Archive News
Canadian production of Enda Walsh classic for Druid stage
Date Published: {J}
MacKenzieRo, the Irish Repertory Theatre Company of Canada, will make their Irish debut next week at Druid Lane Theatre with four performances of their acclaimed production of bedbound by Enda Walsh. The play will run from Wednesday next, March 30 to Saturday, April 2.
It’s a fitting visit, given that Druid Theatre has such a strong connection with Enda Walsh. In fact the relationship between the Galway and Toronto theatre companies developed because of their shared passion for his plays.
Druid visited Canada in 2009 to perform The Walworth Farce. There they met Cathy Murphy and Autumn Smith, the founders and artistic directors of MacKenzieRo, who had presented Walsh’s Disco Pigs in 2007 before doing bedbound.
“Then we went to New York to see Druid perform New Electric Ballroom,” explains Cathy. There, she and Autumn got chatting to Druid’s General Manager Tim Smith and to Enda Walsh
“We all agreed we should come over to Ireland and do something,” says Cathy. “It might seem strange for a Canadian company to do an Enda Walsh play in Ireland, but we want to show how Enda’s plays related to Canadians and not just to the Irish diaspora. It cuts across geography.”
In bedbound a father and a daughter share a small bed. He talks frantically about his extraordinary past in furniture sales; she talks no less compulsively about anything at all, to fill the terrifying silence in her head. This feverish and blackly comic play offers a beautifully judged glimpse of redemption.
The Toronto press raved about MacKenzieRo’s 2009 Canadian premiere of bedbound, which is directed by Autumn and features Cathy as the polio stricken Daughter, with Canadian theatre legend Richard Greenblatt in the role of Father.
Sensibly the pair decided that MacKenzieRo’s actors would perform bedbound using their own accents rather than trying to imitate Irish accents because “we couldn’t do it”, says Cathy.
This production offers Galway audiences a rare chance to see Walsh’s much lauded play, which received its world premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2000, when it was directed by the playwright, before going on to win an Edinburgh Fringe First Award in 2001. It’s also a chance to see MacKenzieRo – which CBC News in Canada described as "Walsh’s biggest champion in Canada" – perform internationally for the first time.
MacKenzieRo came into being because Autumn and Cathy, both of whom are second generation Irish, wanted to bring contemporary Irish theatre, which wouldn’t normally be seen in Canada, to audiences in that country. It’s named after Autumn’s ancestors, who came from Fermanagh.
The pair also want to produce new Canadian work with a nod to the Irish-Canadian connection.
As part of that, they are bringing their own play Teacht i dTír – written in Irish and English – to Galway for a performance at the city’s Scoil Iognáid.
That play, about the 38,000 famine refugees who came to Toronto in 1847, is based on the Toronto and Ontario records of the time and shows how the Irish refugees more than doubled Toronto’s population in a few months.
Cathy and Autumn – both of whom speak basic Irish – are looking forward to seeing the students perform the work bilingually.
And a developing work from MacKenzieRo, The Rake’s Progress: Do You Know Where Tom Rakewell Is?, will also be read at Druid Lane Theatre on April 2 with a cast of Irish and Canadian actors.
Meanwhile, bedbound will be performed in Druid Theatre from Wednesday, March 30 to Saturday, April 2 at 8pm nightly. Booking at
The Town Hall Theatre: www.tht.ie or Telephone
091 569777.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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