10 Questions About…

Yesterday Sheila and I saw The History Boys, which is part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was good. It’s kind of a racy Dead Poets Society or Goodbye Mr Chips. They did a good job of adding in a lot of multimedia. As scenery changes happened, they showed brief videos with great 80s music (Madness, Duran, Duran). The videos showed various scenes from around the school and gave you a sense of what the school was like.

It was a matinee show. So the only other people in the full house were retired people and students. I was a little surprised that there were so many students as the themes from the play tended to get very racy.

After the play we went shopping and had a pint. It was fun afternoon/evening in town.

It was another great day in Dublin weather-wise. So we went out on the road with Irish Grandma and Uncle Fearghal to Glendalough [pronounced glen-da-lock] in County Wicklow – about 45 minutes from the house. (Thankfully no buses or trains today – Fearghal is very very nice to pick us up and tour us around!)

Glendalough is beautiful. I’ll leve Patrick to post the history of Glendalough as a comment when he visits the blog – but I’ll tell you about our day and post the photos.

We had a nice lunch at the Glendalough Hotel. The dessert was particularly notable. Then we walked through the graveyard – the oldest grave we noticed was from 1798. We saw a church called Kevin’s Kitchen and then walked to the lake and to see the waterfall. We got at least a few miles in. The girls did a great job trekking through the area. It is really breathtakingly beautiful. (Sadly due to an Aine-related camera issue we don’t have pictures of the lake or waterfall.)

Even the drive up was amazing. We drove right by Sugar Loaf – a mountain we can see from the house – and it seems to have a cloud around the base of it. Also we saw lots of sheep, cows, and horses.

Saturday Patrick and I went to the Palace Bar to meet two old friends. We hadn’t seen John Newcombe in 7 years. John is currently working at a home for adults with intellectual issues. It’s a perfect job for John – as he’s very patient.

Sheila is really just in Dublin for a couple of weeks – then she’ll be returning to St Paul. It was a very fun night – and the best news is that we actually made the last bus home!

On Friday night Patrick and I went to see the Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey. It’s part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Originally by JM Synge, Playboy debuted at the Abbey Theatre in 1907. The story is set in a pub in Mayo. The excitement sets in when Christy Mahon enters; he’s a young man running away from his farm, claiming he killed his father. The people in the town are more interested in vicariously enjoying his story than in condemning the morality of his murderous deed. He captures the romantic attention of the bar-maid Pegeen Mike, the daughter of Flaherty.

When it first ran, the play caused a riot because Irish nationalists thought it was an insulting commentary on Irish culture. The riot really began when on stage 2 characters try to disguise Christy in a women’s slip (shift) to sneak him out of the town. (You can get more history from Wikipedia – for the interested minority.)

I relay the whole play because the version we saw on Friday was a rewrite by Roddy Doyle – who wrote the commitments and a Nigerian playwright.

The new version is set in a pub in West Dublin. The Playboy comes from Nigeria. The language was like that of the Commitments – not like early 1900’s Western Ireland. It was great.

It was interesting to see what remained from the original and what was changed. Some said they went too far with the language and that the poetry was lost. But I didn’t think so. Or if it was lost, it was lost to the wit of pub talk today. Also I don’t mind poetry that’s a little rough – I love Brendan Kennelly and he uses lots of words I don’t want to hear Aine repeat. In fact, you even hear those words on TV and radio here. So for better or for worse that is the poetry of today.

I loved when Pegeen told Christy that she has “done the Google” on his name and town to see if there are any stories about his murdered father.

The play is an interesting commentary on life in Dublin today. Pegeen’s father is connected and they talk of various gangs and gang members. (Coincidently many of those gang members are not looking to sell their memoirs!) I think the only way to make the playboy seem exotic was to make him Nigerian. There are so many non-nationals living here that American isn’t exotic, nor is Romanian, Polish, or French. English is rarely the primary language on the bus!

I suspect that this show will play in Dublin for a while and perhaps tour. It was a great show.

On Wednesday, we went to see A Long Day’s Journey into Night – by Eugene O’Neill. It’s actually an auto-biographical work.

The mother is a “dope fiend”; apparently she became addicted to morphine after Eugene was born. In the play we know that she has issues and that she’s out of some kind of rehab but we don’t know about the addiction for a while.

The father is a stingy drinker. Apparently he was a big famous actor, but now he just owns a lot of land but won’t spend any of his money on himself or his family.

The brother is also an actor – but especially in the chunk of life we see – he’s a ne’er do well who also drinks too much.

Eugene (called Edmond in the play) is brooding and is about to hear that he has consumption and will be sent to a sanatorium. His grandfather and others died of consumption. (Eugene doesn’t actually die of it – but we don’t know that during the play. Well people who are smarter than I am abotu Eugene O’Neill probably know it, but I didn’t.)

Pretty much the story takes off from there. The play was done by DRUID company, out of Galway. (We saw their marathon production of Synge shows right after the new Guthrie Theater opened.) The Father was played by James Cromwell – most notable to me as the boyfriend of the mom on Six Feet Under.

When the play was good it was very good. The brother does a great scene where he tries to explain to his brother that he loves and hates him. The mother is very good especially at the beginning.

Most notably the play was 4.5 hours. And in the words of the immortal Bob Uecker – that’s 9 Gillian’s Islands to you and me!

On Tuesday Patrick and I went to see Radio Macbeth – it’s part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. I liked it. It’s a quirky show. The dialogue is all Macbeth – but the actors are rehearsing for a radio play – so the actions do not necessarily follow the play.

The actions told another story, which I found interesting. I liked the way they were able to accomplish the interspersed mini dramas into Macbeth. Patrick didn’t like it as much. He didn’t think they went far enough – but I enjoyed the times that it really worked and enjoyed the times when you were back listening to Shakespeare.

That being said – I think this would be a difficult show if you didn’t know Macbeth. I think it would be difficult to follow that main theme if you really had to concentrate on the speech to follow the nuances of the plot. Or I guess you could do that but you might miss the unrelated action.

The other thing that I always like – the play was 90 minutes long. That’s a perfect length.

Last night Patrick and I met group called New & Not So New in Dublin at the Foggy Dew Pub. It’s a Meet Up group – for those who don’t know about Meet Up, it’s an international web site that helps groups of people connect.

So I searched for social groups in Dublin. Actually I really just searched for Dublin groups that were meeting this week – and this sounded best to me. (Although the Gothic Dublin came in a very close second.)

There were about 13 people at the pub. Half were Irish the rest were from around the world – South Africa, Holland, Switzerland, Colorado, France… Everyone was very friendly. Everyone had very different but interesting reasons for being in Dublin .

This group meets a couple of times a week. I’m sure we’ll meet up with them again.

The pub was also great and has a free ska/reggae band on Sunday nights so I know I’ll be back there!

Sunday was our busy day this week. We went to eat at a fun pub in Booterstown – maybe halfway between Cabinteely and the city center. We had lunch with Patrick’s mom and brother Fearghal.

Then we went to the circus – Fossett’s Ireland’s National Circus. There are no animals in the circus here. It’s all people acts. (We came home in time to watch Class Act, which is like a local American Idol and one of the performers from the circus was on the TV show– that’s always fun.)

The best act was the “globe of death” – a big metal sphere about 15 feet in diameter with up to 3 motorcycles riding around. It actually was very cool.

The nice thing about the Dublin circus is that it’s actually held in a tent and it’s fairly small. It’s not 3-ring – it’s just 1 ring. So it was easy for us to see all of the acts.

After the circus we walked through a park in Blackrock, which is on the sea. The weather was great and it was a nice little break.

Our major reward when we got home – Aine fell asleep.

I forgot about 2 of the pictures – the one with me is a nod to Fair Hills Pelican dance – and the first picture is actually taken in the park across from the house. You can see our house in the background. They are in the midst of building a soccer field – which is the reason for all of the dirt. The work that goes into building a soccer field (aka football pitch) is amazing!

Patrick took the kids to see Surf’s Up and then we met in Dublin city center, which meant I had the morning to myself. (I should have taken a picture of my cool new boots!) We had lunch at Eddy Rockets, which the girls think is like Snuffy’s back home. They each got a milkshake, which adds to the allure.

Then we walked around downtown. Lily is invited to a slumber party so we got her present for the party. Aine had a melt down and we came home.

I took some pictures in town and pasted them below. I forgot about the picture of Patrick collecting the clothes off the line in the rain – I just thought that was too typically Irish not to include – although in fairness our weather is still amazing!!