Feis to Feis encounters - Irish Theatre

There is a scurrilous rumour to the effect that it was the Irish who invented arts festivals – to give themselves an excuse for a party on the three nights of the month when any other excuse for a drink was lacking. This is a scandalous calumny, perpetrated and perpetuated by Lutheran and Calvinist nations whose idea of art in motion is a truck carrying turgid paintings – the Duke of This and the Countess of That – from one underused gallery to another.

The Irish idea of mobile art, on the other hand, is the exquisitely built Hedgehunter winning the Grand National (the greatest steeplechase in the world) for a Lancastrian owner and an Irish trainer and jockey, or an all-female conga line stepping out of a hen party in Dublin’s Temple Bar at 2 a.m.

Same concept; different execution.

The Irish word for “festival” is “feis” (pronounced “feysh”) and more than one of them are known as “Feisianna”, though no-one in their right mind could handle more than one a month. Indeed, I have sat through many a feis as both competitor and spectator and I assure you that Congressional Committees of Inquiry into the breeding habits of the natterjack toad are glittering Broadway highlights in comparison.

But before we glide across the glittering stage that is the Irish theatre, we have a significant choice to make. We are at a fork in the road. Are we talking about festivals performed by professionals such as the Wexford Opera bash or are we discussing the amateur version, in which amdram socs tour the length and breadth of Ireland playing J M Synge and John B Keane?

If the former, then I am happy to commend them to you as fine, upstanding examples of their genre. After several stagings of the Eurovision Song Contest in the Nineties (when the Brits always gave us full marks so that we’d have to pay to host the damned thing the next year, and the next…), Ireland became quite accomplished at “event management”. It is indeed deeply regrettable, in one sense, that professional event management – a.k.a. exercising diplomacy and common sense and organizing everyone and everything in sight – should be a fundamental contradiction of the spontaneous joie de vivre for which one half of this island is notoriously famous, if you catch my drift.

You, dear traveller, may not have noticed the subtle gentrification of the concept of a happy and convivial evening enjoyed by all-comers. Where once the allegedly dour northern Protestant could cheerfully reminisce about a couple of hours happily spent in ridiculing all and sundry – and primarily himself – and could sum it all up in the memorable: “It was quare good crack”; the very merest hint that one half the population was peddling adulterated cocaine to the other led the tourism authorities to produce the cod Irish – and italicized, to boot – concept of “craic”, which sounds like the first sliver of morning light to most of us.

But I digress. There are many well-run and highly enjoyable festivals in the length and breadth of Ireland. The Tourism Ireland, Failte Ireland and even the Northern Ireland Tourist Board’s websites will happily advise you as to the cultural treasure house which is modern Ireland, a veritable Tutankhamun’s tomb of goodies. Yes, and we all know what happened to Howard Carter, don’t we?

A swift canter through the “What’s On” section of any of the sites or the three leading upmarket dailies – The Irish Times, Independent or Examiner – will give you full and comprehensive listings of all the performing arts on the island. From the Gaiety and Abbey Theatres in Dublin to the provincial theatres which dot the island like leopardskin, there are endless shows.

Most major towns and cities have good theatres with regular programmes – and it’s not just Cork, Limerick and Galway. Belfast has the wonderfully ornate Grand Opera House, built at the height of its wealth in 1904 and rebuilt four times in recent years after bomb damage to neighbouring hotels and Unionist Party HQ. The GOH (not to be confused with Nashville imitations) survives by staging anything and everything. “Serious” drama tends to go to the smaller and more intimate Lyric, near the university but the Opera House gets by on musicals, pantomimes and one man shows. And the good burgers of Belfast (and Northern Ireland at large) are more than happy to keep it that way.

Having said that, there are a couple of provincial theatres in the north – the Riverside in Coleraine and the Ardhowen in Enniskillen who keep the flame alive in the most spectacular settings. Two small (400 seat) theatres, each serving their local community but with views to die for. The prospect from the Riverside bar down the river Bann to the hills of Inishowen and the view over Upper Lough Erne from the Ardhowen do more than enhance the performance – if tonight’s theme is in any part Irish – for example, Brian Friel’s “Translations” - they are the backdrop, no matter what’s on stage.

And this is your key to performing arts in Ireland. What most US travellers seek from their Irish experience is contact with the people. After all, there are no language barriers – though, on second thoughts, that might be a little optimistic. After all, being abruptly asked: “How’s she cuttin’?” on a fresh morning in Derry/Londonderry might give even the most intrepid explorer pause for thought. (Translation: “How are you this fine morning?”)
I am asked time and time again to design tours which offer US guests the chance to “meet the people” and for the life of me, I – and my fellow professionals – find it almost impossible to contrive a memorable and mutually pleasurable encounter. All we can do is arrange the circumstances in which such a happy meeting may occur. We lay out the chemistry set – it is up to you to create the fireworks.

The point to which I am slouching is that including a visit to a local theatre in your itinerary is well worth while. The local populace is generally in a good mood; most of your fellow spectators are fairly literate – and the drink does the rest.

And I suppose that it is a worldwide principle. I well remember my own adventurous parents telling me in later years of a delayed honeymoon in post-war Norway when the highlight of the evening was watching “Brief Encounter” – with Norwegian subtitles. Celia would glance meaningfully at Trevor and say – with unbearable poignancy – “Tea?” And three lines of Norwegian would appear below. On the other hand, he would pour his heart out to her – well, in as far as any repressed Englishmen ever poured out anything but tea in those days – and two solitary words would appear below. Wonderful stuff.

Which brings us back to amateur dramatics. If you ever – no, not “cross the sea to Ireland”, ‘cos that’s taken for granted – if you ever get the chance to attend an amateur dramatic festival, forget U2 and Coldplay at €80 a ticket. Given the present exchange rate, you could buy all the albums and get better value, anyway.

No – part with no more than €10 (£7) and attend amdram. It is one of the most pressing reasons – apart from knock-down air fares – for visiting Ireland in the off season. This is the one time when a good time is most definitely guaranteed for all. And I mean “good”. The plays can be anything from Shakespeare to Eugene O’Neill to Miller to British farces to Irish classics. You’d swear that Gogol, - no, not a Russian search engine, since you were on the point of asking - Chekhov and Dostoevsky all had Irish grannies. Don’t you? Don’t we all?

The audience is enthusiastic – so would you be if your family were up on stage – and sympathetic and because it is amateur drama, rather than professional, there is none of the tragedy so beautifully played out in Harry Chapin’s Mr Tanner. No destruction of careers and aspirations but a chance for all of us – audience included – to be someone and something else for a while.

Artifice it may be – but the post-performance get-togethers beat the cab home from the Met or wherever any day – and any night.

And if your idea of Ireland has been partly moulded by Riverdance, then the other great Irish institution, without whom no-one can understand the country, is the Irish dancing competition. For sheer competitiveness – I was going to say testosterone-fuelled but I think that’s hormonally incorrect – you have seen nothing (Step aside, Mrs Stallone, there’s a good woman) like the Irish mother of the seven year old dancing prodigy. Little Miss America, eat your heart out.

I once had the great good fortune to stumble – and given my less than serendipitous left feet, I mean “stumble” – across an Irish dancing competition for young ladies in a hotel which had better remain nameless, for its own sake. The locker room at the Super Bowl was an ashram of lotus blossom meditation and tranquility in comparison. Ferocious mothers spraying hair lacquer like agent orange – I was inadvertently sprayed and had to have my levels checked for months afterwards, you understand – and dresses well in excess of $2,000 – for six and seven year olds, some of whom were out of their minds with fear. But for one or two – and I have no idea gifted they were – these were the first steps to the top. You could see the naked ambition of life’s climbers burning like an Eleventh Night bonfire or an unchecked fever in their very bones.

And this what unites the amdram and the dancing girls – All the world truly is a stage – and in an age where we ourselves are worried that we have sacrificed the art of having a good, unrehearsed time on the altar of contrivance – a night at, well, perhaps not the opera (although no doubt The Barber of Sligo is playing to large crowds even as we speak) but a night at our own in-house entertainment will give you the chance – if you push discreetly – to open the doors of insight and encounter.

And even Mr Mojo would have been pleased at that.