French director Olivier Py inspired Vincent Woods to rework the Deirdre legend on an epic scale. Belinda McKeon hears about it.
Gathered at Samhain in the great hall at Eamhain Macha, the King of Ulster and his people hear a terrible cry. It is at once a birth cry and a death rattle, coming from deep within the womb of a woman destined to die; it is the sound of the unborn Deirdre, destined for the lust of the King, destined for the love of his nephew, Naoise, and destined, thereby, to pull Ulster down to ruin. It's destiny; how can it be spurned?
That's the question that pulses through A Cry From Heaven, Vincent Woods's new version of the tragedy of Deirdre and Naoise, which opens at the Abbey Theatre later this week under the guiding eye of French director Olivier Py. Through the startling poetry of Woods's writing, through the lives of these reimagined characters - a wilful, sensuous Deirdre, an anxious Naoise, a mother-festered King Conor - destiny weaves itself darkly; it stifles freedom, closes open roads, inscribes in stone the ends of bright young lives. It's a curse, a burden, a blackout on potential. Still, for the playwright and the director, it's not all bad.
How did Woods and Py first meet? "Destiny," says the latter, and if there's a trace of irony in the statement, it's difficult to discern. "Indeed," Woods laughs, no less shy of the notion, and the two begin to recount the crossing of their paths.
Woods, in Orleans two years ago for a conference on theatre and translation, found himself at a performance of Py's Le Soulier de Satin (The Satin Slipper), the verse epic by Paul Claudel that redefines the notion of epic: at 11 hours, it represents nothing if not a challenge to all involved. Woods, however, had a method for dealing with its vast scale. "I remember thinking, 'if I'm to sit here for all that time, I hope it's either really visual or that there's lots of nudity,'" he says Half an hour into the production, he was riveted. And not by naked flesh.
"I said, 'yes, I'll be here for the whole time,'" he recalls. "It was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen," remembers Woods. "It lifted the roof on my entire head. The power, the visual epic that came through, and the visual poetry, the poetry of theatre . . . it opened a door for me into what I was writing. Its expanse actually gave me the courage to go on and to not be afraid of largeness, to not be afraid of long speeches, of poetry, of the epic. Because seeing a large audience, holding with this, holding completely with it, made me feel that anything is possible in theatre. I think what I came away with was a sense that the epic is not only possible but is necessary."
What Woods was working on at the time was an early draft of A Cry From Heaven, then provisionally called "Deirdre". He soon erased her name from the title, he says, to distinguish this version from the earlier dramatic versions of the story by Russell, Yeats and Synge. But there was another way, too, of marking out his Deirdre from the others, of imagining her anew.
"I came back to Dublin and I said to Jocelyn Clarke [ then literary manager at the Abbey]," says Woods, "I've seen this extraordinary piece of theatre and, exactly as Olivier said, it feels like fate that I've seen it, and I really want this man to do the play." With almost 100 years between the last production of a Deirdre play (Synge's, in 1910) and this one, says Woods, "if it's going to be done again, I think it should be on this epic scale."
The script was sent to Paris. To their delight, it came back almost immediately with a definite "yes" attached. Woods, still in awe of Py's direction, the spectacular achievement of his vision, was too bashful to approach the director when he travelled once again to France, this time to Paris, to see Le Soulier, but he left him a note. Whereupon Py phoned him in Dublin with an admonishment. "You should have come," he says again now. "You should have."
He turns to me. "What Vincent couldn't and didn't know was that I had such a love affair with this country," he explains. "I did a journey 15 years ago in Ireland . . . and if I live in Bretagne now, and I live on an island, that's basically because I went to the Aran Islands and that changed my life. That journey was so amazing for me. Maybe other French directors wouldn't have been so happy to be working in Ireland. But for me it was really something."
Ireland has changed hugely in those 15 years, Py agrees, and he's not entirely happy with what he returned to, this city of glass and chrome. "I really feel that its soul has been sold away," he says, unconsciously echoing a line at the end of Woods's play in which Deirdre gives her deadened body to Conor - "Its soul . . . fled". Such drifts towards the play's world are frequent as the two attempt to distance themselves from it, to discuss it from outside the rehearsal room.
Even the larger context of the play seems to inform their being here, to wield influence on the way in which they have come to meet; Yeats's advice to the young Synge, over a hundred years ago, to "give up Paris" and to go to the Aran Islands, to "express a life that has never found expression" - to find the material for the plays he would write, of Deirdre and of others - seems to resonate in the casual words of Woods to Py, as the director laments the loss of the Ireland that proved an inspiration in 1990, and longs to find again what he calls "the spark". "Go back to the islands," says Woods, simply.
Py was not familiar with the story of Deirdre or with much of Irish mythology when Woods and Clarke approached him with the script, but this posed no problem; in fact, it gave a sense of freedom. "What I felt was that I didn't have to know more about the Táin and Deirdre. I think that it's not a Celtic play. And I think," he says to Woods, who is nodding in agreement, "that was part of your idea to have a foreigner direct, is that I won't go into this Celtic attitude."
The landscape of Woods's play is not recognisably one of Irish mythology. His tropes and motifs could refer just as easily to ancient Athens as to the Irish annals; the raw sexual energy of his women and men roots the piece as much in the modern age as in the pre-Christian. And at the play's heart is a terrible realism, a knowledge of war and its return, over and over, that could only be possessed from the standpoint of the now.
This, says Py, is what separates theatre from film, from soap opera and from other visual imaginings of the world. "Maybe it's good to say war is bad because, yes, war is bad," he explains. "But theatre cannot do that. It doesn't have the fit to be simple. It shows that war is unescapable. So we may feel a bit strange about it, because it doesn't accomplish the moral duty of mourning. It just shows how the unescapable is unescapable.
"And that's strange, how this old thing, people shouting poetry on a stage, shows it as nothing else. And gives us a knowledge of something that cannot be learned, and [ shows] there's nothing that can be done against the heritage of guilt."
Significant power comes, in the script of Woods's play, from the fact that only one of his large cast of characters is given the gift of innocence - and that character, Deirdre's baby son, is murdered even before he has lived out his first day. In Synge's Deirdre, there was a sense that the tragedy of the young couple was brought down upon them by others, and by destiny itself, much more than it was by themselves. Woods's Deirdre and Naoise, however, are implicated in their own fate. "The biggest question, in a sense, hovers around Deirdre and the notion of her birth, her pre-birth cry, and what that means," he says. "It all goes back to those ideas, those notions of birth and innocence, and whether we're born innocent or whether we enter the world anyway, carrying that inheritance of ancestral guilt and pain. What I've tried to do is to make the characters real."
Py has been listening closely. The poetry of Woods's work, he says, was what drew him to the script, just as the visual poetry of Le Soulier sent Woods searching for Py's address. "In my own writing, people used to say to me, 'but people don't talk like that in real life,'" he says. "I would answer, 'but we just did!' I mean, what's the idea of real life, of real people, that people shouldn't speak poetically. It's not true. People speak high poetry every day. And they need it," his voice sharpens to a new intensity, "like air."
The play is dark, he agrees - "I've never worked on something so dark" - but in it is a sort of joy. "Even if it's dark, there's always a joy in theatre. It's a joy just of the meaning . . . this way of looking and facing the darkness is the joy that theatre can bring to the world if it has no more anything to give."
He looks towards Woods. "And I'm here to make the poem. I'm here not to interfere with the words. I mean, a good director can be fashionable sometimes. But the need of a poem and of the poet and the words of the poet are always words from now and for no time. And the most important thing is to have a poetical theatre. That's why it's also important to be in this house, which has a story."
He's talking of the Abbey and the need for a literary theatre - a notion often derided as stuffy and old-fashioned - so to hear these words come from the mouth of a dynamic young director, committed to the visual and the physical as much as to the verbal, seems for a moment something of an anomaly. But Woods is smiling. He's seen this anomaly at work, and in it he, and his Deirdre, trust.
A Cry from Heaven opens tonight at the Abbey Theatre. Booking: 01-8787222.
