There is a part of Canada that is forever Ireland. The rhythms of its speech, its rain-swept north Atlantic coasts, its accents and the highs and lows of its folk music are all startlingly familiar. You might land in St John's airport and grab a taxi, find yourself asking the driver when he left Ireland and be told, "two hundred years ago", with a distinct Wexford intonation.
Maybe it's because Newfoundland is so isolated that time seems to have stood still there. It is a place time works into slowly, where the ghostly voices of the immigrants that made Newfoundland still echo. But those voices are not just Irish. The soft Dorset inflection is also to be heard.
"We're all either English or Irish," says Bernice Morgan, Newfoundland native and author of the novels, Random Passage and Waiting for Time, the books on which the new epic TV drama series, Random Passage, is based.
"Although the place is about twice the size of Ireland, the population is only 600,000. In a small place like that I know I'm going to get flak when people see the series," she says, arguing that however you portray a small place, someone will have a problem with it.
Starring Colm Meany and newcomer Aoife McMahon, Random Passage "looks at the very roots of Newfoundland society, how it was founded by English and Irish emigrants," says one of the Canadian producers, Barbara Doran of Passage Films. Set in the 1800s, the eight-part drama series, which receives its Irish premiere on RTE on Monday, has the look and feel of a big-budget BBC period drama. "Everyone in Newfoundland has read the books," says Doran. "It is to Newfoundland what Roots was to the United States."
Like other epic dramas, Random Pas- sage looks at the fate of a single community, led by Colm Meany's character, and a few close families over a long period. It is the story of Mary Bundle (Aoife McMahon), who leaves Ireland and makes her way, via an English workhouse, to St John's, Newfoundland, and then on to the isolated fishing post of Cape Random. It is the story of a new community being forged in a new world and harsh environment, and survival despite the odds.
As a Canadian and Irish co-production, Random Passage is one of the outcomes of a partnership board set up by the Newfoundland, Labrador and Irish governments, following a Memorandum of Understanding between the governments in November 1996. While the partnership board has a facilitating and enabling, rather than a funding, role Doran credits its importance in bringing the production to Ireland. While the original plan was to shoot in Newfoundland and the Isle of Man, it was thanks to the partnership board, and a number of happy coincidences, that the production came to Ireland for four weeks of its 20-week shoot. One of the Irish producers of the series, Tristan Orpen Lynch of Subotica Entertainment, says it was a chance meeting in Cannes that led to the Irish involvement.
"I met Lorraine Richard [the Quebec producer of the series] at Cannes two years ago," says Lynch. "We had met to discuss a different project, and she was trying to put Random Passage together at the time for an Isle of Man shoot. Independently, I'd met the series writer Des Walsh in Newfoundland - I knew the writer and I also knew the director. When it was impossible to do it in the Isle of Man, Lorraine Richard got back to me, and the possibility of doing it in Ireland came up."
Of the 22 financiers involved in putting the series together, the bulk of the £12 million budget came from Canadian sources. "About 70 per cent of the finance was Canadian, with 30 per cent Irish," says Doran. "The Irish financing came from Section 481, RTE, the Irish Film Board and the Irish producers," she says, "but our first trigger was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation."
According to producer Jennice Ripley, also of Passage Films, the Newfoundland government put the "lion's share" of the money into the project. The Newfoundland and Labrador Film Development Corporation was set up in 1998 to develop the film industry in that part of Canada. "They've a small budget and we took a sizeable chunk of that," says Ripley.
Considering the logistics involved, it is not surprising that the series proved so expensive to make. Apart from some shooting in Co Wicklow, the majority of the series involved the construction of large-scale sets, including the reconstruction, in Leenane, in the heart of Connemara, of St John's Warf and quayside, as it would have appeared in the 19th century. But, says Doran, it was when the production re-located to Newfoundland that the expenses mounted.
"We shot in a small town called New Bonaventure," says Doran. "It's three hours from St John's and so isolated that we had to put a road and bridge in to gain access, as well as running in power. We had runners running back and forth to St John's, and we had to rent and refurbish 50 houses for the cast and crew, many of them houses people hadn't lived in for years."
With no interior studio work involved, the whole production was at the mercy of the elements for the 20-week Canadian shoot. "The Newfoundland weather was horrendous," says director John N. Smith. "We were fighting against the elements all the time, but it was certainly worth going to the edge of the world to make it. You'll see in the landscape the incredibly isolated and harsh world that these people arrived in and built a civilisation in." That landscape is one reminiscent of the west of Ireland in its ruggedness.
Indeed, as Doran points out, the whole production has an Irish look and feel to it and, while a period drama, it differs from older, period television dramas in its intimate, close-up and fluid use of the camera.
"In Cannes, buyers from all over the world were saying it doesn't look like television," says Doran. "It has a grand, epic feel to it. It looks expansive, but at the same time it has a roughness to it. And the performances, particularly from Colm Meany and Aoife McMahon, are really very, very powerful."
Smith took a risk in casting red-haired, 28-year-old Aoife McMahon in the lead role. While an experienced actress and graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Mary Bundle is McMahon's first television role. But, according to Smith, "she has a natural talent and ease - she's a real find".
Originally from Co Clare, McMahon describes Bundle as "a very strong woman who has had a very tough life. She's a fighter and a survivor, but she has a lot of love also. There's a more human and tender part to her which you see in the later episodes."
From McMahon's feisty performance in Random Passage, it is no surprise that she is currently in rehearsals in Liverpool for the part of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World. Her quintessentially fiery, Irish performance makes it hard to believe that the character of Mary Bundle was originally conceived as a dark-haired English woman, rather than the forceful colleen rua we will see on our screens on Monday night. "I was asked to try out a number of accents - west country English, west of Ireland - in the end I played it more or less in my own Clare accent," says McMahon, who cut short her time at RADA in order to take the part.
She made a good decision in leaving college early to play Mary Bundle; soon her face will be known in Ireland, Canada, the UK, Asia, the US, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and the Middle East, if advance sales and foreign interest in the series are anything to go by.
According to Irish producer, Leslie Kelly of Full Works Media, Random Pas- sage has that wide appeal because "it is a universal story of the dispossessed, of emigration and survival in adversity, a huge epic sweep". By all accounts, it seems the production's financiers will see their investment recouped. RTE hasn't been involved in a drama like this since Amongst Women and Falling for a Dancer, and never in anything of this scale.
The advantage of Random Passage is that it is a period drama and will not date. Kelly confidently predicts that, with repeats and reruns,
Random Passage's Irish premiere is on RTE 1 at 9.30 p.m. on Monday, with a double episode of two hours. The following six one-hour episodes continue on Mondays.
