Travellers as real people

Culture Shock:Rosaleen McDonagh shows extraordinary courage in exploring the internal tensions of Traveller lives.

There is a deep irony in the title of Rosaleen McDonagh's new play at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Written into the DNA of modern Irish theatre is the notion of Travellers as the embodiment of freedom, wildness, and danger. In the plays of settled authors, they were both unsettled and unsettling, defined by movement across the landscape. Now, for a rare example of a play about Travellers written by a Traveller, McDonagh chooses the title Stuck and gives us a profound sense of entrapment. From the inside, things look so different that McDonagh's play carries the shock of unrecognition.

In an essay from 1914, famed American anarchist agitator Emma Goldman hailed a play called Where There is Nothing, written 12 years earlier by W.B. Yeats in collaboration with Douglas Hyde and Augusta Gregory, as being "as true an interpretation of the philosophy of anarchism as could be given by its best exponents". The play centres on Paul Ruttledge, a wealthy landlord who, as Goldman summarised the plot "decides to give up his position and wealth and cast his lot in with the tinkers . . . [ He] longs for the freedom of the road - to sleep under the open sky, to count the stars, to be free. He throws off all artificial restraint and is received with open arms by the tinkers. To identify himself more closely with their life, he marries a tinker's daughter - not according to the rites of State or Church, but in true tinker fashion - in freedom."

The rather startling co-option of Yeats, Gregory and Hyde as propagandists for anarchism reminds us of the dangerous edge that could attach to the early fascination of the Irish theatre with Travellers. Goldman saw Where There is Nothing as "deeply revolutionary in the sense that it carries the message of the destruction of every institution - state, property, and church - that enslaves humanity." She can hardly be blamed for missing the element of wish-fulfilment that was at work. For Protestant writers whose co-religionists were then losing their control of the land, Travellers, as people who were apparently content to remove themselves altogether from the struggle for control of the land, were attractive more as a projection of themselves than as a real social presence.

Travellers featured in two of the earliest plays of the Irish Literary Theatre, P.T. McGinley's Eilís agus an Bhean Dhéirce, produced by the Fay brothers in 1901 and Hyde's An Tincéar agus an tSidheóg, presented the following year. In John Synge's The Tinkers' Wedding (a play so outrageous that the Abbey didn't actually stage it until the 1970s), Travellers are set against a Catholic priest as images of a wild, unrestrained life-force. But this celebration goes hand-in-hand with fear.

McGinley's and Hyde's plays both end with a "tinker" departing the stage with a fierce curse on settled humanity.

Travellers exist as unseen offstage and threatening presences in Synge's The Well of the Saints and in The Playboy of the Western World. Pegeen Mike initially asks Christy: "You're one of the Tinkers, young fellow, is beyond camped in the glen?" He is welcomed only when he avers that he is not.

Positive images of Travellers returned to the Irish stage in the 1960s, via north Kerry, as links to an older culture in a rapidly- modernising Ireland and free elements in a society distorted by land-hunger. In John B. Keane's Sive, a Traveller singer and his son are the moral core of a corrupted world, given the power to curse and bless. And in Bryan McMahon's The Honey Spike, the most sustained attempt to place Travellers at the centre of a modern dramatic narrative, a Traveller couple's journey from the Giant's Causeway to Kerry becomes a cross-section of an emerging society.

All of these images, positive or negative, come from the outside, and function essentially as projections of the fantasises and anxieties of settled people. The creation of a theatrical self-image by Travellers is a very different business, and it has been doubly hard. Access to the physical and cultural resources needed to create theatre has not been easy for such a marginalised people. And in a culture that is constantly denigrated, it is even harder to make images that are complex and critical. Just as many Irish people felt that Synge was letting them down in front of strangers by showing drink, sex and violence, the pressures on a writer from the Travelling community must be towards uplift rather than realism.

McDonagh shows extraordinary courage therefore in exploring the internal tensions of Traveller lives hemmed in by violence, drug-dealing and confused attitudes to both sexuality and education. She turns on its head the entire tradition of relating Travellers on stage to freedom and mobility, and gives us instead a world that is both literally and figuratively closed-in. The action of her play is largely set either within the small spaces of a trailer or in the surrounding halting site that is being walled-in by the authorities. Hers is no bland celebration but, for the way it gives us Travellers as real people with complex dilemmas, it is worth celebrating.

Stuck by Rosaleen McDonagh is at the Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin, until Dec 15.