The Tinker's Curse

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

At one point in Michael Harding’s sparing one-person performance for Focus Theatre, he describes a woman taking to a stage and murmuring apologies to her settled audience. As a Traveller, she says, she is not used to talking. The line is soaked with irony, of course. For a start, the character is playing up to a hand-wringing and self-aggrandising committee who pay lip service to Travellers’ issues. More strikingly, though, Harding’s play is itself consummately engaged with the rhythm, eloquence and storytelling of an oral culture. The threat to his Travellers may be one of misrepresentation, but the curse is ultimately one of silence.

Already well travelled, this new version of his 2007 play, originally written for three performers, finds Harding distilling his narrative for one speaker, shifting its details and markedly changing its emphasis. The superstitions that bled into supernatural interference, confusing the original, are here thoroughly downplayed, any shaping hand of the otherworldly entirely removed. Harding’s character seems similarly real, a shambling, broken man in a crumpled suit and trainers named Mikey Rattigan, who begins the play making a sad contrition at Croagh Patrick, but whose ensuing speech roams most of the country in its pursuit of narrative and lore.

Informed and infused by dialogue with members of the Travelling community, Harding’s play is so embroidered with detail that it can strike you more as folk history than folk tale.

His deceptively hesitant speech attains a beguiling ebb and flow, sharing the history of halting sites around the land, parcelling out the stories behind Bradley’s Corner or The Red-Eyed Girls, luxuriating in a turn of phrase (“no flies on her, only the dead ones”), and meandering through liberal character descriptions to the extent that the story itself becomes secondary.

Writing of the literary borrowings of his earlier play, which nodded to Yeats, Beckett and Friel, Harding worried that the Traveller’s tale was forever trapped in a settler’s aesthetic. Here, then, the narrative ramble and colloquial authenticity, delivered by Harding with arresting verisimilitude, seem alive to the politics of voice, representation and truth. The story of this haunted figure is affecting enough – a father steeped in guilt for the death of his child – but it is made more absorbing by its deep respect and affection for a changing culture.

The production in Bewley’s is taking place without musician Finbar Coady’s participation, but Harding’s speech carries a music of its own. It’s not just the story, but the way he tells it. Until April 3