Come on in, the theatre is fine

‘THIS MORNING, the lake fought back,” Louise Lowe declares. The theatre director is talking about Mayo’s Lough Lannagh, near Castlebar.

It’s early in the week; a perishingly cold day of sullen blue-black clouds, torrential rain, and a bitter wind.

It’s a day for scurrying for shelter. It’s also the first day of on-site rehearsals for Across the Lough, and that means battling the conditions on the water to get the work done: the play takes place in a rowing boat, on the lake. The audience, of whom there won’t be any more than four at a time, are passengers.

This weekend, Landmark, Mayo Co Council’s public-art programme, is taking place in and around the Lough Lannagh area. Performance Corporation, a 10-year-old company that specialises in site-specific shows, is presenting Across the Lough as part of the programme.

Tom Swift’s script has a running time of about 20 minutes. “The brief was to create work that responded to Lough Lannagh and the park around it,” he explains. “We came down here and had a look, and I thought: why not make a show on the lake? I don’t think they were expecting that.”

Today the sole audience member is myself, accompanied by Lowe. Lough Lannagh is a beautiful, reed-edged lake with a score of swans drifting on it like lily pads. Recently, a footbridge was built over it, to connect the two sides and encourage more local people to use this hidden amenity. Steve Blount, the bearded boatman and sole performer (most recently seen in Fishamble’s Tiny Plays), stands in yellow oilskins at the edge of the wharf with the boat. He waits while Lowe and I walk down the path towards him, old pennies in our hands for payment.

“Getting in a boat is kind of primal,” Swift says. “When you set off, there is usually a hush.” Blount – who multi-tasks enviably by rowing in strong wind (prior to this show, he had never rowed a boat) and effortlessly performing all the while – is the strong presence that a monologue demands.

“You’re your own stage manager once you’re out there,” Swift observes. As Lowe says: “You can’t go very far in a boat with a short script, so we have to rely on Steve’s fantastic presence.”

Swift’s metaphor of boatman and journey across a body of water is borrowed from the Greek myth of Charon ferrying his unearthly passengers across the Styx. The old pennies you receive on arrival at the lake as payment for the boatman are an Irish reference to travelling from one existence to another: they were commonly placed on the eyelids of dead people to keep them shut.

There’s nowhere to hide in a small, open boat. You’re literally exposed. Nobody else on shore can hear what’s being said. Blount tells his simple, universal narrative: his life, the people who meant something to him, his connection with this specific place. He’s a melancholic, Everyman Irishman of a particular era; you can be utterly certain that if you sat in a bar anywhere in rural Ireland, you would hear these same sentences repeated.

Sometimes he’s silent. Once, he looks down into the water, and says: “A hundred stories down at least.” It could be depth he’s referring to. Or the fact that hundreds of stories have been played out on this lake already over the decades and centuries; by those who walked its perimeter, and fished or swam in it.

Old age, the contemplation of death, how one lives a life, are all the themes running through the narrative. As part of his research, Swift went to Castlebar’s Sacred Heart Care Home, and interviewed a number of elderly people.

“What struck me was the economy with which they told their stories,” he reports. “I went to London. I got a job. My father died. I came home for a while. I went back to London. I came back here eventually.” That economy of language is reflected in Swift’s script. “I made a fortune. I drank a fortune. I never wrote home. I never sent any money.” Blount incants, staring across the lough, the boat intimate as a confession box.

“You’ll often see swans here,” he repeats softly from time to time, along with another mantra-like line, “It’s cold, I tell ya” – the conversational tics that conceal the layers of all that is left unsaid, the hints of a life not fully lived and realised too late.

“The boat isn’t just a gimmick,” Lowe stresses. She talks about the audience having an “ethical experience”. Ethical? She struggles for the right words. “We want the audience to feel that being there in the boat really matters; that the experience matters; that Steve [Blount] is really there waiting for them. That it all matters.” None of the three are sure if the passengers will ask questions, or interact with Blount; the narrative does allow for some intervention.

“I’ll genuinely listen to what they say,” he says. If the audience do contribute, it’s up to Blount to ad lib while also keeping the narrative going, and the boat going in the direction he’d taken it, wind or no wind.

On the water, Blount gives a haunting rendition of the ballad, Do You Love an Apple. “And still I love him, I can’t deny him, I’ll be with him wherever he goes . . .” He lets the boat drift while he sings and there is nothing to do but sit there, listen, and let your meditating mind take you where it will. Led there by the suggestions of the text, my own mind anchored on old age and all the things I want to do before then.

And at the end of Across the Lough, the boatman delivers you to shore, but not at the place you may be expecting to land; just as in life.

All aboard

Across the Lough, by the Performance Corporation, takes place several times a day from April 20th-22nd. Meeting point at Lough Lannagh pier, Castlebar. Tickets free, but must be pre-booked. Life jackets and rain gear provided. For those who cannot get a ticket, there will be 10 MP3 players on site for each performance, loaded with an audio companion soundscape for people to listen to as they walk by the lake. This can also be downloaded as an app. 094-9047561, landmarkpublicart.com