The Cat and the Moon, W.B. Yeats's small play from 1926, has a peculiar magic and enduring power. In it, a blind beggar and a lame beggar are searching for the holy well of Saint Colman.
They exist in a symbiotic relationship; the lame beggar travels on the blind beggar's back and directs him about the roads, filtering the world for him, though the reliability of his vision is questionable. In return, the blind beggar, a big strong man, provides mobility. When they get to the holy well, Saint Colman manifests himself and offers them a choice of being cured or being blessed. The blind beggar chooses a cure but his restored sight brings him only the realisation that the lame beggar has been giving him a skewed version of the world: his illusions are shattered and he storms off in misery.
The lame beggar chooses to be blessed and though he must live with his affliction, the saint grants him one magnificent dance where he achieves a unity of being with all creatures, a kind of transcendental experience of cosmic proportions.
I first engaged with this play nearly 20 years ago, as a member of a Dublin street theatre troupe. We rarely used existing texts, preferring to make the world up as we went along, though many of our concoctions featured beggars - they being easy and cheap to costume. We may also have had an affinity with tatterdemalions, as we earned our living mostly from busking.
This particular summer we had some funding to work with children from city communities, over the course of a few weeks. A bus would bring the children to Dollymount Strand each morning and we would be waiting for them with a programme of activities: games and sports on the hard sand; theatrical sketches, mostly comic, set among the tall sand dunes in the natural bowls which functioned very well as small amphitheatres.
Woven through the morning's events was The Cat and the Moon. The blind man and the lame man were to all intents and purposes just a couple of vagrants on the beach. Word soon got around that they were looking for the holy well of Saint Colman. They'd drift about in character, sometimes near the children, sometimes far off in the distance quarrelsome with each other, resting sometimes, appearing and disappearing into the dunes, the lame beggar often perched on the shoulders of the blind beggar.
Towards the end of the morning, they would take centre stage, so to speak: we'd guide the children to a particular large playing area among the dunes and the actors would embark on W.B. Yeats's text proper.
In the original, the saint doesn't actually appear; his lines are taken by a musician. For our purposes, we had an actor, who looked a bit like Superman in his face make up and body suit, rise from a big barrel which did duty as the holy well.
One particular morning, an overcast clammy morning with an angry sea, there was an electric feel to the atmosphere. The kind of day when you long for a good storm to clear the air. We were lethargic and the children were lethargic and everything felt like a huge effort. Whatever was in the air, by the time we guided them to the rim of the dune and the saint made his appearance, the children fell to their knees, their hands joined as if at church.
THE play went through its paces. The blind beggar had his sight restored and raved off into the distance, unhappy and alone; the lame beggar had his glorious and transitory dance; and the play was headed for its final song. We were gearing up to herd the children to a picnic on the Bull Wall and back to their bus.
Suddenly a boy of about eight or nine years got up off his knees and walked down the slope of the dune until he was standing right in front of the saint. He was a skinny young fellow, with a pale and troubled face. His hands were still joined and he spoke reverently to our actor: "Holy Saint Colman, will you cure me please? Will you give me back me boy's voice?"
I think we all knew what was coming. He had a beautiful, melodious, Dublin voice but there were no two ways about it if you'd had your eyes closed you would be sure it was a girl had spoken. He proceeded to tell a story of persecution and isolation. He poured his little heart out to the saint. His Da slagged him off all the time, told him he should be wearing dresses, called him a pansy, a nancy boy. The other boys in the flats wouldn't hang out with him; he was fed up playing with the girls and, anyway, they only played with him if they were desperate. Besides he must have had a boy's voice once; something must have happened to it when he was a baby; he must have been born with a boy's voice. It was such a huge outpouring of sorrow from such a small frame.
We were stunned. At a total loss. For one moment it felt as if the actor playing the saint computer a cure and give him back his boy's voice. The strangeness of the atmosphere, the weird electricity in the air, the children's devout faces at the rim of the bowl, our collective will to ease his burden, harbinged transformation. The moment passed. The actor spoke, as gently and kindly as he could, about how we each have an individual voice that is important and unique. But there was no miracle.
From that day on we were careful to let the children see us making up and getting into character. They met the blind man and the lame man and the saint and all the other characters first as ordinary young men and women in jeans and T shirts, and they watched the transformation that artifice enables. We wanted a willing suspension of disbelief. We also wanted an informed suspension of disbelief. We didn't want to mess with their hearts and minds. As the poet Michael Hartnett puts it:
"The imagination has no limits.
Art has."