Until a few days ago, the last time I had visited Cobh was the night in 1996 when the then minister for finance, Ruairí Quinn, went live on the six o'clock news to announce the closure of Irish Steel, writes Frank McNally.
The town had been bracing itself, but even so, it was in shock. Angry workers gathered on the waterfront and told me they were only the subplot in a bigger industrial drama, designed to scare unions at Team Aer Lingus. "We're the sprat that catches the mackerel," one man said. Later that night, the Bishop of Cloyne led a candle-lit vigil in the square below the cathedral, which still looms - like the sense of despair did then - over the town.
The very next day saw the start of yet another rescue plan, in which Irish Steel bought one last lease of life by selling itself for £1 to Ispat International. Amid plunging steel prices, a terrible safety record, and allegations of asset stripping, the plant closed again, permanently this time, in 2001. All that remained was the epic clean-up of Haulbowline Island - only now nearing completion - after 60 years of hosting Ireland's heaviest industry, and one of its dirtiest.
So Haulbowline seemed an appropriately doom-laden setting last week for a staging of a play considered "the first working class tragedy" in theatre history.
Georg Büchner's Woyzeckwas revolutionary material when it was written way back in 1836, which partly explains why it was never finished and why it went unpublished until the 1870s. Since then its depiction of the dehumanising effects of poverty and exploitation on an unbalanced young man has established it as a German classic.
The backdrop for the opening and closing scenes of Corcadorca's night-time production is Cobh itself, twinkling across the harbour from the grassy spit on which the demented Woyzeckfirst appears.
Corcadorca's fierce commitment to exposing audiences to the elements is well known, and the pier from which we watch the first scene certainly fits the bill. But having presented Shakespeare's Tempestfrom the middle of a pond last year, the theatre company has now taken the outdoor experience a step further.
Thanks to a collaboration with the Naval Service - still very much alive on Haulbowline, its headquarters - Corcadorca has inverted the time-honoured theatrical convention whereby props are moved around while the audience remains stationary. As part of the arrangement, the Navy is also providing ferry transport from Cobh during the 10-night-run and even a pre-show supper in the mess hall. But its main contribution is the set itself.
The props for this production are necessarily immobile, comprising as they do a collection of large, historic buildings, including the former hospital of the British south Atlantic fleet. Thus, the audience has to walk from one scene to the next, directed by lighting, or by sound, or by Oonagh, the company administrator. This is that most valuable of nights at the theatre, during which you can be entertained and provoked to reflection on the plight of mankind, while also losing weight.
Crucially, the audience remains on the outside of all buildings, uncovered, for the entire play. But in case you are now rushing to book your ticket, encouraged by the balmy evenings we have been enjoying lately, there is bad news. Like Corcadorca's previous summer productions, the entire run was booked out before it opened. Cork people cannot get enough of this sort of thing.
Georg Büchner was a young man in a hurry. During his short, chaotic life, he wrote three plays and completed a doctorate on the nervous system of fish. But he was also a political activist. Thirty years before Das Kapital, he wrote a pamphlet urging peasants to revolt. Unfortunately, most of his target audience couldn't read, and a few passed their copies to people who could: the police. As a consequence, Büchner spent some time on the run and was still working on Woyzeckwhen he died of typhus, aged 23.
Inspired by the real-life story of a Leipzig wig-maker beheaded for murder, Woyzeckwent unread for decades, until the faded manuscript was painstakingly deciphered and published. Its lack of an ending remains a challenge for those staging it, and even the intended order of scenes is open to interpretation. In this as in other things, Büchner was ahead of his time. But he had done enough in his few years to be acknowledged by Brecht as the father of modern theatre.
With Irish Steel no longer anchoring it, Cobh has a displaced feel about it these days. Most people work elsewhere, albeit in the general hinterland. But the sprat is gone (and the mackerel after it), and the nearest thing to heavy industry in Cobh these days is the cruise-ships that come calling nearly every week, availing of the deep-water channel that runs right past the town's piers.
I woke up the next morning to find that my waterside hotel had been dwarfed during the night by a liner the length of a football pitch, with a 10-storey glass lift going up and down the side, disgorging passengers most of whom looked like they could benefit from the Corcadorca weight-loss programme.
Even that ship was a minnow, apparently, compared with the Navigator of the Seas, which was in recently and will be back in August, with 3,800 passengers, a theatre bigger than Cork Opera House, and a shopping mall the width of Main Street. When the cruise passengers are in port here, their entertainment is Cobh: a show that runs for one night only, and maybe the following day, until the ship heads somewhere else. It's not exactly a steel plant, but it's a living.