BRINGING his itinerant troupe, Cool Root Theatre Company, around Galway and Dublin for the last few weeks was Aidan Parkinson. He is a man of many parts and an old acquaintance. Lovers of drama in Dublin may remember him.
Aidan, from Drimnagh in south west Dublin but now based in Boston, was one of that brave band of playwrights associated from the mid 1980s with Passion Machine at the SFX Centre. His contribution was the play, Going Places, which was about workers at a CIE bus depot who were plainly not going anywhere.
This play was not one of the Passion Machine's more successful productions in terms of audience numbers the punters refused to be drawn in by Parkinson's subtle ironies of dialogue and imaginative scene changes, and Going Places undeservedly sank into the footnotes of Dublin theatrical history.
Getting back Up
But Parkinson is back he is made of that stern stuff which produced from his native suburb men of the calibre of Michael Carruth and Mick Dowling. You can knock them down but they get back up.
Indeed, the playwright, drama teacher, translator English to Spanish, and vice versa, has spent the past nine years doing precisely what he suggested the fictional CIE employees were doing going laces. But no hint of iron in this description of his travels in a career which has taken in, successively, Algera (in the early 1980s, before his playwrighting days had begun), Spain, New Mexico and now Boston, he has gotten around.
On the way, he married the well organised Mary Kearney of Boston (who handles Cool Root's front of house) and they have a two year old daughter, Alana.
Cool Root was established three years ago by Parkinson in Boston is and well known on the fringe circuit there. It specialises in pub based and community based theatre, and is in Ireland touring its founder's latest plays, Waitin' On The Ma and Wrestlin' two one act comedies acted back to back in what is one of the funniest night's theatre you could wish for this summer in Dublin and Galway during the Arts Festival.
Parkinson's anti heroes and heroines (the first features two young men, brothers, the second two elderly ladies) are engaged, respectively in waiting for their mother in the students bar of Trinity College Dublin, on the occasion of the conferring of in degree on one of them and in watching Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks slug it out on the box in their local pub of a sweltering Saturday afternoon.
They are comedies based firmly in the life of their author's native city. One awaits with interest, however, to see what Parkinson will make of the other, foreign, part of his life in theatrical terms. When I met him last week, it was clear there was a rich mine here.
Algerian sojourn
In between his Algerian sojourn, where he taught teenagers in an inland town Parkinson taught at St Patrick's Institution in Dublin. Although stressing that that was 10 years ago now, some of his memories of that time are certainly relevant still, especially where illiteracy was concerned.
Some of the kids I taught couldn't read brand names for example, Heinz or Guinness, he recalls.
There followed three years in Spa in, where he met Mary, and out of which my wife had to drag me I loved Madrid". It was still Europe's most exciting place then, he says, where there was a laid back atmosphere in which bar owners would give customers several different types of tapas to taste without charge before expecting an order, and not be offended if one was not forthcoming.
Then there was a year in New Mexico, during which he did a stint on building sites, working initially for the same tiny wages as his intimidated, illegal immigrant Mexican colleagues. "Their position made them completely obsequious," he says of a people he clearly admires, and whose insecurity reduced them almost to the level of slaves.
Mary rescued him through a desire to see her parents in Boston again, and for the past lewd years that's where he's been based, teaching in a private school, with an international department of children and adolescents from all over the globe desperate to learn the English of their adopted country, the United States.
Of his present charges, he notes that the South Koreans are ferociously committed to being financially successful and that trying to explain the Western meaning of the term democracy to Indonesians has had its hazards.
They just want Fun
"I started by saying that the USA was not a democracy, but a plutocracy, he says, where upon an Indonesian girl pupil announced that her native country is a democracy".
"At the end of the lesson I'd have to make it clear to her Suharto is a dictator."
He notes, generally, one disturbing difference between his present charges in the US who include many US born put elsewhere including Ireland.
American kids demand to be entertained in class all the time. Unless it's fun, they won't participate. When it's elbows on desk time, and they've got to concentrate and apply them selves, well, you've an enormous problem there. It's extremely dangerous, because there are certain things which can't be taught without a struggle, i.e. without fun.