Read Online Synge by Colm Tóibín - Free Book Online Page B

and 2005. Bold, mischievous, at ease with the flow of words and the stillness of silence, these performances form a living bridge between the contrary elements of Synge’s imagination, the symbolic minimalism that heavily influenced Beckett and the salty mediaeval lustiness that makes Synge’s texts so vividly alive. Mullen’s apparent agelessness (there is almost thirty years between her second coming as Mary Byrne and her first performance of the role in 1976) has given her access to a sense of what is genuinely timeless in Synge – not a vapid flight from history, but an ability to create images and archetypes that transcend it. She has incarnated a Synge at once imperturbably ancient and forever full of youthful vibrancy and cheek. And in doing so she summed up the point of Druid’s Synge: that theatre can do more than one thing at any one time.

Illustration 3: Islanders on Inishere. From J.M. Synge, My Wallet of Photographs

3 Shift ~ Hugo Hamilton
     
    The first thing we noticed going out to Aran was the light. It was coming from the opposite direction and felt strange. To a person brought up in Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, the world seems to be turned around a full hundred and eighty degrees when you take the boat from Galway out to the Islands. The white glimmer of sunlight that you expect to see when coming ashore is right there ahead of you on the way out to sea. The feeling of leaving becomes confused with the feeling of going home. It’s like an inverse homecoming, something that must be similar to getting on the plane in autumn and landing somewhere on the far side of the world in spring. On the Naomh Eanna ferry out to Irishmore, it felt as though we were going backwards in time, travelling into the mirror. We were staring into the light over the Atlantic. We could barely see the shape of the three Islands in the distance. We could smell the sea and the diesel fumes and feel the throb of the engines in everything we touched. We could hear the murmur of Irish being spoken around us on the boat and became aware, without saying it openly, that we were no longer facing east, towards London, towards the buzz of Europe, but west, into an older, untouched world.
In my cottage I have never heard a word of English from the women except when they were speaking to the pigs or to the dogs …
    A small group of us had come from Dublin after school in the summer to spend some time on the island, to see this remote place with our own eyes before it disappeared. People were talking about Aran as if it was the last part of Ireland that was left intact. The country was moving on. Yoghurt had just been discovered. Men wore beards and moustaches. Everything was going electric. New music, new cars, new fashions from London and Paris. A photographer in one of the daily newspapers had captured the change that was taking place in the country that summer in a front page shot of a slender young woman dressed in a white mini-skirt, high white boots and a broad-rimmed white hat, lifting her suitcase onto the train at Euston Station with a nun in a brown habit waiting in line behind her.
    We travelled west to the Aran Islands with one eye on the future and the other on the past. As we arrived on the pier in Kilronan, the afternoon sun was shining away towards the mainland. We walked up towards the American Bar which seemed to have taken on the function of the island waiting room, where people looked out to see if the boat was coming in, where men spoke about the weather and decided whether the boat would go back out again or whether you might be trapped on the island for another night. The people leaving the island were heading down towards the pier and the people arriving were filling their places at the American Bar. Some of the tourists were already heading out along the road to see the promontory fort at Dun Aengus, on foot, in cars, on pony and traps, on rented bicycles. We were staying on the other side of the island at