Culture/Ash Clash – An Irishman’s Diary about the Kilkenny Arts Festival

Among the events I meant to attend during a flying visit to the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Sunday was a panel discussion called “Russia and the Rising”. Unfortunately, urgent business delayed my departure from Dublin, so that by the time I arrived, the discussion had just ended. When I say “urgent business”, I mean the hurling match. And I know that for most Kilkenny people, that clarification was unnecessary. My apology is mainly intended for the local arts community (long-suffering, I imagine), who bravely scheduled some of their programme for Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, having read up on the subject afterwards, I am doubly sorry to have missed the event, because the story behind it was at least as gripping as the Waterford-Kilkenny game. It centres on a Russian play called Gondla, newly translated into English by a former Irish ambassador in Moscow, Philip McDonagh, who was part of the discussion.

The original author was Nikolai Gumilyov (also spelt Gumilov), who wrote it in 1916. But subsequent political events meant it was little produced in his homeland and, until now, unavailable in English.

In fact there were Russian productions in 1920 and 1922. And after the latter, the Petrograd crowd even called for the author. Alas he was not in a position to appear on stage, due to his having been shot dead by the Soviet secret police, in a forest, several months earlier.

His tragic tale also has a major Irish angle, however. Because Gondla, although set in 9th-century Iceland, concerns a struggle between the natives' paganism and the Christianity introduced by an Irish prince. Gumilyov found contemporary (and autobiographical) echoes in the story of self-sacrifice. But his source material was the oldest known manuscript written entirely in Irish – the 12th-century Lebor na hUidre, or the Book of the Dun Cow.

Checking references to that work in this newspaper’s archives, by the way, I found a truly startling typo from 1983. It suggested Lebor na hUidre was then part of the “IRA library”. Of course what the writer meant was “RIA” (Royal Irish Academy). But given the book’s turbulent history, a paramilitary twist might have been plausible.

Of its three authors, known to scholars as “A”, “M”, and “H”, only “M” has been identified. He was Máel Muire Mac Céilechair. And according to the Annals of the Four Masters, he suffered a violent end – murdered by Vikings at Clonmacnoise in 1106.

The book, meanwhile, survived, although not without further misadventures. After the demise of the monastery at Clonmacnoise, it came into the possession of the O’Donnells. But in 1359, they were forced to exchange it as part of the ransom for clan members taken prisoner by the O’Connors.

Due to these and other depredations, the manuscript has been somewhat reduced over the centuries. Only 67 of an estimated 110 original leaves remain, all vellum (although probably not from St Ciarán’s miraculous cow, after which it is named).

It remains in the RIA library, where it continues to inspire new scholarship, including most recently a 2012 conference whose papers were published in a book last year, edited by Ruairí Ó hUiginn.

Getting back to Philip McDonagh’s translation, the good news for those of us who missed the Kilkenny discussion is that the actual play is now touring Ireland. It runs in the Town Hall Theatre, Westport, from August 14th to 20th, while a parallel production visits Dublin’s Smock Alley from the 15th to 16th, and another town hall – Galway’s – on 19th and 20th.

As for the rest of Sunday's programme in Kilkenny, the main thing I did manage to attend was Footsbarn Theatre's The Incomplete Works of Shakespeare. Footsbarn is a Franco-English troupe. But despite being foreigners in those parts, they had wisely arranged the 7pm curtain to avoid a clash with either Sky TV's live coverage of the hurling, or the Sunday Game's highlights.

Their show was an entertaining romp through the Bard’s greatest hits, although even with its sympathetic scheduling, it was not appreciated by everyone present. As the crowd left afterwards, I heard one middle-aged philistine mutter to his wife: “That’s 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back”.

My guess is that his culture-loving spouse had lured him there by mentioning the extraordinary number of Shakespeare’s plays – seven – that have “King Henry” in the title. In a distracted moment, her husband may have been led to expect a retrospective on the career of a certain local legend who hung up his black-and-amber jersey last year.