Between two worlds

Actor Tom Hickey and writer Tom Mac Intyre are back working together again, in a play that goes beyond 'the tyrannical rule of the secular'. Belinda McKeon meets them

In 1895, a young Co Tipperary woman was stripped, doused in paraffin and set alight by her husband, while several of her neighbours and relatives looked on. Her body burned, the life went out of it, and still they watched, waiting for the moment in which Michael Cleary, the man who had brandished the burning stick, believed absolutely: the moment in which the fairy which had taken control of 26-year-old Bridget Cleary's person would leave her and vanish up the chimney of their home.

That moment didn't come, and nor did the reunion with the real Bridget of which Cleary also felt certain. Faithful to fairy legend, he trekked night after night to a local mound, waiting for the white horse that would carry his wife back to the human world, waiting to cut its golden cords so that he could again share his life with a woman rather than a witch.

Bridget did not return, and the discovery of her charred remains led to Michael's arrest and subsequent imprisonment. He spent several years in Mountjoy Prison before emigrating to Canada, where he laboured away the rest of his days. Little more can be told of Michael's life in those last years, but the memory of what he had done to Bridget must have assailed him at every turn.

Unless, of course, his abiding memory was not of what he had done but of what he believed had been done by others, by those spirits who had possessed her, by those on whom no amount of poisonous herbs, no beating or burning, could make a mark.

If he and Bridget could have met again, what questions would they have asked of one another? In all the blame, could room have been made for any sort of understanding? And where in their encounter would the name of Bridgie's purported lover, her neighbour, William Simpson, arise?

Enter Tom Mac Intyre and Tom Hickey, the writer and actor who collaborated, in 1986, on the play that remains one of the pivotal moments in the history of Irish theatre - The Great Hunger - and who came together again four years ago for another acclaimed production, The Gallant John Joe. There were several other Mac Intyre-Hickey plays in between, of course, but those are the two that lodge most firmly in the theatre-going memory; the savage richness of Mac Intyre's language, the beauty and wit of Hickey onstage.

Since their first meeting - in Hourican's pub in the early 1980s, Mac Intyre approaching Hickey to ask him to take the lead role in his "Kavanagh play" - the two have had an artistic relationship that relies as much, they say, on an unspoken understanding as it does on the practical rough-and-tumble of the rehearsal room.

"There's no explanation for it," says Hickey of their bond and their apparent ability to read one another. "It's an intuitive sort of thing. I don't know what it is."

"I have an explanation," Mac Intyre interjects. "It's the business of playing. The essence of collaboration is playing. If two people involved have a sense of play, then the dance begins, and can go anywhere. Just like life. And I cannot conceive of seductive theatre, poetry or fiction motoring without that fuel."

Though twinkling with an infectious sense of mischief - they laugh often, and seem to draw great fun out of everything they encounter - the duo discuss their art from a position so close to it that it can be difficult for a third party to grasp a concrete sense of their collaboration. Mac Intyre, especially, speaks with a passion that frequently veers into the lyrical, even the mystical.

"The note of Irish literature, mythology and folklore is the creak of the door between the two worlds," he says, and the two worlds are the human and the other world. From the river that joins them, Mac Intyre draws the water of his art. Little wonder, then, that he should eventually find himself drawn toward the story of a woman who died while immersed in that river. The attraction was slow, he says, as he became aware of the growing literature on her case; but once it happened, the need to write his way into her being was inescapable.

In his new play, What Happened Bridgie Cleary, which opens next Wednesday at the Peacock - with Catherine Walker in the title role, Hickey as Michael, and Declan Conlon as the lover, Simpson - Mac Intyre finds a way of giving life to his conviction in creativity's creaking door.

Bridgie, Michael and William Simpson have all passed through what Bridgie refers to simply as "that spotted door"; their lives ended, they are faced with one another in a sort of waiting-room in another world. The music of that strange world strikes notes sometimes poignant, sometimes warning, sometimes chilling, through Mac Intyre's characteristically intense language. The task faced by these characters is not, he makes clear, an easy one, nor one from which they can escape.

It is, he says, formed of his belief that there exists "a room in the world beyond where you may consider your account book, and where you must perforce make a deal". What's different about his perspective, however, is that this other world or realm of the unconscious, this unnamed zone where the spirits and the voices of these characters are gathered, is a place which exists alongside the mortal world once inhabited by Bridgie Cleary - and inhabited, indeed, by us all.

Mac Intyre's stance on the story of Bridget Cleary is not driven by the impulse simply to condemn and deride the ignorance and small-mindedness of her time, or of a society which could burn an independent-minded woman because of that very independence, where that spirited nature could be understood only in terms of witchcraft. To condemn is easier than to question and to comprehend; besides, Mac Intyre seems utterly open to the possibility that Bridget was in touch with the supernatural or the irrational, and that this was no bad thing.

"I happen to believe," he says. "If ever you met a believer, you are now facing one, a believer in the other world. And I know that in that rural Ireland, which I almost touched myself, the beat of the other world was an audible beat. And it makes perfect sense to me that Bridgie should have a connection with it and, indeed, that Mikey [ as Michael is called in the play] has had his wee lash of it too."

Hickey, though less vociferous about belief, approaches the character of Mikey with a distinct lack of scepticism. Mac Intyre criticises as the great pity of the modern age the fact that "the breath of the supernatural" has been drained by "the tyrannical rule of the secular", and the oxygen of Hickey's performance relies on that same powerful breath.

"Mikey can't hear the music that Bridgie hears," he says. "He knows there's something there alright, but he can't hear that music. And he's afraid of it, in a way."

In the case of the actual Michael Cleary, of course, the man's belief was part of "the doom of the situation", as Hickey puts it. He believed fervently that the fairies had carried his wife away and left in her place a witch or a changeling, and out of that fervour he enacted her murder. But the world of the play, as both men are keen to stress, is not the world of reality; this is not a documentary about what happened in 1895. Rather, it is an imaginative journey that takes those happenings as its springboard. Though relatives of those involved are still to be found in south Co Tipperary, this decision was informed by the need not for sensitivity but for creative freedom.

"The play," as Hickey explains, "has its own demands", and those are demands which can only be met by loosening the cords, golden or otherwise, that bind it to history. That said, a visit to the area made quite an impact on the actor.

"I'll tell you what was wonderful," he says. "Things like standing outside the cottage where they lived. And there's Slievenamon right in front of you. To know that . . . this beautiful mountain, when she looked out her front door, there was Slievenamonin front of her. To know that . . . so you'll use what's beneficial."

The harsh reality that informs the play is born more of an ethical truth than of any historical or geographical accuracy. Bridgie Cleary, in Mac Intyre's eyes, chose the wrong path, to be with her husband rather than with the man she truly loved - and for that she paid the price. As a result, the play is a meditation not just on loss and betrayal, but fundamentally on love and its demands. Not that, he understands, to choose the right path would have been painless.

"Thinking about the atmospherics around a young woman in the late 19th century, and the atmospherics around a young woman now, I feel strongly that the task of breaking away from the collective is savagely difficult, always, whatever the century is," he says. "To find the resources to step free of collective values and to live your own magic is a supreme task for the individual, and as difficult as the young woman or man tonight as it was in the 12th century, as it was in the third century."

Had Bridgie chosen to do her heart's urging, she would have rendered impossible the night of her burning by a man who could not understand her. But she stayed with that man, and what happened afterwards left scars on his psyche as well as on her ruined body. Mikey must also face up to his past.

"We had a phrase at home about how, when people didn't like someone, they'd say 'May he die roaring'," Hickey laughs. "And I would say that Mikey probably did die roaring. Because of the unresolved feelings that he's lived through all these years after the deed. Now, in Mikey's case, the question is, how can he find his way, guided sometimes by Bridgie or by this place, to some sense of acceptance or self-recognition of some description so that he can stop roaring. So that he can find his way."

Mac Intyre takes up the thread.

"I think basic to the music of the piece," he begins - and Hickey nods in agreement already - "is the notion that we find articulated in stories all the time, that with your dying breath the account book is flashed before you. And there's the possibility, in this play, to examine it and to deal with the deficit side of the ledger. Now, how that will go down with a contemporary secular audience I have no idea. But I don't apologise."

And he laughs. Naturally, Hickey's already laughing with him.

What Happened Bridgie Cleary opens at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, on Apr 27 (previews from tonight), then tours to Town Hall Theatre, Galway (Wed, Jun 8 to Sat, Jun 11), Backstage Theatre, Longford (Wed, Jun 15 and Thur, Jun 16), Ramor Theatre, Virginia, Co Cavan (Fri, Jun 17 and Sat, Jun 18), Garage Theatre, Monaghan (Tue, Jun 21 and Wed, Jun 22), Town Hall, Dundalk (Thu, Jun 23 and Fri, Jun 24), Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray (Tue, Jun 28 to Sat, Jul 2), and An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny (Thu, Jul 7 to Sat, Jul 9)