Here we go, 20 years on

The state of the nation and the state of the Irish soccer team have often appeared linked. So how is the hero of Dermot Bolger's play about Euro '88 doing two decades on, writes SARA KEATING

THERE IS A theory that the successes and failures of the Irish soccer team over the past 20 years have shaped the course of contemporary Ireland. The theory posits that the victories in Euro ’88, Italia ’90 and the World Cup in the US in 1994 ushered in a period of national confidence, while our failure to qualify for international championships since the Saipan-marred 2002 World Cup apparently predicted our economic doom. Alas, if we follow this theory to its logical conclusion, the failure of the Irish team to qualify for South Africa means the end of the recession is still a long way off.

Soccer provides a metaphor for exploring the evolution of our national identity, too. Matches are cultural performances where we display the symbols – flags, colours, anthems – that define our differences from the opposing team, while in the mass of like-minded individuals gathered on the terraces is a potent sense of community and belonging. The game has been especially useful to Irish theatre in the past two decades, with writers such as Sebastian Barry (The Pride of Parnell Street) and Marie Jones (A Night in November) using the Irish soccer team’s endeavours to explore social, economic and political change.

Dermot Bolger's In High Germany (1990) was a significant addition to this sporting theatrical genre. Set during the 1988 European Championship, the one-act monologue followed an emigrant Irish football fan named Eoin from the terraces of Hamburg's football stadium to a platform at the city's Altona railway station as he realises that, despite the temporary camaraderie offered by the boys in green, he will not be returning home.

In his latest play, The Parting Glass, which opened this week at Axis, in Ballymun, Bolger has brought Eoin back to life in the context of a dramatic episode in the travails of Trappatoni's army.

It is exactly 20 years since In High Germanypremiered at the Gate Theatre, but Bolger, speaking before the tragic sudden death of his wife, Bernie, last week, says he has thought of Eoin often over the years, wondering what happened to him after he settled down in Germany with his wife and baby at the end of the play.

“You go to see one of your own plays and it is speaking for you at a particular time in your life,” Bolger says. “But when you have a chance to revisit one of your own characters you are introducing yourself again to your younger self and bringing him on a new journey.”

FOR EOIN, THAT journey is back to Ireland, the country that thrust him into the world beyond in the recession-blighted 1980s because it could not promise him any future. But the Dublin he returns to with his wife and almost grown-up son in The Parting Glass is a different place altogether, a cosmopolitan city humming with the babble of tens of languages and simmering with shiny new possibilities, one of which is another chance to qualify for the World Cup in South Africa. The chutzpah of a devastatingly handsome French player soon puts an end to that.

But neither play is truly about soccer, even if the game provides the stimulus and resolution of the plot. The plays are, as Bolger says, “conversations with the nation”, and in The Parting Glass the dialogue is with a country buckling under the weight of a decade of sudden change. It is a country that woke up one day, as Eoin puts it, as “a jigsaw under construction. It is Polish shops and Romanian bodybuilders and African mothers outside schools. It is unexpected estates dropped from space . . . all the women have turned blonde, all the waitresses speak Latvian; the bookies in Dorset Street are now sex shops, the girls buying John Player blue at Hardwick Street flats are so posh they have a different pair of pyjamas to wear to the shops every day.”

And if it is the Hand of Henry that brings The Parting Glassto its climax, Bolger has a message that soars beyond the pitch. Where Henry's action might have meant, in the most obvious of metaphorical terms, that Ireland did not have to suffer at the hands of its own stupidity any more but could play the underdog, the victim, once again, Bolger's play suggests that defeat gives us a chance to reclaim a sense of ourselves that transcends soccer.

Eoin's journey is something that Bolger has been mulling over for years with Ray Yeates, artistic director of Axis arts centre, who has worked with Bolger consistently over the past decade, most significantly on The Ballymun Trilogy.

Indeed, Eoin was what brought the two men together for the first time, in 1992, when Yeates, who was then an actor in New York, gave In High Germanyits US premiere. (He revived his performance in 1997-1998, just before he returned to Ireland.) Yeates used to fax Bolger copies of the (fantastic) reviews, and a great friendship and a great working relationship were born.

Yeates says that In High Germanystruck a chord when he first read it. As an emigrant himself he related to the "sense of longing and homesickness, and the sense of rage in the play about a country that can't provide for you". When Yeates returned to Ireland during the economic boom he could not help but wonder what Eoin would have made of it all, and over the years he and Bolger discussed putting that journey on the stage.

This year they decided to do it, and as Bolger set about re-imagining Eoin’s world Yeates geared himself up to perform again after a hiatus of almost 10 years.

The production is directed by Mark O’Brien, who has worked with Yeates as arts development manager at Axis since it opened. It is the shared history and camaraderie between the trio – evident in the comfortable overlapping of voices as the three men talk – that Yeates says keeps his nerves at bay.

It also helps, he says, that it was the Axis’s loyal patrons who would be the play’s first audience. “We have a very unusual theatre here, in that the community of Ballymun is very involved in and invested in the theatre, so there is that sense of ‘There’s Ray up there.’ And when they come to see a show they are there to cheer you on, rooting for you.” A bit like at a football match? “Exactly,” Yeates says.

The Parting Glass runs at Axis, Ballymun, June 1-11 and then tours

From soccer to the supernatural

Dermot Bolger's latest novel, New Town Soul, is also published this month, by Little Island. A supernatural thriller for teenagers, the book is the culmination of Bolger's writer-in- residence tenure as part of Dun Laoghaire- Rathdown's Per Cent for Art programme. Set in Blackrock, the novel takes three teenagers on a journey through familiar surroundings where they discover secrets about the suburb where they live and about each other.