Local entertainment

The Matchmaker is an iconic play by the Irish playwright John B. Keane. Although people don’t particularly know much about Keane, if you mention the play there isn’t a person who can’t name the author. Keane, who wrote about 20 plays in his lifetime, died in 2002 at the age of 74. His best-known play is probably The Field, but The Matchmaker comes close. It is a two-person play about life in rural Ireland in the 1950s, although for some bizarre reason this production included the word computer in the script. The entire play is done as a series of letters between the matchmaker, an elderly country man who is widowed during the play (we never see his wife), and the various objects of his matchmaking. The dialogue is suggestive, lurching toward bawdy, but a child would suffer terminal boredom rather than shock if he or she should happen to be dragged to a performance by her parents.

            Sadly, the boredom would have set in very early in this particular revival at the Tivoli Theatre in Dublin. The Tivoli is on its own in an unglamorous neighborhood in Dublin, across the river from the center of Irish theatre obeisance, The Abbey. It is a worn-down place with an abandoned air. For this production there was no program and the concession area was locked up tight.

            The two actors who performed are as iconic as the play itself. Mary McEvoy and Mick Lally were the couple in a long-running series on Irish TV. Given the subject matter and the density of Lally’s accent, the series would not be likely to have arrived in America; Ballykissangel it wasn’t. But they are beloved by Irish audiences, and certainly have deserved their place in the pantheon of top Irish performers. The play, with its long monologish letters, must be massively challenging to memorize. Lally tackled this problem by not bothering. He sat at a table with the script to his side. Every time he paused and said, Now, we knew that he would turn to the script for prompting about the next section of his speech. Every once in awhile he would remember that he was supposed to be in character and would pump his arms suggestively or make another sort of half-hearted gesture. This would all be bad enough, but I swear the man had been drinking. He delivered his lines in quick slurs, with none of the cadence of Irish speech that makes listening to so much talking such a pleasant experience. To top all of this off, Lally chose to mug for the audience when he went into one of his five or six characters, pulling a fedora down over his forehead and putting on a goofy expression. The friend who invited me said at intermission that she was concerned about my understanding Lally’s accent; it would have been fine if that had been the only difficulty.

            Beside this phoned-in excuse for a performance, McEvoy looked even more brilliant. Since she wasn’t so tied to her table (she did look at the script when the light went off her but she never read her lines), she was able to stand downstage and actually act. One recurring character in particular, a twice-widowed woman who only wanted someone lively to bed her, was especially effective.

            The best part of the evening was the discovery of a restaurant, Just Off Francis, improbably around the corner from the theatre. I sat in the narrow café eating seafood risotto and soaking in Dublin, happy to be in a city for a change.

            Two nights later I was in a car being driven to Mullingar, a town larger and more dynamic than Edenderry but otherwise without much distinction. Una, her daughter Emma and I were heading to the movies. There is an ironic disconnect between the passion the Irish have for cinema and the number of places where they can see them. Films (the Irish pronounce this word as if it had two syllables—fill-im) feed an inclination for the romantic and provide a window to elsewhere, away from this island; in practical terms I suppose they connect those (few) that are still here to those (many) who have left.

            This night out was going to include tea, meaning an early and light dinner, and shopping, Penney’s for Emma and Marks & Spencer for Una and me. The movie we were seeing was Irish produced. It is written and directed by Ken Waldrop. His & Hers is a loosely linked series of conversations with Irish girls and women. The point of view is set with the proverb at the start of the film:

An Irish man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best, and his mother the longest.

The first image is of a diapered baby being set down in a crib by male hands. The baby becomes a toddler, then a girl, then a teenager. The girls talk about their fathers (me da, they say here), then their boyfriends, their fiancés, their husbands, their sons, then their fathers again. They become widows, both weepy and resilient. Finally, they are old women on their own. It is a poignant and surprisingly powerful film, and even though the women all speak in relationship to their men, you are never left with any sense of their helplessness or dependence. In fact it is quite the opposite; these women know who they are. This is not a film about inclusion: there are no divorced women, no fatherless daughters, no childless women (or at least none whose identity revolves around childlessness). 

All of the girls and women are from the Irish Midlands, where Waldrop grew up. One, a doctor’s wife and local councilwoman, is from Edenderry. But we don’t know this from the film; none of the speakers are identified in these serial conversations, and they are listed only by name, in order of appearance, at the end. Still, they endure in your memory as they do now on the screen. It is a beautiful film, and a tribute to the women as well as to the man who had the foresight and perhaps the audacity to ask these women to talk to the camera.

radio voices

rain, heavy rain, mist, fog, breeze, further rain, wind, more heavy rain, flooding, showers, thundery showers, persistent showers, persistent rain, wet, damp, rain

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea twice

The K Club is a five-star hotel surrounded by two golf courses favored, according to the hotel literature, by the likes of Tiger Wood, still a huge hero here despite his recent disgraces. The hotel is a great house on steroids, obviously added onto any number of times until it resembles an unruly Victorian mansion block, with just a few too many turrets, bays, and cupolas. Topping this neat sprawl are several gangly satellite towers that would look more at home on a small government’s intelligence headquarters than on this self-consciously country pile. Still, the hospitality is pure Irish, even though the wait staff appears to be entirely Asian.

 The place is owned by a man named Smurfit, an art collector of some renown who, like all wealthy Irish businessmen, breeds horses. Smurfit is besotted with Jack Yeats; there is a Jack Yeats room in the hotel with a dozen or so of Yeats’ paintings, along with various letters from and tributes to him. Most of the paintings are in Yeats’ exuberant and wildly colored style, but there are two placid seascapes in which the paint is controlled in a very different manner. Two small paintings of horses are the best of the lot. Otherwise the other notable painting on our informal tour was a Modigliani on the wall outside the very smart restaurant (named after a stallion that supposedly is the grandfather, so to speak, of all the race horses in Ireland). The receptionist tells us that, while most of the art is original, there are a few copies of paintings elsewhere in the hotel, for who would expect to find a real Monet in their hotel room?

            Despite the sprawling exterior, the scale of the rooms inside is intimate. This is not your average Marriott. Guests should feel as if they are stepping into a friend’s opulent but cozy sitting room. Even on a sunny day in July there is a fire in the small grate. The chairs are people-sized and the reception desk is tucked away, the person behind it nearly invisible behind the tall counter. The concierge desk is empty this afternoon; given the few people in the public areas of the hotel it is safe to assume that guests are in short supply right now.

We are a motley crew heading to the tearoom, three and a half generations of Ballindoolin residents and me. Esther, the matriarch, organized the trip. Her daughter Trina, pregnant with her third child, has her towheaded overalled toddler William in hand. William is possibly the best behaved toddler ever to be seen in public. He loves going out, and has already developed the calm demeanor of his father, Norman, whom he adores. Zara is Trina’s oldest, and William’s half sister. She is studying fashion design in a university in England but is home for the summer. She is dressed in a light summer frock and black velvet heels and looks entirely at home in these surroundings. I hover at the edges of this welcoming family, happy to be in their presence.

We have our tea on the back patio overlooking the Italianate garden. The food arrives on two three-tiered towers, the cut sandwiches on the bottom, sweets in the middle and scones on top. Esther and Trina are experts on scones and know a good deal about food in general, especially desserts; they run a teashop at Ballindoolin, adjacent to their walled garden. As they taste the various sweets they guess the ingredients. The scones come in for serious scrutiny. Esther says that they have a very high level of fat content. They crumble beautifully, and William has a great time creating a small mountain of scone crumbs that the crows will feast on after we leave the table. Later Trina finds a magazine put out by the K Club that includes some recipes, but as she reads them to us in the car she realizes that the recipes have not been modified for quantity (‘Take four pounds of butter’) and are seriously deficient in other areas; if you followed the scone recipe, for instance, you might miss the fact that flour is required. Esther points out that anyone staying at the K Club would simply hand the recipe to their cook, who would certainly know better, so it really didn’t matter.

After tea we wander down to the River Liffey which passes through the grounds, undoubtedly diverted in its course at some point in the nineteenth century to lend authenticity to the garden. A single swan floats and preens on its surface. Behind us the occasional golfer walks by pulling his golf bag.

No one is in a hurry to leave. Back home Norman will have done the milking, and Esther has already prepared the meal she’ll serve to her garden interns when she gets back. William never fusses, not once; he’ll even stay awake on the car ride home, then slip into bed for the night. I’m content to soak it all in. I take William with me to show him the Yeats’ paintings, knowing he’ll recognize the horses. Esther and I check out the menus at the two restaurants, thinking that we might just be able to afford the table d’hôte menu at the cheaper one; we discuss trying to organize a small group of people to eat there, as the receptionist has told us that we could schedule a private tour of the art with the head barman.

As I make the short drive back to my house from Ballindoolin, I realize that I am extraordinarily relaxed, with a sense of well being washing over me even in the car. This, I realize, is what money can sometimes buy.

Tea

Sunday is a day for walks, and in this area the closest walks are in the Slieveblooms, the hill range that is the Irish Midlands’ excuse for mountains. Hill walking here means trekking up and down the higher mountains; in the Slieveblooms the Sunday treks are called more simply walks. No one should be fooled, however, by the gentle sound of these excursions. What the Slieveblooms lack in altitude they make up for in terrain. This past Sunday I met up with a group of 30 or so people who gathered in the car park in the village of Cadamstown. Our leader, Paul, headed us up a gentle rise. Walking on the spongy grass, we were lulled into thinking this might be a pleasant amble along the Silver River. Paul quickly disavowed us of this by plunging into a plantation area of partially cut timber where we tripped and trudged over the hillocks left long ago by the plows while climbing up the side of Spink Mountain. At one point we passed a cottage, now empty, in which a legendary woman named Maree lived in rough circumstances until her death in her late eighties. Paul told us that Maree was known for offering tea to any walker that passed by her door, and that many of them took advantage of this hospitality, no doubt hearing her stories while they drank. We passed two other cabin ruins even higher on the mountain than Maree’s cottage. These stone cottages must have been nearly inaccessible despite the rather arbitrary logging roads that ran through the mountain.

We stayed off the trails for nearly the whole walk, only picking them up at the beginning and the end. The best part was the walk along the riverbed, although in the States we wouldn’t call this narrow stream a river any more than we would call the Slieveblooms mountains. River or stream, it was a gorgeous bit of water, running fast and spilling over several short falls. We forded it half a dozen times or more, and I was again grateful for my dry and sturdy boots and the ash walking stick that someone had kindly fashioned for me last summer in these same mountains (and mad I had forgotten my camera). By the end of the walk nearly all of us were struggling to lift our exhausted legs over the last few stiles.

Back in Cadamstown I decided to have tea before I headed back. My Little Tea & Craft Shop was housed in a simple bungalow right at the curve of the road as you head into Cadamstown, which is itself a tiny blip of a place with a church, a pub and a very pretty mill ruin. The Silver River runs through the village; there are even three or four picnic tables along its bank. I expected to be the only person in the teashop since it was late for tea, nearly 5:30. But when I entered three men were sitting at one of the four tables, chatting with the owner, a straight-backed thin woman with steel-grey crimped hair. One of the men instantly began a conversation with me, and, in the Irish way, had gotten my background and current whereabouts from me within a minute or so. He guessed that I was from Los Angeles, which was a bit surprising, and surmised that I was a writer. He asked how far we had walked, and when I told him we were out for four hours, he said they had been out for six.

As I waited for my tea the conversation the same man asked me how I would feel, as a walker, if there were a wind farm on the ridge. I told him that since a great deal of the area had already been devastated through clearcutting a windfarm would scarcely make much of a difference and would at least be doing something positive for the environment.

After naming a few other potential schemes for the land, the most unlikely being the building of holiday time shares for wealthy Americans, the conversation turned to Maree’s cabin, where, as it happened, the men had ambled and then gone no further. The man, who as it turned out owned all the land on which we had been walking, said that the tea shop owner, who was of course in on the conversation by now, should open up a branch of the shop in the cabin, carrying on the tradition of tea for walkers. No, she said, I have been in this shop for 26 years and I wouldn’t do anything else. After a bit more discussion about the cabin—he would tear it down, he would open a teashop himself, he would turn it into a romantic rental—the subject switched to the bronze chalice that he had found on the site. It was, he claimed, from the first century, and had healing properties. He next named a sum of money that he had been offered for this chalice that was so astronomical that even a gullible person would be skeptical. The chalice was currently locked away, and he would never give it up. No one had seen it, except the two men who were with him, whom he kept turning to for validation, which they cautiously gave (‘It’s like that you did find something up there, alright’); they and the few people who had drunk from it and been miraculously cured of various ailments were the only ones who knew about its power. What did I think, he asked, but before I could tell him he had moved to another subject. The bemused expressions on his friends’ faces never changed, and only one of the two ever opened his mouth except to put a scone in it.

We all left together, me back to Edenderry and they to their home a couple of hours to the southwest, if even that were to be believed. The teashop owner closed her door as we walked away, with the braggart calling out after me to wish me a safe journey home.

Swallow field day

There appears to be a convention of swallows outside my window. In the cool morning air they are performing their characteristic frantic swoops and dives but in numbers far larger than I have seen before. They are performers flying wrecklessly among the trees: a circus of swallows with no one to applaud them but the unimpressed jackdaws and me.