Alone It Stands, beginning its final week in the Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin, before moving to the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, is one the cleverest, funniest, most brilliantly crafted plays you are ever likely to see. Its writer and director, John Breen, has married rugby to the dramatic arts and produced an absolutely delightful offspring.
Even to have arranged a blind date between the stage and the oval ball seems to have as much promise as organising a dinner between Peter Robinson and Bernadette McAliskey: you wouldn't expect them to stay together for the duration of the bread-roll.
It's not just that rugby by its nature, with its complex running patterns and brute physicality, seems quite beyond capture on the stage. There is also the small matter of the sort of people who play and follow rugby. They are about as theatrical as the fair Bernadette is Orange. If you crosschecked the membership of voluntary societies in any university, the two most likely to have absolutely no members in common would be the rugby club and dramsoc. They stand at the opposite ends of the occupational spectrum, mutual disdain being perhaps the only quality which unites them.
So how can these two profoundly anti-pathetical elements, matter and antimatter, be brought together, not just to co-exist begrudgingly, but to produce a dramatic triumph? One word: Munster.
So different
What is it about Munster that makes it so different from the other provinces? Why does it, in any of its manifestations, seem to guarantee character, resilience, courage, resourcefulness, intelligence, in any code? An All-Ireland final without a Munster team competing is somehow lacking. And sport being a metaphor for other things, and much as I loathe the War of Independence as an unnecessary conflict, it is hard not to admire the tenacity and courage of the people of Munster throughout its duration.
So, as in all things, in rugby (unlike Leinster) Munster never surrenders. The game is over only when the team bus leaves the ground, as tomorrow's game will undoubtedly testify. Of course, Munster has its class divisions, but in rugby, and in Limerick in particular, they seem to dissolve completely. Working-class people play and follow rugby there in same way that they follow soccer in Dublin. The ordinary boundaries that cut through Irish rugby like a Berlin wall vanish when they converge on the Shannon.
Utter incomprehension
This is not without difficulties. At Musgrave Park for the Munster match last Saturday, I fell into conversation with two spectators, who I suspect from their appearance might have been unskilled labourers. On the other hand, they might have been from Mars, for all that I could understand of their speech. It was, to be sure, very musical, but utterly baffling, and I responded to it with those vigorous nods and general noises of assent which the seasoned traveller, in Cairo or Cork alike, deploys both to give the impression that he has seldom met minds of such depth and acuity and, more importantly, to mask his utter incomprehension at what is being said to him. The outcome can be either an excruciating companionship of ceaseless mummery, the purchase of an unwanted camel, or the sale of a teenage daughter to a 75-year-old kilim dealer; on a bad day, all three.
If you know of anyone who can give a camel a good home, let me know.
Limerick rugby's classlessness gives the game there a cachet, a plausibility, that it lacks elsewhere. And there is something else about Limerick. It is the home of one of the great occasions in Irish sport: the victory of Munster over the all-conquering All-Blacks in 1968.
So? How can you make a play about that? I wish I had answered that for you; instead, John Breen has - by a combination of ingenious writing, brilliant dramatic construction, and superb directing. And it doesn't really matter if you think that Dolphin is a cousin to Porpoise and a Cork Con man is a Leeside fraud, or, conversely, if the word "theatre" suggests sinister cross-dressing homosexual pinko pacifists no man in his senses would turn his back on. Alone it Stands is a theatrical occasion which, like rugby in Limerick, crosses all boundaries.
We can justly ask why this play has been presented only in fringe theatres. Is it too accessible? Is it too unaffectedly amusing? Is it because it features the sort of people who as quintessentially untheatrical as rugby players and supporters? Or is it because it so triumphantly subverts theatre's self-consciously theatrical definition of itself?
Limerick society
Haven't a clue. No matter. Whether you're from Coolock, and have never been to the theatre in your life, or are a long-suffering resident of Lansdowne Road who loathes rugby as the invention of the devil, you will love Alone it Stands. As well as being very funny, it is a delightful study of Limerick society, of the qualities of courage and determination, and of love - love between man and woman, between men together, and between father and son.
You will probably weep with laughter. You might equally well weep with pride. And suddenly, out of the blue, you might find yourself weeping in pity. I have not seen a finer Irish play in years. I suspect only dramaturgical snobbery of the most witless kind has prevented John Breen's becoming the household name which one day it assuredly will be.