing what we might do next with this artistic gift entrusted to us. “Let’s call Michael Colgan”, one of us said, and we both chuckled merrily at the absurdity of this idea. Michael Colgan ha ha ha! But why not? We didn’t know Mr. Colgan then, other than by the reputation he had already cultivated for himself as a kind of enigmatic Mr. Big in Irish (and British) theatre. Well, we would be just as big! I tilted back the rickety stool that served as my office chair, put both feet up on the table like a classic movie mogul, and turned the dial – yes it was an old black dial phone. I mentioned Pat McCabe’s name to the receptionist. “Just a moment…” Michael took my call. He bought in and brought his legendary producer’s skills to the work, assisting us along the road to international fame.
At Colgan’s invitation, we revived the show for a week at The Gate, and shortly afterwards returned there for four weeks. My mother, Joan, was in her dying days, losing her long battle with cancer at the young age of 62. She came with my Dad (who lived on to be 94) to the grand opening and was introduced to Gay Byrne among others. She had by now resigned herself to the troubling reality that I was going to work in theatre probably for the rest of my life, and had begun belatedly to warm to some of the weird plays I had performed in or promoted. This was a particularly great night, and she whispered to me that she was proud of me. I accepted her praise, knowing I was basking really in the genius of two other men, but I felt I had her blessing to continue at my chosen trade wherever it might take me. I guess I owe that and a lot more to Pat McCabe.
‘Humorous songs and an old piano’ Pat McCabe in 1993
We went on a national tour, opening amidst tensions, in a hotel ballroom in Pat’s home town of Clones. Mischievous remarks he had made in an ironic newspaper essay had been misconstrued and there were rumours of planned pickets. None materialised. Up to the last day or two, however, booking was slow. A local radio announcer implored the people of County Monaghan to buy their tickets in advance from the Clones shop where they were on sale, because, allegedly, hordes of cultural bargain-hunters were coming over to stockpile from Cavan where the tickets were a pound dearer for the following evening. On the night, the reception in Clones was fantastic – emotional and enthusiastic. A very late session was enjoyed by all in the Busted Sofa. The following afternoon we were all packed into the small van, the crew, the actors Sean Rocks and David Gorry, Pat, Joe and me. As we drove out of town on the short hop to Cootehill, we saw an old man with a black bicycle whacking dirt off his trousers, in an exact re-enactment of a scene in the play. “Me trousers, me trousers! Me trousers is covered in grace!” somebody said, and we almost veered off into a field, the van heaving with so much laughter.
The show sold out all over Ireland and then we went to the Royal Court in London. At the previews, in contrast to the raucous, knowing, tearful laughter that had greeted the work at home, the audience reaction was quite muted, although there was loud applause at the end. Londoners were seeing the darkness in the work but, we worried, not ‘getting’ that odd Irish brand of humour that has seen us historically through so much sorrow. At the premiere, however, one man laughed with great relish from the opening moments and very quickly the audience felt released to laugh with him. We wondered who he might be. None other than the late Dave Allen, mythic comedian. That night was spent in an Irish club in London somewhere, Pat singing humorous songs and banging on an old piano, his great buddy, the late Dermot Healy reciting absurdist limericks and everyone delighting in our success.
The show went on to wide international acclaim and toured to the USA and Australia, but I did not travel beyond London. My new day job at City Arts Centre was calling me back. An unknown emerging playwright called Conor McPherson had a show about to open. I look back at that time with great pleasure – a time before I began to write and direct myself, when my work was largely to do with assisting other artists to get started or make advances. Unlike Michael Colgan, I hadn’t a clue, really, about how the business of theatre worked, but I recognised a great artist when I met one and did what little I could. Pat McCabe was, and remains, one of the greatest. I am pleased now briefly to reconnect with the work which projected him from a promising novelist to an international icon, and to be part of introducing ‘The Leaves of Heaven’ where Pat and Joe rejoin forces with a fantastical new dream play of the great anti-hero of Irish writing, Francie Brady, aka Frank Pig.
I am particularly happy that a new generation will get to experience an hour and a half that changed Irish theatre and my life forever!
House of Fun: Brian Mallon as Francie Brady and Mairéad Devlin as a fellow patient. “Leaves of Heaven” 2017
The Dublin Theatre Festival season of ‘Frank Pig Says Hello’ and ‘The Leaves of Heaven’ (which can be enjoyed as single plays or as a double bill) will be officially opened on Wed 4th October at Draíocht, Blanchardstown by Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Heather Humphreys TD.
The season runs over two weeks at both Draíocht and Axis, Ballymun. Info and booking via Dublin Theatre Festival
Ah – the subsidised days… The Upstate Van: a familiar sight all over Ireland, pictured here in the Cooley mountains – often lent or hired out to colleagues
Anticipating tomorrow’s Theatre Forum touring debate at Draíocht, (and aware that tourng is only one part of a more complex set of relationships involving artists, arts centres and communities) a few random observations from a self-start, artist-led perspective.
1. Artists/Producers need to be audience aware – the gap between experimental innovation in a niche urban festival and the sensibilities of the audience on a typical wet Wednesday in a rural town is vast. But that does NOT mean create conservative crap! It means think very carefully about what you programme, for what context and when. Modern Irish audiences are sophisticated and diverse and I have never seen an audience reject a truly excellent work, no matter how challenging… once they were persuaded to be there in the first place.
2. Touring without subsidy is nightmarishly difficult: gruelling work for crews, long hours, long drives.
3. Working intelligently with quality venues on fair guarantees, however, a skeleton team of 4 (cast & crew) can travel an unsubsidised show in the regions and expect a basic living wage & per diems. Higher numbers of personnel than this on the road (without subsidy) suggest to me skimping on wages which (on tour in particular) is not cool, or else a remarkable skill at negotiating fees!
4. This math applies of course only if nothing goes wrong – like damage to a hired van; a bad box-office split call etc.. One single mistake can turn a successful tour into a personal disaster when there is no subsidy to fall back on.
5. Unless you are a commercial certainty (eg you are a famous TV comedian) avoid box-office-split-only deals, DO negotiate guarantees and never, ever rent – at least this way, if you control your costs, you have a bottom line.
6. I found tech standards universally high in theatres on my last few outings. As well as their technical proficiency, I found techies (as well as FOH people) welcoming, collegial, calm and appreciative of good forward planning.
7. Finally, touring has saved my soul. When funding as we used to understand it, when the implicit support of Arts Councils and media champions, when so many other old certainties were stolen from us by the collapse of the economy, the regional venues were left standing. I am forever grateful to a group of about 25 venue managers across Ireland who took risks on my two recent ‘comeback’ shows and worked with me to find audiences for the art I wanted to make. Above all I am renewed by those audiences – they came, they laughed, they listened, they fell silent, they applauded, (usually on their feet – although that strange habit alone does not always mean a thing was good!) and they restored my own belief in myself and in the joy of theatre.
My induction into the Irish theatre began in Munich, West Germany, in March 1984. I had been three years working in a car factory, blissfully unaware that there existed an active expatriate Irish community in the city. A group of them ran an informal cultural project. They hosted touring musicians from home, ran pub trad sessions and – each St. Patrick’s Day – presented a drama from the Irish repertoire. I received an introduction and joined the troupe as prompter. within weeks I was not so much invited as ordered to direct a play. They knew something that I still did not: that there was something productive I could maybe do. And so began a career…
Back home later that year, I entered Trinity College as a mature student where I became active in the drama and modern languages societies and took every academic Theatre Studies option available. I won a scholarship to return to Germany, to the Freie Universitaet Berlin, where I researched modern interpretations of classic German dramas while training part-time in dance performance. I began work on a translation of Hauptmann’s ‘The Weavers’ which was finally produced ten years later. Somewhere in there I began directing plays in German at Trinity College and met Joe O’Byrne who was likewise directing German language drama at UCD, and over a beer at a party we decided to form a professional theatre troupe.
Song of the White Man’s Burden: Co-Motion Theatre Company, Project Arts Centre 1987
And so I ran away from college shortly before graduating to join my own company. It was called Co-Motion and within three years it had become a minor legend in Dublin, presenting a diverse programme of plays, mainly translated German Expressionist works and cabaret-style performances, in cafes, galleries and eventually the Project Arts Centre. Joe began writing his own plays, grand spectacles drawing from the physical and visual traditions of Central Europe. I acted and produced, and picked up a couple of good reviews for my comic performances. Our work was quite political, but above all, under Joe’s direction it was robustly physical. We made a lot of noise and – although we did not know it at the time – we influenced the work of a number of young writers and directors emerging just behind us.
The Parade of Innocence Photo Derek Speirs: Irish Actors Equity quarterly
It was the late 1980s, a time of remarkable social and political ferment. I spent two years in the Socialist Workers’ Movement, contributing occasionally to their newspaper, standing in solidarity on picket lines for striking college cleaners and glassblowers, and speaking out at earnest if poorly-attended meetings about the British miners, the Iran-Iraq War, the Dunnes Stores strike and other class issues of the day. In 1989 I left SWM to pursue more immediate ‘reformist’ protest activism. I joined with theatre friends Charlie O’Neill, Donal O’Kelly, film-makers Breda Walsh, Pat Murphy and ultimately hundreds of others to form the artists’ wing of The Miscarriages of Justice Campaign. We joined human rights activists, trade unionists and community groups campaigning for the release of Irish and British prisoners wrongfully imprisoned on trumped-up terrorism charges. We created huge, vivid street theatre spectacles, altering the hitherto dull nature of street demonstrations and contributing to a groundswell that culminated in the release of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, and the exoneration of the Maguire Family, Nicky Kelly and others. For a year I was coordinator of the overall campaign group and I learned the value of collaboration with so-called ‘non-artists’. One highlight of that year was addressing a group of British parliamentarians at Westminster along with fellow-campaigners, as guests of a courteous and knowledgeable young MP called Jeremy Corbyn.
I was also drawn into the beginnings of arts policy advoacy in Ireland and was deeply involved in the Independent Theatre Association, a brief precursor of the more sophisticated Theatre Forum of later years. In 1990 I took up a job at City Arts Centre. I became Theatre Programmer, and for five fabulous years I had the privilege of running one of the most influential theatre development crucibles in Europe. Almost every director and playwright of note to have emerged in the second wave of independent theatre-making in Ireland during the 1990s, as well as scores of now-famous actors, made their professional debuts in the intimate confines of the 65-seater studio in the old ships’ chandlers premises on City Quay. City Arts ironically was never intended as an incubation space for professional theatre. It was first and foremost a community arts centre. But along with director Sandy Fitzgerald, gallery manager Tom Weir and other key staff members, we argued that allowing the spaces to be used equally and simultaneously for participatory local arts, disability arts and laboratory professional practice, we might help break down old and unhelpful barriers that saw one kind of creative process as superior or more worthy than another. In small ways, we persuaded emerging arts graduates to look beyond the academic and institutional limits and see how their work might connect with the realities of the inner-city, the suburbs and the wider society in which they were about to practice.
I pursued a few freelance projects during my City Arts Centre years, most enjoyable being directing the Dublin Disability Pride Parade. I began to speak out at arts conferences and write articles, one in particular in response to what I thought an isolationist position that had been adopted by the Abbey Theatre. Out of the blue, I received an invitation from the Arts Council to play an active part in the Review of Theatre in Ireland 1995-96, a year-long undertaking that would research and advise upon the diverse ways and places in which theatre in Ireland was now being made. From this flowed a new Arts Council policy that seemed to endorse and secure the role of independent theatre-making, children’s theatre, T.I.E, youth and community arts and so on, complementing the work of the Abbey, Gate and other institutions.
I freelanced around for a short while and then went to the Director of the Droichead Arts Centre, Paul O’Hanrahan with a proposal to research and in due course establish a professional, community-engaged theatre company in the large town of Drogheda in the border county of Louth. Paul somehow raised £1000 for my project research and from that, for a second time in my life, I formed an independent theatre company that would come in time to make a difference. Upstate Theatre Project was incorporated in 1997 by a Board of Directors comprising local activists and theatre people from Northern Ireland and the Republic. I was appointed Artistic Director. Declan Mallon became Community and Education Officer. Mary Scally was General Manager and we set out to reinvent the regional theatre model.
I finally had a platform to write and direct for the stage, not in the disconnected way I might have done had I gone straight from school to the arts, but rather in a collaborative approach. From the outset we worked with community groups, devising professional actors, designers and others committed, as I guess I was, to ideals of justice, peace, equality and so on. The timing was perfect. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement heralded the beginning of a new post-conflict era, and the challenges of peace-making became a key theme in our work. I hail originally from Monaghan. The border and the Troubles in Northern Ireland had haunted me personally and cast shadows over my home community all my life. Here was real work to be done.
Sinead Douglas in Epic, Traverse Theatre Edinburgh (2002)
My first full-length stage play ‘Hades’ was set in a mythical border town in the days and months following the signing of the Belfast Agreement. It won a Stewart Parker Award. ‘Hades’ toured all over Ireland culminating in a historic performance at the OMAC in Belfast on the first anniversary of the Agreement, as local and world politicians down the street wrestled with the collapsing peace process. It was later seen in Brussels. My follow-up play ‘Epic’ also toured North and South and transferred to Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. I dusted down and directed my own translation of Hauptmann’s blockbuster classic of uprising and aftermath, ‘The Weavers’; and also a version of ‘Macbeth’ that featured a groovy remote control spotlamp in the role of a British Army helicopter training its futile light beam from on high on the murder of Banquo. Ex-Waterboys composer Colin Blakey was a regular collaborator and artist Maureen Finn designed our costumes, earning an Irish Times Award nomination for her work.
At the same time, Declan Mallon and I along with other hired-in artists worked year-round with community drama groups that we had helped to form, along the border counties, under the Crossover Theatre banner. And we pioneered new ways for existing community groups to create vivid dramas of their own invention, some directly political, but often simply concerned with liberating creativity and fostering community cohesion. Among these was an acclaimed work called ‘Zoo Station’, developed with Termonfeckin Macra, a rural organisation, which became the first ever such community play to feature on the Dublin Fringe programme.
At Peace, Upstate 2007
In the mid-2000s we were joined by artist and manager Paul Hayes who brought new ideas and energy to our work. We had turned our attention to intercultural work, responding to the radically changing demographic of the town and region, and ‘Journey from Babel’ stands as a particular highlight. This was a promenade performance in a disused garment warehouse at Drogheda Port, tracing the history of migration, devised and performed by fifteen local residents of eight nationalities. The project became the subject of an academic study by Dr. Charlotte McIvor of NUI Galway. In the meantime, the company had been selected as a field partner by New York University for its annual Applied and Community-Engaged Theater programme at Trinity College. Through all these years, the Arts Council part-funded the company’s work, matched by the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation. The Arts Council however was less convinced than the universities, the European Union or the borderlands communities themselves of the value of our work, and in 2008 it suddenly reduced our funding following one problematic production.
‘At Peace’, a tri-lingual drama developed with members of the Nigerian and Latvian communities in counties Louth and Dublin, and with a professional cast drawn from Lagos, London, Riga and Dublin, failed to please the critics at the 2007 Dublin Fringe Festival. It was under-rehearsed, beset by internal tensions and – doubtless – under-written. The subsequent public spat with the Arts Council was unseemly and hurtful. We appealed their decision to reduce our grant, won the appeal chaired by an independent expert, but were still refused a restoration of the funds. But that same year the economy collapsed and dozens of our fellow companies around the country had their funding radically reduced also – or cut completely. The independent theatre movement as we had known it, fought for it and secured with policy and funding caved in almost overnight. It was devastating.
I took some time out to reflect and pursued a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Trinity College, retaining a part-time role with Upstate but preparing the company and myself for an amicable split which came in 2010 after 13 great years. Re-designated following talks with the Arts Council as a Participatory Arts organisation – but no longer a producing theatre company – Upstate has continued to survive and innovate under Declan Mallon’s direction.
And I entered the curious wilderness of the unsubsidised freelance arts for the first time in 25 years. It took a while to adjust. I gained exciting employment initially, spending two consecutive Winter semesters as Creative Director on the Applied Film, Writing and Performance course at NUI Galway until it was discontinued. I began a novel, only recently completed and now doing the rounds of publishers, and I finished out my time on a long-term public art project I had already begun with Iontas Arts Centre in County Monaghan. But then in 2012, I arrived home one day and found no job offers, nothing in the post from the Arts Council but rejection notes from the prize-giving schemes that were its new substitute for sustainable funding, and a heap of debt.
I wrote a short play for solo performance based on James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’, mainly to keep sane. My intention was to find an actor to play it. I would direct the work. But one morning I came to the curious view that I should perform it myself. I had not stood on a stage for 22 years, but was excited and magnetised by the idea of performing Joyce. With help from actor/stage manager Bern Deegan and director Gerard Lee as well as dozens of old friends who came out in support, ‘The Dubliners Dilemma’ took off. I self-produced it, forming yet another theatre company, Bachelors Walk, this time with zero subsidy. The show has toured to almost every major venue in Ireland, played literary and arts festivals at home as well as overseas in Moscow and Oslo. Four years on, I still perform it occasionally by invitation. Adapting and performing Joyce helped me to fall in love again with the theatre; to see that while art may be hindered or helped, it is not defined by funders or policy-makers but rather by artists and their relationships with the public.
Performing at ‘The Garden of Genius’ festival, Yasnaya Polyana, Russia
Over the past few years, I have been engaged on a variety of freelance projects – some marvelous and stimulating, some quirky and ‘left-field’. A highlight was The Road to the Battle project with Louth Craftmark, a devised drama with an intercultural community cast, responding to the contested history of the Battle of the Boyne. Another was a public art development process in the rural district of Killesher/Florencecourt in County Fermanagh. I also directed the European premiere of The Hijabi Monolgues for Axis Ballymun, working closely with producer Niamh Ní Chonchubair, which brought me into contact with the growing Muslim community in Ireland. These freelance opportunities have kept me connected to communities and the collaborative practice that is a key part of my preferred way of working.
But I like to temper my freelance and community-engaged work with artistic projects that derive from my own imagination and compulsions. In 2012 I bought and read a tattered second-hand book at Balrothery flea market. It was written in 1937 by an author I had largely overlooked, about a political figure I had always viewed as the figurehead of a political tendency for which I had little sympathy. Something about the book seized me, compelled me to reconsider my received understandings, caused me to think deeply once again about violence, conflict and reparation – and in 2014 I began working on a new play, ‘The Big Fellow’, based on Frank O’Connor’s biography of Michael Collins.
In 2015 I reconnected with Joe O’Byrne and we formed Co-Motion Media, an echo of the original 1980s company but naturally different in outlook. It is a supportive platform to encourage artists to pursue their innovative projects in a still largely unfunded environment. Joe’s plays ‘The Rising’, ‘The Aran Islands’ (after Synge) and ‘Nighttown’ (Joyce) were produced in 2015-16. And then, in May 2016, in a co-production with Drogheda Arts Festival, I directed the premiere of ‘The Big Fellow’. It has played to excellent critical notices and healthy houses on its first tour and returns for a full national tour in 2017. As well as the two terrific actors Gerard Adlum and Cillian O Gairbhi and lighting designer Cillian McNamara, the team included my old collaborative partners from the glory days of Upstate, Colin Blakey and Maureen Finn.
Cillian O Gairbhi and Gerard Adlum in ‘The Big Fellow’: Co-Motion Media 2016
Producing your own work without either subsidy or a cohesive national infrastructure is stressful, but the imperative to make theatre, to collaborate with excellent artists, to engage with diverse publics and with the themes of our times and of history, does not stop because of failed policy priorities and fiscal rectitude. A platform of peers is helpful, but the workload and the economic anxiety of making a full-scale show, self-producing it, self-designing it, building a set, driving through the night from tour venues to your home and starting out again the next morning, is unsustainable. Two guys end up doing the work that teams of seven or eight did through most of our careers. It is a strange vocation, this theatre-making, this compulsion to engage with society, to connect with community to be part of change through the performing arts. But it is the only profession, in different variations, that I have known since leaving the BMW assembly line in the early 1980s. The applause, the laughter, the deep listening, the animated post show conversations all around the country provide reassurance when money is low. And things are changing again gradually, as political pressure to reinstate and reorganise arts funding intensifies. For now, there is work to be done and we get on with it.
