by Colm Toibin
She has noticed that ‘lonesome’ is the adjective he most uses about himself. He is nearly always lonesome in his missives to his changeling. Another word he likes to deploy is ‘disappointed’. It is sprinkled over his letters like a tartish cologne. She disappoints him so often, so deeply and unforgivably, that there are times when she can’t help but wonder what he is doing with her at all.
He often repeats a story she has always found curious, emblematic of him in some way neither of them quite understands: about a particular sojourn he once made into Wicklow, when the room in which he quartered was directly above a kitchen, so that if he got down on the floorboards and put his ear to the chinks, he could eavesdrop on the serving girls talking below him. An admirer of Shakespeare, perhaps he thought of Pyramus and Thisbe, those lovers doomed to commune through a fissure in a wall. Maybe – can this be possible? – he sees her as a conduit, a way of negotiating away that separation? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Kingstowner to navigate that eye in the floor. She is the only woman of her class with whom he has ever been truly intimate, perhaps the only Irish catholic who will ever know him really well. (Unless some gurleen over in Aran? – but no. He’d be afraid.) Is her role to be conductress, to allow him admission to something? ‘Be careful not to get grease-paint in your eyes,’ he once told her. Be careful yourself, she sometimes wants to say. The twilight is not real; it is only limelight burning low. So much in the theatre is smoke and mirrors.
Like many self-doubting people, he sometimes has the arrogance of a Pharaoh. She has received love letters before, but never like his. Who in the name of the suffering saints does this thread-arsed playmaker think he is? The proper mode of such correspondence, when written by men, is to pronounce oneself unworthy of the fairy-one’s favours, to do a little begging and gasping about your sleeplessness, and make a few suggestive comparisons to mythological hip-swingers. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean it: Christ, it’s only good form. But the playboy doesn’t play. These are not billets-doux.
He tells her, approvingly, that she is ‘pretty and quiet and nice.’ Is that really what he burns for in a lover, she wonders, and is this sandwich of stone-like, deadly words the best way a poet would have of presenting it? Why does he never say exactly what he wants? Would that be too much to ask, too naked an admission? If beauties were before me, stepping out of their clothes, it would be you that I’d beg for; it could only be you. Why can he never write her anything like that?
Mostly, his tone is sardonic, schoolmasterly; so brusque he seems to want to push her away. ‘I will not wait for you in Bray, so don’t miss your train.’ ‘I’m afraid I’m spoiling you by writing to you every day.’ ‘You may be sure when I have anything I don’t approve of, I’ll let you know fast enough.’ ‘Why are you so changeable when you know how much it hurts and harms me?’ He is an example of the man every woman has known: the suitor who craves you but secretly wants to be dismissed.
Their quarrels are Vesuvian tirades of invective. ‘You are ludicrous!’ she accuses him. ‘You may stop your letters if you like. I don’t care if I never heard from you or saw you again, so there!’ She is faithless, he is ‘selfpitiful’, she is spiteful, he is ‘an old stick in the mud’. They can have no possible future, should separate immediately. She is making him ill. He is wearing her out. She will leave off acting and ‘get a shop’ if he keeps this up. (That will soften his cough for him now.) One of her outbursts is countered by Glenageary’s ultimate denunciation: ‘You have finally ruined my holiday.’
He loves to take his seat in the consoling darkness of the theatre, to watch her move about in the scorch of the light: the poise with which she holds herself, the way she speaks his lines. The fact of her speaking them, a kind of lovemaking.
She moves across the footlights, knowing he is watching. Up here, she is the artist, he the apprentice. He is out beyond the point where anything matters. Not riots. Not hypocrisies. Not batons. Nothing. ‘That is not the West!’ a man in the audience cries out, as though he were in the play, which, in a way, he is; he will always be in it now, no matter where or in what circumstances it is ever performed again. And she feels for this man. She understands his grief. All those years he was told that his West was a land of apes. He wants it to be a land of angels, is upset and frightened that it isn’t. But she clings to the lines. People are yelling. As the cries grow more wounded, and the insults crueller, she pictures her lover silently mouthing his lines along with her. She feels like weeping, but that will not happen. She breathes and speaks, she speaks and breathes, and the words he wrote in silence are pushed into the air. Acting is breathing: the body gives life. Some reason, a small one, but it isn’t nothing, to go on existing in this vicious world, where hurts abound, and the body fails, and the crushed hopes of childhood are never far away. It is an act of mercy, the thing she does every night. She would be nothing without him. He needs her, too.
They are walking up Bray Head, as they often do on Sundays, and below them the sea is a rolling grey-green. People are nudging. They know him now. The Kingstown little tinker who wrote that dirty play. He does not seem put out, nor even especially surprised. ‘We are an event,’ he tells her, and they carry on with the climb. Pushing together into the slab of the gradient. It is as though he is trying to persuade himself that none of it matters. ‘It makes me rage when I think of the people who go on as if art and literature and writing were the first thing in the world.’ He is so disingenuous sometimes. You’d have to love him.
Soon he will alter his term of address. ‘My child,’ he will call her, instead of ‘my changeling.’ He is aging with every step, is often in crippling pain. ‘I am so proud of you,’ he says. ‘I am so fond of you. I love you.’
Before very long, his mother will die, so old that he doesn’t remember her age any more. His loyalty to her ghost is unqualified, fervent. It is as though she is still in the house, watching over his shoulder, still waiting for him to atone for all the disappointments. ‘I cannot tell you how unspeakably sacred her memory seems to me,’ he will write. ‘There is nothing in the world better or nobler than a single-hearted wife and mother. I wish you had known her better. I hope you’ll be as good to me as she was.’ How hard it must have been to write such words. But harder to have had to read them.
He will stay on in the big house at Glenageary for a time, but will find it difficult to be alone in the old empty rooms, with only ‘that little donkey of a servant’ for company. He will inherit some money, not very much, but enough to live quietly in some place like Dundrum. That is all he wants now: his child and Dundrum. A home with no memories. A few quiet years together. He is becoming like Lear, as the play nears its end: begging for the consolations he refused in Act One. Being killed by the Gods for their sport.
He will talk to her again about marriage, their future. ‘If only my health holds we will be able to get on now.’ But the cues have all been missed; he did not recognize them when they came, and the long-rehearsed plans are not to be realized. Five painful months after the death of his mother, he himself will die, aged thirty-eight, following a hopeless operation for Hodgkin’s disease. Distraught, she will beseech a priest to say a requiem mass, but will be told that the request is difficult to grant. He was not one of us. He was of the other persuasion. There have to be limits, after all.
Probably he would have understood, would not have wanted any fuss. All his life he had to attune to subtle transmissions of his unacceptability. He knew what it is to find yourself walled out, separated by boundaries you did not yourself make; to have to look through whatever chink may be found at the people whose acknowledgement you ached for. At the time of his death, no member of his family has ever seen one of his plays.
‘My dearest Love,’ begins his farewell letter. ‘This is a mere line for you, my poor child, to bid you good-bye and ask you to be brave and good and not to forget the good times we’ve had and the beautiful things we’ve seen together.�
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It is signed ‘Your old Friend.’ He is no longer the tramp. There is no need to be in character any more.
She will help Yeats and Lady Gregory to stitch together his last play, will continue at acting, will emigrate to London. She will be married twice, will give birth to two children, will often be close to poverty, will not always be happy. She will never give up, will always act; but as she ages there will be years when living gets very much harder. She begins to drink heavily; her private life is troubled; her son, an RAF man, is killed during the war. There are not many parts for an elderly Irish actress in England, whose great performances are over and whose manner can be difficult. The good times we’ve had and the beautiful things we’ve seen. He was right: it takes bravery to remember such times. Bravery and goodness. The ultimate defiance.
Molly Allgood, whose stage-name was Maire O’Neill, will die in London, in the winter of 1952, having collapsed while rehearsing a radio play.
Her daughter is ‘Pegeen’ after her mother’s greatest role: a woman who loves a storyteller, but loses him too soon, when the past lurches out from the dark backstage in the shape of his wounded parent.
‘All art is a collaboration,’ wrote the father of the play.
‘To me, he was everything,’ said the mother.
Illustration 11: Aaron Monaghan in the DruidSynge production of The Playboy of the Western World (2005). Photograph by Toni Wilkinson
11 Wild And Perfect: Teaching ~ The Playboy of the Western World ~ Roddy Doyle
The best thing about The Playboy of the Western World is the voices. The thing is full of culchies. It’s a teacher’s dream.
Try finding enough students willing to read the parts in Hamlet.
‘Hands up who wants to be Laertes.’
Hands stay down; eyes hit the desk. You’re standing in front of a roomful of very shy, aspiring vets and accountants. Not an actor or a chancer among them.
But come back in six months with The Playboy.
‘Hands up who wants to be Shawn Keogh.’
‘Sir!’‘Sir!’
‘Me sir!’
‘Sir!’
‘Me, me, me, me, me!’
‘What about the Widow Quinn?’
‘Oh God, pick me!’
I was an English teacher for fourteen years. I spent hours, days, months trying to convince young people that the irony in Persuasion was worth their attention.
‘There’s a good laugh on the next page; I swear.’ I spent hours and days trying to convince them that Wordsworth wasn’t an eejit. ‘They’re only flowers, Sir. Calm down.’
That Yeats wasn’t an eejit – ‘Sir? Why didn’t he just ask her to go with him?’; that every sentence and line they read wasn’t, automatically, the work of an eejit.
It was a constant fight. I stood at the front of the room and said, ‘Open up _________’ (Choose any one of the following: Persuasion, The Charwoman’s Daughter, Heartbreak House, most of the pages in Soundings, Portrait of a Lady, The Greatest of These – and the list goes on. The horror!)
The command to open the text was always followed by a groan. A real groan. The dreadful, wet sound of young minds being squeezed. I was killing these children. But there were plenty of good days. The students were easily convinced that Shakespeare was the business. They loved Edmund. They loved Lady Macbeth. They loved Iago. They loved Wuthering Heights. They loved Heathcliff and Cathy. They loved hating the other characters. They loved the passion and the cruelty. They loved Lord of the Flies. They loved Piggy, and the ‘stuff’ coming out of his head. They loved the posh English boys shoving, hitting – killing each other. ‘Sucks to your asthmarr!’
They loved the fact that these kids could have been themselves; they loved the honesty of the book, the language, and the simplicity of the story – the theme: children, given the chance and the island, will eat one another. And they loved – God, they loved – The Playboy of the Western World.
‘Sir!’
‘Sir!’
‘Me!’
It was, at first, the opportunity to do the voices. The room was suddenly full of Christys and Pegeen Mikes. Even the girl I chose to read the stage instructions became a culchie, an R.T.E. continuity announcer circa 1981. ‘Impty barrels stind near di counter.’
It was mad, wild stuff. A laugh. These Dublin kids got it out of their systems. Every Garda who’d ever told them to move their arses, every teacher who’d ever looked sideways at them, every priest who’d ever let his Mass go over the thirty-five minutes – they all got a slagging in the first few pages of The Playboy.
‘Where’s himself?’
Shawn Keogh, ‘a fet ind fair young min’, is the first male character to walk onstage. In the first few days of reading, Shawn came from Kerry, Donegal, Galway, Offaly, Limerick, Wexford and, bizarrely, Scotland. One boy in the class could do a good Sean Connery and decided not to waste it.
‘Where’sh himshelf?’
James Bond had just walked into the shebeen, but Pegeen Mike didn’t even look up. If I remember correctly – and I probably don’t – the first Pegeen Mike, having beaten off the opposition, decided to stick with her own accent. So, for the first five or six pages, Pegeen Mike Flaherty, ‘a wild-looking but fine girl’, came from Briarfield Grove, Kilbarrack, two minutes walk from the Dart station.
‘Isn’t ih long the nights are now, Shawn Keogh, to be leavin’ a poor girl wi’h her own self countin’ the hours to the dawn o’ day?’
James Bond’s response was lost in the roars and wolf-whistles.
It was fun, but not much else, at first. The first few pages were very slow. Pegeen’s shopping list on the first page seemed unnecessarily verbose, and we were expected to watch her write it. And what did those words mean? ‘A hat is suited for a wedding day.’ Did she want a hat? And what was a hat doing on a shopping list? Where were the eggs and the bread? And why all the names on the first two pages? Philly Cullen and Red Linahan, the mad Mulrannies and Father Reilly, Marcus Quinn, ‘got six months for maiming ewes’. It was one line, stop, next line, stop, just like reading Shakespeare for the first time, until they got the hang of it, until they could see it, and hear it, and it began to make great sense.
It did make great sense. And, along the way, it was often hilarious. One of the great successes of my career in teaching came to me unexpectedly, when Shawn Keogh delivered the line, ‘I’m after feeling a kind of fellow above in the furzy ditch’. The Shawn that morning was from somewhere near Kerry, but his accent fell away when he got to ‘fellow’ and he realized what he’d just read, and the other twenty-nine boys and girls in the room realized what he’d just read, and the silence – it lasted less than a second - became a cheer that became a bigger cheer, and bigger, and Shawn Keogh looked at his desk, and under his desk, for the hole he hoped would swallow him whole, and burp. And, after the laughter died and Shawn Keogh rediscovered his spine, I never before saw such keen scholarship; every student was flying through the pages, looking for more lines like that one. I hoped the principal or vice-principal would walk in now; I hoped anyone would walk in. I was listening to the sound of utter concentration. I had control and engagement. And I had silence. No threat or bribe would ever again be as effective. And I had it, the sound of well-used silence – it’s very, very rare – for two long minutes, until someone found Shawn Keogh’s line about ‘the naked parish’.
‘What page, what page?’– and that started another scramble.
Then someone else found the Widow Quin talking about ‘the gallant hairy fellows are drifting beyond’, and that got me up to the bell and the coffee break. I bought myself a Twix.
At first, the language of The Playboy was as far away from these Dublin kids as the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Even the simple question from the Widow Quin, ‘What kind was he?’ needed a good looking at before it became, ‘What was he like?’ or something nearer their words. ‘There’s harvest hundreds do be passing these days for the Sligo boat.’ Again, it needed
staring at. What was a ‘curiosity man’? And what did ‘Tuesday was a week’ mean? But, as with Shakespeare, the staring was well worth the time. ‘Harvest hundreds’ brought a story about one girl’s grandfather who went from Donegal to Scotland every year to pick potatoes. And, more than twenty years later, I still meet ex-students who smile and say, ‘Tuesday was a week’.
The Playboy was a hit. It wasn’t just because they could become culchies for the day. They copped on to the story and, unlike the language, the story was immediately theirs. I taught The Playboy in the early ‘80s, when many of these kids were going to join the ‘harvest hundreds’. The play was about people on the edge of the rules, and the kids I taught knew that place. Today, that part of north Dublin is often featured in the Property sections – the schools, the sea, all the recently discovered amenities. Back then, it looked much as it does now but, more than once, I saw the word ‘ghetto’ used to describe it. It was no more a ghetto than Ranelagh, but these kids knew the hurt of being written off. They knew the power and fun of language; language was one of the things they owned. Slagging was a sport and an art. The best slag I heard was this: ‘Your granny’d climb out of her grave for a half-bottle of gin.’ Change it a bit and it could be a line from The Playboy; it might even have been in the first draft. It’s a Playboy line because The Playboy is a slagging play. The slags fly across and back across the stage. Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin, the big women of the play, are particularly good at it – ‘there’s poetry talk for a girl you’d see itching and scratching’. Slagging is a huge part of the play’s energy. Shakespeare knew a well-aimed slag. So did Synge. And so did my students.
