Listening to local radio "down the country", as I found myself doing for much of last week, one could be forgiven for any ignorance that Europe is in a massive military, political and humanitarian crisis - and, indeed, that Ireland is nicely brewing one of its own.
Thank God, I heard myself saying more often than usual, for RTE. The nightly dose of Tonight with Vincent Browne (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) - now graduated, thanks to the pace of events, from the happy adolescent phase of tribunal-mania - was especially welcome. Not that it was without its problems. On Thursday, the night of the April Fools' Declaration from Hillsborough, the programme came from Belfast. Suddenly, just as Browne was putting a probing question to the DUP's Gregory Campbell - himself in the Derry studio - fate intervened and delivered a veritable balloon-full of dead air.
The continuity department in Montrose came to the rescue, with a snippet of Pacobel's Follies. (The thought occurred that some deity had arranged the technical blip simply in order to present us with this glorious congruity.)
Anyway, local radio - with the usual exception of Anne Cadwallader's exceptionally informed and informative reports on the shared news bulletins - wasn't the place to hear these follies. However, an exceptionally sweet and moving piece of holiday broadcasting could be heard on two of the local stations.
The Clown Crucified (CKR-FM and WLR-FM, Friday) was a reflective programme made by an independent production company, Kairos. Ironically, though it was broadcast on Good Friday afternoon in the southeast and midlands, it was very much a story from the city of Thursday night's silence, Derry.
This wasn't a documentary in the usual sense of the word, though it told the true story of the life and death of Joseph, a Derry boy with Down's syndrome. There was no "actuality", just a well-judged script written and read by John McCullagh, with a few additional "texts" (Biblical ones among them) read by other voices.
The heavily-wrought links between Joseph, born on Christmas Day, and the suffering and despised Christ, would probably have sounded excessive at any other time. In a Good Friday meditation, however, they worked; the Marian parallels in the pain of his mother were especially sensitive and telling. The programme, though, was at its most evocative when it was most specific. It skilfully conjured up the innocence of the boy in his divided city: in August he'd march happily beside the Apprentice lodges, playing an imaginary flute, then head home to prepare bonfires for the Feast of the Assumption.
On his 14th birthday one May, Joseph - at his own insistence - was a clown, leading out a civic procession. "He threatened only our secure way of looking at life," the narrator told us. His role was as much that of medieval fool as 20th-century circus performer; Joseph was, we heard, "a lord of disorder".
Recently I overheard a conversation between two non-actors about acting. The chatters were idly discussing how you can gauge the merits of, say, a film performance by tuning out the picture and listening only to the actor's voice - or, alternatively, by tuning out the voice and watching the face. It struck me as a misunderstanding of the craft, a deconstruction of parts that shouldn't be separated. A performance, surely, is a whole, aimed at all the senses the audience can bring to it. Then I heard a test case, By the Bog of Cats (RTE Radio 1, Sunday). This was basically the Abbey's reprise of the Patrick Mason-directed production, staged last autumn, of the Marina Carr play. The RTE radio drama department also got a credit, but this production had few of the familiar names and other hallmarks of that body's output.
I never saw the play, but to these ears a couple of performances failed the now-suddenly-relevant ears-only examination. Moreover, so really did the play itself: its archetypally mythic and otherworldly qualities often sounded pretentious and overworked.
Happily, I did finally learn how to pronounce the name of its star, Olwen Fouere; you probably already know: Fwair-ay. Me, I've been rhyming it with "ooo-err", uncoincidentally ever since I saw her in Salome.
Fouere is really good in By the Bog of Cats, but her vocal mannerisms in the role of the Traveller heroine were unmistakably reminiscent of Sean McGinlay, which was very definitely no aid to visualisation.
Call me a Philistine (or make some other, more obscure reference from literature or antiquity), but I figure a play set on an Irish bog, even a haunted one, has a lot of work to do once it has named its central characters Hester Swane and Carthage Kilbride. Hester's Medea-howl at the end, extraordinarily powerful in this medium, may leave the listener with the false impression that most of that work has been done.
