Archive News
Hollywood star Cillian goes back to his roots
Date Published: {J}
You are friends with people whose work you admire, but it’s rare you work together,” says Cillian Murphy.
The Cork actor whose film credits include Red Eye, 28 Days Later, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman Begins and Breakfast on Pluto, is in Galway putting the final touches to Misterman, the flagship show of this year’s Arts Festival which was written and is being directed by his good friend, Enda Walsh.
And certainly, the opportunity for audiences to see him working with Enda is one that has not occurred in over 15 years.
The two became friends in the mid 1990s when a young Cillian – then a UCC law student involved in Cork’s music scene – was offered the role of Pig in Enda’s groundbreaking play Disco Pigs. It changed his life.
“It was the biggest break you can have as an actor,” says Cillian as he and Enda take questions from the press in the city’s Radisson Hotel.
Disco Pigs was produced by Corcadorca Theatre Company and on it, he worked with Enda, actress Eileen Walsh and the play’s director Pat Kiernan. “I have never forgotten that,” he says
Disco Pigs came to Galway during the 1996 Arts Festival and “we had an amazing couple of weeks”, he recalls.
Seven years ago he returned to the city to play Christy Mahon on Druid’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, directed by Garry Hynes, and he has visited the Film Fleadh on various occasions as well.
“I love the place and the audience.”
It’s been six years since Cillian last appeared on stage and he compares his role in Misterman to “jumping in at the deepest end of the theatrical swimming pool. And it’s cold”.
Misterman is a one-man play in which Cillian takes on the role of Thomas McGill, a disturbed loner trying to come to terms with a massive trauma in his life. The action is set in a huge warehouse, where the audience realise that this could be the last hour and a half of Thomas’s life and if he doesn’t keep moving and talking, life will stop.
But while it’s a one-man drama, Cillian plays multiple characters as Thomas recreates conversations he has had with a host of residents of the midlands town of Inishfree, from which he is running away.
The good news for Cillian and for those who’ll be attending Misterman in the Black Box is that while the theatrical swimming pool is cold, “it’s getting warmer”.
The character he is playing is “funny and loveable, but as you’d expect from Enda’s plays, he’s not all there”, according to Cillian.
He and Enda compare the play to the BBC drama series,Ballykisangel – but it’s Ballykisangel gone wrong, with Enda exploding and magnifying “the clichéd Irish social stereotypes . . . through Thomas McGill’s eyes”, according to Cillian.
“It’s like Ballykisangel in the wrong hands, written by someone who is drinking absinthe,” adds Enda.
There’s an easy familiarity between Cillian and Enda and it’s obvious that they get on famously together. Both are based in London where their families live near each other, and they socialise together regularly.
A couple of years ago Cillian suggested over a pint that they should work together again and mooted revisiting an old play of Enda’s, Misterman.
Enda has written several screenplays, including that for the film Hunger, which won the Camera d’Or in Cannes, but he is probably best known as a playwright. His works include The Walworth Farce, New Electric Ballroom and Penelope – all of which were staged by Druid. He originally wrote Misterman for Corcadorca and took on the role of Thomas McGill when it was first performed in 1999.
It was inspired by the 1994 tragedy in which Clareman Brendan O’Donnell killed Imelda Riney, her three-year-old son Oisín and Galway priest Fr Joe Walsh in Cregg Wood on the Galway-Clare border.
The current production, which according to Cillian, is “almost operatic in scale” is totally different from that 1999 version.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
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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