Review: My English Tongue, My Irish Heart

My English Tongue, My Irish Heart

Waterfront Hall, Belfast

***

Chippies and navvies, preachers and poets, boozing, brawling, singing and hell-raising, isolated and homesick in a foreign land: it's a well-worn picture of the Irish diaspora. Down the years, many popular songs have emerged from the cold house of the neighbouring island, where, only notionally, do the natives speak the same language. But study of the written words of generations of Irish emigrants was largely neglected until the publication in 2009 of The Literature of the Irish in Britain, 1725 - 2001, by Mayo-born Dr Liam Harte, a senior lecturer in Irish and modern literature at Manchester University. Harte's learned assembling of a substantial collection of diverse autobiographical writings has prompted a co-production between the university and Belfast's Green Shoot Productions.

This collaboration with writer Martin Lynch, who has always placed community and social issues at the heart of his plays, sets out to explore the effectiveness of research-based drama in broadening an understanding of the Irish migrant experience in Britain dating back to the fourth century. Immigration remains a wider pressing subject and the piece offers a timely reminder of the reverse outward journeys taken for a similarly wide variety of reasons.

As both director and writer – always a risky double-edged sword – Lynch has opted for a lively in-the-round presentation, which the unaccommodating acoustics of the Waterfront Hall Studio do not always serve well. The five performers – Kerri Quinn, Cillian O’Dee, Keith Singleton, Margaret McAuliffe and Ross Anderson-Doherty – switch character and accent between set-pieces, moving with energy and commitment around a set of plain black cubes and ramps, with an emphasis more on the sung and spoken word than on strong visual impact.

A third eye in the mix would undoubtedly have brought increased cohesion to this complex piece. Lynch is a natural storyteller but in merging a modern day story with a dizzying series of period extracts, the central narrative meanders through a maze of impasses and non-sequiturs. The protagonists are shy Mayo Catholic Gary (O’Dee) and feisty Tyrone Protestant Susan (Quinn), who, on the trail of her long-lost great aunt, take a short flight to Manchester, a city that feels like another planet but which they will eventually call home. There they discover a shared identity crisis when Gary’s work colleague Roger (Singleton) reveals the conflict between his English tongue and Irish heart and the three become absorbed into the ongoing story.

Touring nationally until May 31