Bríd Ní Neachtain is happy to reprise her role as a dead woman in the stage version of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Irish-language novel, Cré na Cille, but she's not going to let the grass grow under her feet, writes Rosita Boland
'You often see these old picturesque postcard images of Connemara women with the black shawl, the red petticoats and all that, but Máirtín Ó Cadhain's women are nasty. They bitch. They're worried about land. They're worried about one-upmanship. What I like about playing the part of Caitríona Pháidín - apart from the fact it's a great part and Ó Cadhain writes very well for women - is that she is a very strong woman. I love that bitchiness; that harshness."
Actress Bríd Ní Neachtain is talking about an Irish-speaking role she has now played three times on stage, that of Caitríona Pháidín, in an adaption of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's famous novel, Cré na Cille. Galway's An Taibhdhearc ran the play again as part of the recent Galway Arts Festival; this year marks the centenary of Ó Cadhain's birth. Also this summer, TG4 filmed an ambitious production of the novel in Connemara, with a large cast, in which Ní Neachtain again played Caitríona Pháidín. This major dramatisation will air next spring.
Cré na Cille (the graveyard clay), was published in 1949 and is one of the most famous novels in modern Irish language literature. Although there are translations in other languages, to date there have been none published in English, due to copyright issues. Cré na Cille is set in a graveyard in Connemara, or, more correctly, under a graveyard. The characters are all dead and, as the novel progresses, they are joined by more of the newly-dead, who update them about news from life above ground.
Caitríona Pháidín is the central character, a woman somewhere in her 70s. She arrives into the graveyard, having had a bitter and disappointed life, when her sister Nell married the man she herself had loved. Garrulous and sharp-tongued in death, she is driven by the desire to know that her surviving family have erected a headstone over her grave, and she eagerly questions each new arrival to see if this has happened yet. The news she seeks never arrives.
"She wants to know that she lives on; that's she's not just become a hole in the ground," Ní Neachtain explains. "She continues to the end until she realises there ain't going to be no cross. This woman is holding on. She's very selfish, but there's sadness about her constant hoping. The cross is so important to her."
WHETHER IN THE community of the living or the dead, Ó Cadhain points out in Cré na Cille that people are motivated by the same things. Even in death, life goes on, in all its humdrum tangled bitterness and black humour. There is no sentimentality about death in Ó Cadhain's Connemara. "Life above ground wasn't a lot better than it was below ground. They were both bleak places."
For scholars of modern Irish- language literature, Cré na Cille is their Ulysses: a rich, complex and subtle showcase of the Irish language. It's not everyday Irish, and even those completely fluent in the language who attended the Taibhdhearc production of Cré na Cille reported having to concentrate hard in order not to miss anything, particularly as there is very little staging in the play. The entire production is driven by narrative.
"Dramatically, not that much happens on stage," Ní Neachtain says. "The dramatics are the words: the language is almost like another character. It's difficult, but beautiful, language. I always try to make it sing. Ó Cadhain is a giant of Irish literature."
Ní Neachtain is from the Connemara Gaeltacht, from Rosmuc. Did being from Connemara help her to interpret the role?
"Oh, absolutely. You have to have total command of the language for this role. And also, I know those people Ó Cadhain writes about. I grew up with them. I recognise that territory. The audiences recognise it. At the time he wrote it, I think Ó Cadhain thought the Irish language was dying. We didn't have TG4 and Gaelscoileanna then - he wanted to portray his own people and his own community.
"At the time he was writing, Connemara people were emigrating not just to England but to east Galway and now it's just the opposite. If he came back and saw the Spiddal of today, it's exactly the opposite: people aren't emigrating any more, they coming in there to live, and it's just as easy to get a cappuccino in Spiddal as it is in Dublin 4."
When Ní Neachtain first played the part of Caitríona Pháidín 10 years ago, she was eight months pregnant with her first daughter: "I don't know what Ó Cadhain would have made of that!" she laughs. There can't be many actresses who feel so at home on stage that they're happy to perform only weeks away from giving birth, but theatre has always been part of Ní Neachtain's life.
All through her schooldays - boarding school at Spiddal - she acted. "I always felt very at home on stage, very comfortable. I never analysed why I wanted to be an actress," she offers. "I still don't. It's about feeling comfortable." When she was 17 and about to leave school, she wrote to Tomás Mac Anna, the then artistic director of the Abbey, and asked if there was a vacancy for an assistant stage manager. Her initiative paid off.
"He wrote back and said, 'can you come up on Monday?' I started on the following show." At that time in the Abbey, roles were less clearly defined in the theatre than they are now. It was possible for production people to occasionally double as cast by being extras or playing very small walk-on and speaking parts.
"My first walk-on part was in Brian Moore's Emperor of Ice Cream. I had six or seven lines. I was playing, strangely enough, a woman that was much older, because at the time - I think it was brilliant - you could be in such a thing, regardless of whether you were 20 or 40. My character was in her 40s, I myself was in my 20s, and that was my first role.
"I was very fortunate at the time I was working in the Abbey that I saw some wonderful directors and actors - I saw people working things out on the rehearsal room floor when I was there working as assistant stage manager. At the time I wasn't aware I was learning so much, but it was only when I put it into practice myself I discovered what I had learned. In those days, you went from the Abbey to the Peacock. You had Sundays off and that was it. At the time also, there was a policy that you worked on sound as well as stage managing. So you learned the whole package."
SHE WAS TAKEN into the company as a member of the acting company in the 1980s. Among the roles she played there was Mary Anne in Tom Mac Intyre's 1983 version of Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger; the mother in Sebastian Barry's 1988 Boss Grady's Boys; and Beck in Marina Carr's 1994 The Mai. However, her most high-profile role during that time was Rose, the damaged, dreamy sister in Brian Friel's study of a quintet of Donegal sisters, Dancing at Lughnasa, which premiered in 1990 at the Abbey. Directed by Patrick Mason, this production went on to run at the National in London and then on Broadway, where it was a huge hit. Ní Neachtain regards it now as her favourite role.
She left the Abbey in 1999 to do the first four years with Ros na Rún, at a time when the whole structure of the Abbey was changing and the acting company was being disbanded. The Abbey, however, where she spent most of her acting life, is still a big part of her life: her husband Fiach Mac Conghail, was appointed director of the theatre last year.
This autumn, Ní Neachtain returns to Trinity College Dublin for her fourth and final year reading Early and Modern Irish Literature. Coincidentally, Máirtín Ó Cadhain was appointed Professor of Modern Irish there in 1969, the year before he died.
"Even though I'm enjoying studying, I know the stage is where I belong," she says firmly. "I would never think of giving acting up. We actors throw everything up in the air and academics try to put them all back together again. Throwing things in the air is what actors do. It's what I'll always do."
After its Galway Arts Festival run, Cré na Cille was on Inis Mór last weekend and is now playing Inis Meain until Mon. It will run at Tur an Fhia, Lettermore, Co Galway on Aug 18-20 and later at Dublin's Axis Arts Centre for a week, beginning Oct 30