Photos by Pat Shortall
In the hidden Ireland off the new EU infrastructure of motorway and ring-road, two elderly farmers lean on a fence and talk in the low-key code of near neighbours.
The Quiet Land is also a masterclass, served as it is by two actors, Ger Cody and Brendan Corcoran, who’ve accumulated between them a hundred years of rich theatrical experience.
Directing the piece is recently retired artistic director of Barnstorm, Philip Hardy. The author of the piece is Malachy McKenna, a player-turned-playwright. A member of the Writers Guild of Ireland, Malachy graduated from NUI Galway with an honours degree in English and history and a Post Graduate diploma in communications. He trained as an actor at the Focus Stanislavski Studio in Dublin. He won the 2014 P.J O’Connor Radio Drama Award for his radio play The Quiet Land. He has co-written Water Pressure, a play written for teenagers based on a short story of the same title by Conor Bowman. Malachy’s first play Tillsonburg, won the Stewart Parker Trust Literary Award, having premiered at the Focus Theatre, Dublin. Tillsonburg has had several Irish tours. He is currently editing a final draft of The Last of the Turfmen – the final play of The Quiet Land trilogy. This week, The Kilkenny Observer sat down with Malachy to garner some insight into his play The Quiet Land.
Old friends
The play deals with two elderly farmers, Eamon and Nashee, who meet at a gate on a remote hillside. These men are old friends, old rivals, old neighbours. They are men of heart, of humour, of hardness. Their conversation is a throwback to a gentler time, when silence was as telling as declaration and meaning was more often found between the lines than on them. But there’s nothing gentle about today’s conversation. In facing the bitter reality of their remote defiance, Eamon and Nashee have grown fearful and desperate. Now they are forced to confront each other with some heartbreaking truths that test their friendship to its limit. After today, will they ever again talk on this hillside?
According to Malachy, the play was written to portray a blend of humour and pathos. “The Quiet Land is a celebration of life, resilience and the endearing innocence of an exiled generation as it struggles to survive in the isolated rural Ireland of today,” explained Malachy.
He continued “It’s a real test of their lifelong friendship and is my heartfelt tribute to a rare breed of forgotten men who live a ‘long way in off the road’.”
The author quoted from a review in The Irish Times which said that The Quiet Land was a lament for a disappearing Ireland. “This is no country for old men such as Eamon and Nashee in Malachy McKenna’s sensitive new play about a very Irish decline. Meeting each other at a gate between their farms, Nashee and Eamon seem to haul around a lifetime’s worth of baggage, some of which McKenna uses to allude forcibly to the Irish theatrical canon. Nashee, for instance, holds a bullhook, reminiscent of Christy Mahon’s loy, while Eamon is sporting a hurl that he uses as a crutch.”
McKenna reminisces about a childhood in Tipperary. “My earliest childhood was filled and coloured by the laughter and endeavour of men who cut turf by hand, dug potato drills with shovels, pitched hay with forks and snagged turnips on their knees.” And as Malachy explained “all under the gentle shadow of Knockshigowna hill in North Tipperary, where my mothers’ people farmed and loved and lived until the last of them were gone.”
A rich life
There is no doubt that McKenna’s upbringing plays a large part in the thought process of this theatrical piece. “Whilst my childhood was made rich by these people, my subsequent life has been similarly enriched by their memory – being on the bog with them, climbing Knockshigowna hill, gathering berried holly in winter, searching for a Christmas tree, feeding cows and calves – my grandmother’s hurried ‘chook chook’ tenderness as she flung grain to hungry hens, – sitting with my uncle at the back of the church as he sang in the choir, sitting again with him between his strong legs as he milked twelve cattle on a battered three legged stool.”
Speaking of his grandfather’s generation, Mr McKenna acknowledges that it was a generation of hard working, hard playing, good living, honest people. One term that is written large in the text is progress, but the author puts a large question mark over the word. “It is the generation on whose endeavour this country was built and it is a generation that is fast being forgotten in our headlong rush for what is smugly termed: progress.”
Isolation
The fear, according to McKenna, is that in that progress we have left some people behind, people who now fall under that grim umbrella we refer to as rural isolation. There is an implication here that the land is isolated. Not so, says McKenna “The land doesn’t care. It was here before us and it will be here after us. It is people who are isolated. It is friends, family, neighbours and in a wider context, governments who isolate people.”
Malachy explained in detail how he was touring in the west of Ireland with a play in which he was acting. On a walk in the wilds of Mayo one afternoon, he came across a bag of turf, sitting inside an old wooden gate on a hillside. The sight of the bag jolted him. Who left it there? Where was he? What was his story? The image stayed with him. That bag of turf. A hillside. His thoughts. And in time, The Quiet Land was born. That play is the author’s humble tribute to a generation of forgotten people who live a long way in off the road.
Concluding his thoughts on the play, McKenna had this to say “I can say no more about what inspired me or what has helped me write, for good or bad. In truth, all I could hope to say is in the play and really, I can’t take the credit for that. That goes to those who’ve gone before me.” Nice words and a thought provoking message for the present generation to ponder.
The Quiet Land opens at The Barnstorm Studio on John’s Quay from January 30th for 4 performances.
