… and that can be both good and bad for blogging. You couldn’t buy better writing material; just ten minutes ago a man walked past my bus stop in the driving rain, a lit cigar clenched tight between his determined teeth. But whether any of that material actually makes it into print is anybody’s guess. I’m waiting for someone to invent a way to sell extra hours and minutes in little jars; I’d go bankrupt in a heartbeat.
I spent most of the day on an errand for Memorial Hall in Rathmines. The Druid Theatre Company out of Galway is coming to UNC in the fall with two plays by Irish drama wizard J.M. Synge, In the Shadow of the Glen and Playboy of the Western World, the latter of which caused riots when it aired in the early 1900s to a conservative Irish audience. (It mentioned underclothes, which sent the crowd into hysterics; the Abbey Theatre kept showing it, only this time, with more policemen in the theater than actual audience members — 500, if I remember right.) I’ve been in contact with the Druids director to visit for a rehearsal and heard the company was working on Walworth Farce in Rathmines, a nearby suburb of Dublin, so I hopped a bus to see what all the talk was about.
For some reason I haven’t grasped yet, mentioning Rathmines elicits snickers from a lot of Irish people. It sounds like some kind of cultural inside joke — not that I have anything against Nebraska or the fine people who live there, but I do the same thing when someone mentions Omaha. It must be a “What would you need with Rathmines?” sort of thing. And what indeed? It’s a pretty nondescript little place. I had to walk past a bike shop, around a cricket pitch, and through a small maze of buildings to a small shed the Druids had been given to practice in. It wasn’t a bad day for walking.
I might have been a strange presence at the rehearsal; I didn’t want to interfere with their work so I didn’t talk much, but I was a one-man audience all the same, and I thank them for putting up with me. They’re rehearsing one of the strangest plays I’ve ever seen, Walworth Farce, which apparently staged first at the Druid playhouse in Galway. Basically, a man lives with his two sons, and makes them stage a drama every day of the story of their journey from Cork to London after he murders his brother and his brother’s wife over an inheritance — and if the kids don’t get it note for note perfect, he flies into a rage and threatens to kill them. They’re never allowed to go outside, except to buy food, which is always an imitation of the last dinner they had as a whole family in Cork. Utterly bizarre. But surprisingly poignant.
It’s been too long since I’ve been involved with a production. It was a pleasure just to sit and watch them build the thing from the ground up; the acting was so good that it was easy to forget I wasn’t watching real people, which made it all the stranger when someone blundered and had to call for a line. Fantastic way to spend the day. I’m going to try for a visit to Galway later, which should help me write a little piece for the Memorial Hall program that I owe Emil.
The walk home was one of the most memorable passages of the afternoon, and one of the most typical of Ireland. I arrived in sunlight, and left in slashing rain; caught outside without so much as a newspaper over my head, lulled into a false sense of security by the morning’s gray promise of sunlight. When I got to the intersection by the bus stop the storm had reached full blow already, the rain stabbing sideways like so many knives thrown parallel; and of course the light was red for me, and the 15-minute-running bus on the other side of the street was just getting ready to pull away from the curb. People driving by probably caught a glimpse of a soggy-looking American college student with plastered-down hair, pounding the light-change button with the heel of his hand, maybe giving the traffic light pole a good kick as the double-decker pulled away and plowed off toward city center. This country. It has the rainy-city image down to the point of being disgusting.
And as I’m writing this, the clouds have peeled away to either side, leaving what remains of the sun to peep through the trees into my window, painting the desk in gold. Whoever’s in charge up there, I wish he’d give us a warning before he decides to pour out the bathwater.
