Actors have a reputation for being affected and just a little pretentious. You imagine them nattering away in the Abbey bar, gesticulating flamboyantly and washing each other with kisses and diminutives such as "darling" and "pet". Scarves are worn with particular flourish and conversations are conducted looking over your shoulder, without letting some casting director out of their sight, even for an instant.
This stereotype may have a certain amount of truth to it, but when you see the same actor lugging electrical cable and lighting equipment from a boat as the rain spills down, you quickly revise your opinion of the average thespian. When it comes to touring the far-flung regions, this peacock begins to take on quite a different colour.
The recent Abbey tour of Tom Mac Intyre's Cuirt an Mhean Oiche is a case in point. A gruelling schedule taking in some of the remotest corners of the country pushed cast and crew to the limit. But it was also an experience full of song and merriment, as memorable and as vibrant as Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, the poem that inspired the Mac Intyre play.
Opening in Galway, the troupe of 12 actors and six crew took in venues as remote and far apart as Inishmaan, Dingle and Belfast. Over a period of three weeks, the whole exercise aimed to bring contemporary theatre to a Gaeltacht audience - the belief behind the project being, in the words of the managing director of the Abbey, Richard Wakely, that "the 80-year-old man in Donegal and the five-year-old child in Cork have equal right to the ownership of the National Theatre as Dublin residents".
Fired by this idealism, what was effectively a modern bunch of travelling minstrels set out on a voyage of discovery. What lay waiting was Ireland itself, from the lofty cliffs of Inishmaan in the west, to the urban, Irish-speaking enclave of west Belfast in the North. A circular journey out of Dublin, but leading back to the Abbey for a two-week run in mid-November.
After Galway, the first port of call was Inishmaan. Sitting on the deck of the boat out, the musician of the travelling troupe, Steve Wickham of Waterboy fame, produced his fiddle and began to play. The boat rose and fell to Wickham's jigs and reels. A few American tourists on board thought their dreams had come true. Suddenly the distant fields had a hue a little greener, the water below appeared a little bluer. It was easy to be intoxicated by the whole thing - but for the thought of breakfast with each lunge of the boat. As the vessel swayed one actor joked that we would sink without trace and that only some journalist's notebook would be recovered weeks later, like some ship's log, as a record of events.
At the quayside in Inishmaan the logistical difficulties of touring became apparent. As the company has to take everything that could be needed on the road, there is as much gear as might be carried by a small army. John Stapleton, the stage manager, made it clear that there was more to this analogy than one would think. "It's no coincidence that years ago in theatres they often used retired army people as stage managers," he says. "The whole operation is not unlike a military expedition." Looking at the tables and chairs, lighting rig and costumes that had to be unloaded from the boat, his comparison took on a heavy reality. Not only had the boat to be emptied by pure heft and muscle, but the whole exercise became a race against time as an ebb tide dropped the boat down the quay wall.
But, with the help of the cast, the work was done quickly. While there are cast/crew divisions on some tours, here there was no preciousness about getting hands dirty. As Brendan McLoughlin, the assistant stage manager, points out in appreciation of the cast: "They really do pull their weight and that seriously helps morale."
There now only remained the mammoth task of transporting everything to the halla in another part of the island. Five trailer-loads later and with more heroism from the crew, show time approached. . .
ONE by one, the lights went out in the houses of Inishmaan. Slowly, a steady stream of shadows emerged from dark lanes and roads. The lights of the local theatre beamed out in the deep Atlantic blackness. Actor Brendan Conroy is alive with excitement. "This brings me back to why I wanted to be an actor in the first place," he says, "when you find yourself in a hall like this it suggests images of the circus coming round. It's a hall in the middle of nowhere and yet the magic happens."
The show, due to start at 8 p.m., must wait until the audience is ready. Of the 190 or so people who live on the island, nearly all turn out for the event: only the very young or the very old stay away. In the front of the theatre, two rows of children chew sweets enthusiastically. In the rows further back the old quietly converse, smoking pipes and cigarettes in a slow, leisurely manner. Just after 8.30 p.m., a gradual silence indicates readiness.
Earlier that day, the writer Michael Harding, who directed the play, had leaned on a stone wall and anticipated how the show would be received. "I think that in my experience travelling with plays in the country you get very electric audiences, you get audiences that are still spontaneous, that have an easier facility to respond emotionally to a play.
"Rural life opens up your emotions better than the city, that in every way that you live in a city you tend to be contained and your emotions tend to be contained, it's almost like you have to be house-trained and when you come from the country to Dublin you have to be house-trained not to be emotional, or else people think you're a total gob-shite."
As the play unfolds, Harding's observations seem to have been accurate. There is a sense of occasion. The children are mesmerised by the dream and illusion being summoned up before them. Adults in the audience whisper to each other, discussing the meaning of the spectacle. The atmosphere is taut with attentiveness.
Up on the small stage, the troupe of 12 actors is caught up in the dream of performance. This is a play beyond the Pale in a number of senses. It is part re-telling of Merriman's dream poem The Midnight Court, but also partly to do with the banning of Frank O'Connor's 1945 translation of the original Irish poem by the official censor - the frank and bawdy sexuality of O'Connor's version proved too much for de Valera's Ireland. The storehouse of subversion that Gaelic culture has always been may have been safe in the obscurity of the original 18th-century Munster Irish, but was a little too provocative when O'Connor made the poem available to all and sundry in popular English.
But the audience on Inishmaan shows no sigh of offence. The Midnight Court proceeds. A fairy court is in session where the men of Ireland are in the dock for their lack of sexual prowess. A priest is stripped to his underclothes and the argument is made that such men of the cloth should be allowed marry, there not being enough good men to go round. In a comic and lively performance, the unmentionables are boldly mentioned, taboos are flouted, and an identity is reinforced for a people who know that Irish is a living language.
Later, back in the pub, it is the islanders' turn to perform. Steve Wickham plays his fiddle, then an island man delivers a seannos song with the controlled passion of an accomplished artist. Each actor in the company takes a turn at entertaining, as song follows song: the atmosphere of civility is unspoiled and continues into the night without interruption - there is no local constabulary on Inishmaan. Here is a kind of civilisation unknown in the disco bars and packed pubs and clubs of the urban boom. There are no conversations about traffic. Something Michael Harding said earlier rings true: "The city is full of sad queues of people buying these pre-packed curries and lasagnes to go home to little apartments and to cook them. This is not a life!"
It is a week later and the play has reached Belfast. After Galway, Aran, Mayo and Donegal, the cast and crew are wilting slightly. "We're all pretty knackered at this stage," confides Tomas O Suilleabhain, who plays Merriman in the production, "but we're all getting on really well and there's been no fights or scandal, which can happen on tours," he adds.
With about a week left on the road before the return to Dublin, the cast has the bulk of the tour over. Sitting in the bar of the Belfast Festival Club, its members consider the high-points and low-points so far.
"The high point for me was the two rows of children in Carrowteige on the night we did it there," says Brendan Conroy. "They were absolutely mesmerised: they had their crisps and their sweets, and yet they were absolutely attentive and they affected the audience . . . there was an innocence in the children that affected the audience and then they were ready to receive the play. They laughed and they enjoyed it."
But Carrowteige, in Co Mayo also provided the low point of the tour to date. A storm resulted in a power cut and the phones were down for two days. While the performance was not affected, the conditions did make the technical side of things problematic. "We were doing a get-out in a wind of 80 miles-an-hour," says John Stapleton. "It wasn't raining, it was a gale," says the tour manager, Colm O Dulachain.
The actress Karen Ardiff remembers the event differently: "Maybe I'm perverse, but sitting in a pub in candlelight or walking with Sile Nic Chonaonaigh down a mountain road to get to our B&B and leaning into the wind without falling over, that was wonderful," she says. "The storm was one of my high points, actually."
No matter what diverse experiences the troupe had over the few weeks, all were in agreement that it was a wholly worthwhile experience.
"To give support to people who hardly have roads, for some kind of cultural assertion . . . For the Abbey to give full support to that is what I consider enlightenment," says Conroy. John Stapleton agrees.
"Getting out to the Gaeltacht is something the Abbey has done, is doing and should continue to do, I firmly believe that," he says.
For Richard Wakely, it is important to stress that touring is an essential part of the Abbey's brief - it takes two or three shows on the road each year, depending on funding. "We fund this out of our annual touring grant from the Arts Council which is about £250,000 annually. We are very grateful for that because touring is a very important part of making the work accessible. Touring in the Irish language, the sort of tours that we do in community venues, is by its very nature quite expensive because the income isn't very high, so the subsidy is really used for very good purposes, for bringing theatre to the people."
This kind of commitment helps give weight to the "national" element of the National Theatre. If in the works of J. M. Synge, Inishmaan has given the country a theatrical tradition to be proud of, then it only seems right that the country should return the favour.
As for your average thespians. . .well, they in no way deserve their reputation.
Cuirt an Mhean Oiche by Tom Mac Intyre opens in the Peacock Theatre for a two-week run on Tuesday, November 16th