EVERYONE is familiar with that oft-used reading from the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, ‘For everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven’.
If that be so, then surely God ordained that Lent was and is the time, the season, for drama.
In Ireland in the last century, when cars arrived and people began to move out and about from their home place - be it country, town or city - mobility meant they were able to travel for leisure and pleasure.
From the end of the deprivations of the Economic War in the 1930s and ‘The Emergency’ in the 1940s, the ’50s and ’60s brought a social revolution to the country.
Dance halls sprouted all over the country as the era of the showband arrived. Even when our dancing ‘careers’ started in the early 1970s, massive crowds thronged weekly to the Majestic in Mallow, the Arcadia, Redbarn, and our ‘local’, the Top Hat in Fermoy.
If one peruses the Examiner or the Evening Echo of the period, you can see dancing was not just a weekend activity - no, it was literally seven nights week.
The exception of course was Lent. For decades, dancing (for Catholics anyhow) was forbidden, along with many other ‘pleasures’ during the 40-day lead up to Easter.
Back in 1960, the newly-appointed Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, Dr Thomas Morris decreed: “As my office imposes on me a special solicitude for the moral welfare of my flock - no dances are to be held on Saturday nights, eves of holy days, Christmas night, or during Lent.”
Similar ‘bans’ existed across the country, so much so that many Irish showbands moved lock, stock and barrel across the water to the UK - especially to the Irish clubs in London and Manchester.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and the absence of dancing during the Lenten period saw a huge growth in the popularity of amateur drama groups right across the country.
The era of the showbands is now well and truly part of our history, but thankfully the drama scene is as vibrant and popular as ever.
At present, amateur groups in Castlelyons, Kilworth and Conna are all treading the boards in front of fine crowds, and will do so again this coming weekend.
Only ten days ago, we went to Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre to see Sive. I suppose we’ve seen John B. Keane’s classic play about forced match-making dozens of times, and still it never ceases to entertain and bring forth gales of laughter and floods of tears in equal measure.
Just last weekend, we saw two amazing plays in West Waterford, in Ballyduff on Saturday night and over the road in Tallow on Sunday night. One play was written about the year 440 BC - that’s roughly two and a half thousand years ago. The second play we saw was written seven years ago, in 2017. One is a Greek tragedy, the other is all about ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland - in South Armagh to be precise - and is set in 1981.
I had seen neither of these before so went along with an open, ‘absorbent’ mind, prepared for virtually anything. Though literally set thousands of years apart, the two playwrights Sophocles and Jez Butterworth both took as the central theme of their dramatic presentations the matter of a dead body and its disposal.
I was stunned that the two plays set in Greece and Ulster should both have ‘plots’ hinged and based on the death and subsequent aftermath of a pair of characters that the audience never see!
Though only spoken about throughout both productions, Polynices and Seamus Carney are central and crucial, even ‘leading’ figures.
Sophocles is regarded by thespian experts as being a brilliant writer of plays full of moral, fable-like lessons in human behaviour. This is despite the fact that only seven of his plays still exist in complete form.
Set in Thebes, the play Antigone is a powerful statement about power and judgement, love and sentiment, and eventually unbearable suffering. The brothers Polynices and Eteocles are on opposite sides in a Civil War - redolent of what happened in Ireland just over a century ago. Both brothers die in a bloody battle.
Their uncle Creon takes the Crown. He declares Eteocles a hero and a martyr and awards him all the pomp and dignity of a ‘State funeral’.
Polynices, on the other hand, is declared a traitor and Creon decrees his body be left to rot on the battlefield - ‘his bones picked bare by carrion’.
Antigone, the sister of the dead brothers, defies her uncle’s orders and, despite death threats, commences the funeral rites for Polynices. Her sister Ismere is bothered and bewildered, but does not aid Antigone.
Furious Creon is angry to the point of fury - despite the fact that his own son is engaged to Antigone! The body remains unburied and Antigone is sentenced to death by starvation in a rocky cave.
The play has a terribly tragic end. Creon is still king but a broken, pathetic figure. He knows now he has made such wrong decisions. Truly, punishment bring wisdom, but it’s too late for all concerned.
In May, 1981, we were on our honeymoon in Spain. It was just after the death of hunger-striker Bobby Sands and I recall we travelled over to Tangier by hydrofoil one day.
In the narrow streets and markets, people asked ‘You English?’ We replied we were from Ireland and immediately came the words ‘Ah, Bobby Sands’.
Well, The Ferryman, written by Jez Butterworth in 2017, is set in south Armagh at harvest time in 1981. Like the Greek Tragedy, the central character Seamus Carney is never seen. Early in 1972 he got a bullet through the head and his body ‘disappeared’.
Now, a decade later, his body is found buried in a bog in Co Louth. Was he shot by the British Army or RUC or Loyalist Para Militants?
Perhaps, but as the play unfolds the story of the man we never see, his wife and son and extended somewhat chaotic family become the scaffold around which is built an intriguing story. Love, loss, lust, loneliness and hatred are set against the annual harvest festival - shades of ‘Dancing At Lughnasa’.
The menacing Muldoon and his henchmen give lie to the perceived notion many of us had of glorious, patriotic freedom-fighters.
Like Antigone the plot twists and turns and leads to a bloody awful and awe-full ending.
I marvelled and still cannot comprehend the skill of amateur actors capable of producing plays as good as any professional company - ‘And still I gaze and still the wonder grows, how these small heads can carry all they know’ in terms of lines, emotions, silences, stares and the ability to convey thoughts and words written two and a half thousand years apart - amazing and stunning!
Ballyduff Director Ger Canning and Brideview (Tallow) Director Jack Ahern have assembled superb casts. Luckily for theatre fans, Antigone and The Ferryman will be soon on the drama ‘circuit’ at venues all over the country. Make sure ye get to see them somewhere.
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.”
To paraphrase the late, great Willie Shakespeare: ‘If drama be the source of love and life, break a leg and play on’.
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