In the end, everlasting life is nothing to boast about

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:WHEN THE PLAY was over in Tralee, on Sunday night, there was an eerie silence in the theatre. The lights were switched off and the set was dismantled. The company of people who had worked so hard to create the illusion for such a short while, hugged and kissed and said goodbye. I went across to the Brandon Hotel and had a glass of wine with some of the cast, and then we went off to a house in the beautiful hills outside town and partied until dawn.

Someone said: “Theatre is just one big illusion. When two characters kiss and fall in love on stage, it is beautiful, but it doesn’t last. It disintegrates. It has no permanence.”

I said: “I suppose that’s the same as life. Nothing lasts forever.” Television and film try to make things literal and lifelike, as if the smiles on celluloid could remain eternally, and the body flesh be forever young. But the illusion is revealed as the film fades, and eventually all the pretty dresses in old movies get caught in time, like photographs of Auntie Mollie.

When I see old film footage of religious processions flanked by police and army colour parties, I wonder did that time really exist. When I see old documentaries about Joe Dolan or Dickie Rock, and all the showbands, crawling around the country in minibuses, from one dance hall to another, where thousands of young farmers lined the walls waiting to find the love of their life, squashed against the opposite wall, I wonder did that time really exist. Did we actually live like that, back then? Did those things really matter to us then? I was still a teenager in the early 1970s when Ireland was a steady and unchanging rock in a volatile world. Or so we thought.

But then came a “time of hope”. There were real signs that Ireland was emerging from a cultural ice age, which had protected the nation from European ideas throughout the course of the 20th century.

The sexual revolution of the Californian beaches had already arrived in Dublin and a few other urban areas beyond the Pale. Many young people were placing their hope in the belief that if you were in a room with another young person for more than half an hour, and if there was sufficient eye contact to indicate mutual attraction, then a quick bonk was never entirely out of the question.

Sad to say, I completely missed the fun. I had been mesmerised by a medieval world of dark cloisters, exotic rituals and men singing melancholic chants about the beauty of crucifixion, while they averted their gaze from denim jeans, cheesecloth blouses and the flesh of young women.

Like many other uncertain boys, I was confused by my sexuality, and frightened of the changing world. And in that bliss of sexual illiteracy, I was drawn to the safety of an all-male priesthood that played blind man’s bluff with philosophy and produced the creator of the cosmos in a silver dish each Sunday morning. In that time, I thought that the truth was immutable. That change was illusion.

And now that the world, as we knew it, has sunk in a great economic deluge and everything we thought was permanent is being taken away, and the world we had held together for a short lifetime is being measured by the reaper’s blade, I begin to realise that there is no consolation any more in the brag of an Easter people who proclaim everlasting life.

When the dust of friends is scattered on the earth and the agony of Calvary or Auschwitz disturbs us with the possibility that God might indeed have abandoned us, the only consolation is in the letting go of things, and the falling away of time.

It is the impermanence of things that holds the truth. The fading of photographs, the darkening of the theatre, the storing away of sets, and the yellowing of old newspaper cuttings that contain rave reviews for some play that has long since been forgotten. On Tuesday evening, I packed my bags and checked out of the Brandon Hotel and nosed my car into the evening traffic, heading for home. The streets were full of lanky boys, and giddy girls – all of them waiting for their moment in time, to strut and fret upon the stage.