Tuesday, October 11, 2011
While back in the Emerald Isle...
Last week to the Old Vic again to see 'Playboy of the Western World', near full and a good show. Our second exposure to drama from rural Ireland, the first being on or about March 29th 2009, 'Dancing at Lughnasa'. As it happens, Niamh Cusack was in both, and did rather well in both. On this occasion, neither she nor any of the other luvvies exercised their smoking privileges, although I grant that the script did not call for it quite so strongly this time around. Robert Sheehan and Ruth Negga also did well in the other two big roles.
They took a leaf out of the Globe's book with the cast lined up at the front of the stage doing a bit of folk song a couple of times during the proceedings. Complete with squeeze box and a small bodhran, a sort of drum which I am rather keen on but which I had confused with a lanbeg, a confusion which might have caused trouble in some quarters.
Splendid set, a rather splendid mock-up of a stone cottage making good use of a revolving stage. I am still wondering how you make replica stone walls without using stone, which all goes to show how fancy props can distract one from the business at hand. To which I reply that the fancy prop is an integral part of the business at hand. We do need to know the sort of place that the paddies were living in. Back in 1907 a Dublin audience might reasonably be expected to know but that was another time and another place. A parallel wonder of recent days has been about for how long pots and pans have been cheap and available to the working classes. I have heard that many rural poor in Ireland did all their cooking in a single cauldron over a peat fire - which I imagine to be rather like the cauldron exhibited at the Sutton Hoo museum - where it was a luxury item, chiefs only. The Irish version was said to have contained a never ending stew, fortified by the odd rabbit and cleaned out for feast days. I have also heard of tinkers trundling around mending pots and pans, something you certainly would not bother with now.
Another wonder has been the various times and placing where a bragging, far fetched and aggressive style of conversation has been the thing, provided, of course, that it is done with style and no one resorts to fists. The important thing is to be able to return the serve. Some inhabitants of TB are quite good at it. It used to be all the thing in the poorer quarters of Belfast, but I forget the special word they had for it. There is 'banter' in TB but that does not quite capture the spirit of the thing. Also all the thing in the aboriginal bars in our former colonies in Africa. Don't know about golf clubs as I am very rarely in one.
# posted by Jim @ 3:58 AM 
