Nine Irish Plays for Voices

By Eamon Grennan

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts.

In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration.

The rhythmic, musical, and vivid language of Grennan’s plays incorporates traditional song lyrics, lines of Irish poetry, and letters and speeches of the time. The result is a dramatic collage that tells a story through the voices of characters contemporary to the period of the play’s subject. By presenting subjects through the dramatic rendering of the human voice, the plays facilitate a close, intimate relationship between players and the audience, creating an incredibly powerful connection to the past. Historical moments and literary figures that might seem remote to the present-day reader or audience become immediate and emotionally compelling.

One of the plays, Ferry, is drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. It puts unnamed char­acters who come from the world of twentieth-century Ireland on a boat to the underworld with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On their journey the five strangers, played by two voices, tell stories about their lives, raising the question of how language both captures and transforms lived experience. Addressing the Great Famine, Hunger uses documentary evidence to give audiences a dramatic feel for what has been a silent and traumatic element in Irish history. Noramollyannalivi­alucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce is a one-woman piece that depicts James Joyce’s wife as an older woman sharing her memories and snippets from the works of her husband. Also included in this rich volume is the author’s adaptation of Synge’s Aran Islands, as well as Emigration Road, History! Reading the Easter Rising, The Muse and Mr. Yeats, The Loves of Lady Gregory, and Peig: An Ordinary Life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531502553

Book preview

Preface

The following nine short plays for voices were composed originally for Curlew Theatre Company, a small, three-person company formed in Renvyle, Connemara, by two actors—Seán Coyne and Ros Coyne (whose stage name is Tegolin Knowland)—and myself. I wrote and directed, Ros acted, while Seán acted and did most of the stage and tech work. Our first production (J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands) was in 2009, and we have done almost a play a year since then. In this brief introduction I don’t intend to offer a critical commentary on each play, since I hope, in either reading or performance, each play implicitly demonstrates its own purpose and point. The following paragraphs simply contain a few general thoughts that may be of some help and/or interest to the reader, in addition to the brief background information provided in the introduction to each play.

My general title notes the fact that the plays deal with material drawn from Irish history in Part One: Hunger; Emigration Road; and History!: Reading the Easter Rising; and Irish literature in Part Two: The Muse and Mr. Yeats; NoraMollyAnnaliviaLucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce; J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands; The Loves of Lady Gregory; and Peig: An Ordinary Life. Naturally those centered on literary figures deal with their public (i.e., historical) as well as private personae. The play called Ferry, though not directly based on Irish history or literature, has also drawn on material from both and serves as a kind of coda to the collection. In the composition of all of these, I’ve used many primary and secondary sources and materials in order to compose in each case my own many-voiced audio collage. Since the plays are neither works of scholarship nor works of literary criticism, I have not burdened the scripts with references. Since, however, J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands and Peig: An Ordinary Life are adaptations (one from Synge’s own prose book on the islands, and the other from Bryan MacMahon’s English translation of the Peig Sayers original autobiography), I have noted this fact in my introduction to each. In addition, I should say that The Muse and Mr. Yeats was directly prompted by the critical work WB Yeats and the Muses, by Joseph Hassett.

When one turns from writing lyric poems to writing plays, certain adjustments have obviously to be made in the way the language is handled. The common thread, of course, is that in both the language itself is of paramount importance. For the poet, however, the language of any poem is always, in a crucially determining sense, part of the subject. The language is obliged to be—without necessarily seeming to be—self-conscious, without being self-regarding. Language, in a sense, is the master. The language in a play, on the other hand, reveals plot, reveals narrative, reveals character, and is, it could be said, the servant of these external facts and forces. Even in plays that have a distinctly poetic quality, language remains enlisted in causes other than its own. I learned this lesson as well as I could in working on each of these texts/scripts.

Having said that, my writing most of these pieces in lines that give the impression of verse needs a brief comment. I chose to do that, not because I think of these as verse plays but rather because I use the lines for myself as writer to keep me rhythmically more supple than I might be if I were writing prose sentences, sentences set out as prose. And I use the line-mode to be also of some assistance to the actors, because—written and presented thus—they assist in some way the memorizing of the script.

I might also add here that by choosing to call these pieces Plays for Voices (enacted in many voices either, in most cases, by two actors—one female and one male—or by a single woman performing alone), I’m calling attention to the presence and persuasive power of the human voice itself. Its power, that is (in small space and brief time), to tell a story, reveal a character, offer a little picture of the world with which the audience can sympathize, and by which—if the play works—it can be briefly illuminated. It might even be said that in their various ways all these plays are intent upon giving voice to silence, bringing dead voices—whether literary or historical—to life.

Finally, as far as length is concerned, my attempt as both writer and director was to keep each one to just about an hour, either a little over or a little under. Beyond that, I imagine I’d have taxed—more than I wanted to—not only my audience but also (given the burden of being onstage and speaking without a break for an hour or more) my two patient, talented, always willing, many-voiced players—Tegolin Knowland and Seán Coyne.

Eamon Grennan

January 2021

Note 1: These plays were first performed by Curlew Theatre Company’s Tegolin Knowland and Seán Coyne. The director in each was Eamon Grennan.

Note 2: While three of these pieces were originally entitled dramatic recitals for two voices, I have also always considered them and their successors as being plays for voices and adaptable to other forms—radio plays, for example, or stage events with more than two actors. For this reason I have, in most of the plays, removed many of the stage directions regarding movement I’d included for my two actors in performance, leaving only some more general directions, including those regarding voice, where they might be necessary for the purposes of clarification. In addition: directions regarding songs, as well as their music, can (where not already determined) be decided by a director.

Part One

An advertisement poster of the play “HUNGER” has the subtitle ‘A dramatic recital for two voices’. Its artwork on upper right side depicts a sculpture of a malnourished figure with spindly limbs raising both the arms laterally. The performance credits and dates on left reads as: ‘performed by Tegolin Knowland and Sean Coyne; devised and directed by Eamon Grennan; music by Arne Richards; Tue.,4/14/15, at 11 am, Nafe Katter Theatre, UConn Storrs Campus’. Sponsorship credit at the bottom reads as ‘Co-sponsored by Irish Studies and Dramatic arts’.

Hunger

Introduction

Hunger is a play for two voices and many characters. It draws on songs, poems, oral histories, letters, books, and government documents, all dealing with the catastrophe of the Great Irish Famine, An Gorta Mór, that convulsed the island and radically changed it between 1845 and 1850. By giving spoken, many-voiced life to the terrible events of the Famine—events that were followed by a century of near silence on the subject, the whole country stunned by trauma—Hunger hopes to bring home some of the human truths behind the terrible, mind-numbing statistics of probably the single most determining event in the making of modern Ireland.

Through immersion in what the living dead voices of the period say, our sense of some of the features of the Famine landscape will become clearer. The play aims to create a living history, a tableau that grants the audience some sense of what those times were like, and what they meant to many of those who lived and died in them.

The Great Famine was most immediately caused by a potato blight, with its distinctive smell of rotting potatoes, that destroyed crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. A third of the Irish population was entirely dependent on potatoes for nourishment. The devastation caused by the loss of the potato crops was intensified by a number of other factors, political, social, and economic. The result of all these contributing factors was one to one and a half million people dead and a massive wave of emigration that scattered one and a half to two million Irish people across the globe.

While the main concentration of the piece is the Great Famine itself, the first part serves as a kind of historical prologue, sweeping from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century and using snippets from such writers as Spenser and Swift and Goldsmith to show the presence of famine in Ireland prior to the terrible events of the Great Famine. In order to make out of all this material a play for two voices, I decided to compose a patchwork out of the words of some of those directly involved in the catastrophe itself: men and women, ordinary people at all levels in society, politicians, priests, poets, Irish, English, American, Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, and so on.

In composing this patchwork I made use of documentary evidence, mostly by direct quotation. I sewed together these quotations, sometimes slightly altered, with linking passages of my own creation. I consulted and used as a source for speeches, poems, and songs contemporary with the Famine the following books and essays:

William Carleton, The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine. Irish University Press, 1972.

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. Gallery Books, 2002.

Joan Johnson, James & Mary Ellis: Background and Quaker Famine Relief in Letterfrack. Historical Committee of the Religious Society of Friends in Ireland, 2000.

Ellen Shannon Mangan, James Clarence Mangan: A Biography. Irish Academic Press, 1996.

James Clarence Mangan, The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan Poems V2: Poems: 1838–1844; V4: Poems: 1848–1912. Irish Academic Press, 1996, 1999.

Roger McHugh, The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition. In The Great Famine, Studies in Irish History, 1845–52, ed. R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams. Irish Committee of Historical Sciences, 1956.

Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford University Press, 2004.

Asenath Nicholson, Annals of the Famine in Ireland. Ed. Maureen Murphy. Lilliput Press, 1998.

Liam O’Flaherty, Famine. Random House, 1937.

Robert Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, & Emigration. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Cecil Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger, 1845–49. Penguin Publishing Group, 1962.

Elizabeth Smith, The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith, 1840–1850. Ed. David Thomson and Moyra McGusty. Clarendon Press, 1979.

Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland. Vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. L. Renwick. Scholartis Press, 1934.

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal in Irish Political Writings after 1725: A Modest Proposal and Other Works, ed. D. W. Hayton and Adam Rounce. Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Liam Swords, In Their Own Words: The Famine in North Connacht, 1845–1849. Columba Press, 1999.

The play was originally performed by Curlew Theatre Company at the Clifden Arts Festival in September 2010. For this and subsequent productions the music for the following songs was composed by Arne Richards: Brave Walter Raleigh; I wish that we were geese; Oh God! Great God!; The Lord of the plains; There is many a brave heart here, mother; To thee I’ll return; The island it is silent now; and I am of Ireland (based on The Wessex Carol).

For the original production

PROPS

2 chairs, 2 stools

2 shawls—1 black, 1 red

1 white apron

1 white scarf/cravat

1 flowered scarf

1 crucifix pendant

DRESS

Black polo necks, black pants, black shoes

SET

Bare stage except for the 2 chairs, 2 stools

Note: While this piece was originally written for two voices (male and female) it may be played—for stage or radio—by more than two.

The main voices are those of a Countryman and a Countrywoman who serve as Narrators. As other voices appear, they will be identified, and may be played by either one of the actors.

Historical Prologue [narrators speak, antiphonally]

PAUSE

[sound of fiddle; a lament]

PAUSE

[roll of bodhrán; fiddle music]

PAUSE

[merry fiddle music]

PAUSE

[a snatch of rebel music]