The Quiet Land review: lament for a disappearing Ireland

The Quiet Land

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

***

This is no country for old men, such as Eamon and Nashee, in Malachy McKenna’s sensitive new play about a very Irish decline. Meeting each other at a gate between their farms, Des Keogh as Nashee and Derry Power as Eamon seem to haul around a lifetime worth of baggage, some of which McKenna uses to allude forcibly to the Irish theatrical canon. Nashee, for instance, holds a bullhook, reminiscent of Christy Mahon’s loy, while Eamon, his head in bandages after a recent attack, could have been its target, himself sporting a hurl that he uses as a crutch.

From the familiar echoes of its title to the many forebears of elderly Irish characters meeting at an unspecific rural location, right down to such well-worn theatrical devices as crucial information held in a letter, The Quiet Land seems as much a lament for an eroding literary culture as it is for rural lives overtaken by modernity.

Adapted, with very little alteration, from his 2014 radio play, McKenna’s dialogue is wistfully comic and forlorn throughout: “I thought it was touch-and-go with you,” Nashee says of Eamon’s recent misadventure (the result, we learn, of a violent attack). “I thought I’d have to iron a shirt.” Against an economy of gesture, this is what passes for affection between a widower and a bachelor farmer, and in that spirit McKenna is inclined to indulge antediluvian wit and attitudes without comment: here, canny women are frequently called “hoors”, a little person is simply known as “Midgey”, being “off the drink” means consuming wine only, and transition year (“Transmission year,” as Nashee calls it), is a mystifying prospect. The disappearance of such worldviews is not all that lamentable.

But McKenna and director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh are alert to a painful impotency, something identified as much with the men as the land. Turf can no longer be cut in an area marked for conservation, unproductive sheep farms have sold their stock to neighbouring counties and wind-farm turbines (“turbans”) are beginning to encroach on the land. Keogh’s lean farmer, guilt-ridden and fearful, is marked by failing eyesight and frequent malapropisms, while Power’s battler complains of brittle hips and disappearing cohorts. “Might as well be dead,” he sighs, which is the prevailing mood of two men going gently into that good night.

There is more vigour in its performance, though, where Keogh and Power make an amiable pair deploring modern times with some spirit (“Whatever happened to bacon and cabbage?”). In the autumnal foliage of Andy Murray’s set, and the halcyon glow of Colm Maher’s lights, all such comforts are irrevocably lost, and, alone, unguarded and isolated, even the geese remind them of being “exiles in our own godforsaken land”. That land remains quiet against such falling pleas, fading gently into silence.

Until September 5th