At the Pumphouse theatre in Dublin Port on Friday, during a play called The Book of Names, I found myself trapped back stage in a small kitchen area, outnumbered by actors asking me uncomfortable questions. The play – which dramatises IRA activity in the port during the War of Independence – is one of those immersive theatrical experiences, in which the audience moves with the action, indoors and out, and is frequently consulted, singly or as a collective, about what should happen next.
This makes for some awkward moments where you’re unsure whether you should answer a question, in case you get it wrong and derail the plot. So when asked anything directly, I opted for minimalism and replies that were easily ignored.
Not everyone did. At one point, when several of us were lined up in an identity parade and the man next to me was asked several times if he was a certain named individual, he grew increasingly into character and in the end snapped: “I told you already, I’m not going to say it again.”
For a moment, I thought: Jesus, just give yourself up quietly, or you’ll get us all shot. But as I realised later, he knew the cast personally. He was just enjoying himself.
The Book of Names is powerful drama, although the power conferred on me during my kitchen cameo was too much for comfort. As an undercover spy produced pictures of IRA targets from her undergarments and handed them to an intelligence officer, I was asked my opinion on descriptions to accompanied them in the files.
That was okay. But then the archivist invited me to draw an “x” on one of the targets. I raised my hands, Pontius Pilate-style, and refused the pencil. That was the correct answer, I think. The IRA man looked at me sadly, muttered something about how the hard decisions are always left to others, then drew the “x” himself.
Eighteen hours later, during another event of great dramatic intensity, I found myself admiring the view of Dublin Port from the opposite side of the Liffey. It’s an accidental effect of the Aviva Stadium’s weird bedpan shape that from the press box, the ground’s low end seems designed to frame the port, including the giant Odlum’s flour-mill, somewhere behind which lurked the scene of Friday night’s spectacle.
The Ireland-New Zealand rugby match was an audience-participation event too, and not just in the usual ways. Before a ball was kicked, the scene was set by the home supporters’ decision to launch a chorus of the Fields of Athenry during of the All Blacks’ haka, which was drowned out as a result.
Some people think that was unsporting. I disagree. After a certain assault on Brian O’Driscoll some years ago, provoked by an imagined insult to the haka based on rules known only the offended, I lost a lot of patience with the whole cultural sensitivity argument.
I still enjoy the haka as theatre. But if the All Blacks can work themselves into a war-like frenzy just before a game, they can hardly object if Irish fans simultaneously sing the Fields. That, after all, is our version of communing with the power of the earth and our dead ancestors.
A theatrical weekend continued on Sunday, more quietly, when I watched this year’s Beckett in Foxrock production on a laptop.
Normally held in the old Beckett family church, Covid forced it online this year as two short films: Beckett Country, about the places he grew up, and The End, his short story, performed movingly by Marcus Lamb.
The films are now available online from TakeYourSeats.ie, but due to rules of the estate, tickets can be sold only until November 30th. For the Beckett fan in your life, it might make an early Christmas present.
Then Monday night, by circuitous chance, I found myself back in Dublin Port, this time for the after-show party of Elsewhere, the new opera that had opened earlier to a packed Abbey. The party was on the upper deck of the MV Cill Airne, a formerly State-owned ship, now a bar and restaurant, moored at the Beckett Bridge.
That vessel made history when built in the early 1960s. It and a companion were the last in Europe to be built with riveting. Thereafter, electric arc welding was the norm everywhere. It was an apt place to celebrate the opening of an extraordinary opera, dramatising the 1919 Monaghan Asylum lock-in.
The show is funny, sad, and deeply affecting. It is little exaggeration to say that, like the MV Cill Airne, the audience was riveted.