All about my mother tongue – one man's struggle to keep the Irish language alive.
COLIN MURPHY, IRISH INDEPENDENT, 3 Feb 2013
Manchán Magan grew up in Dublin 4, lived for a
while in a cowshed in the Himalayas, became a celebrity on Irish-language tv,
and is now writing Irish plays for English-speaking audiences (details of his
latest below).
As befits a published travel writer, his life story
has been quite a journey. I asked him to explain it. “It all goes back to one
moment,” he said, “on the morning of Easter Sunday, 1916.”
Magan’s great grand uncle was The O’Rahilly - a
founder of the Irish Volunteers and an ardent Irish language revivalist. That
morning, as O’Rahilly kissed his wife goodbye (he would be killed in the
Rising), he was watched by his niece, Sighle Humphreys – Magan’s grandmother.
She was left with an extraordinary passion for both
the Irish language and the national struggle. During the Civil War, she shot
and killed a young Free State soldier during a gun battle at her Ailesbury Road
home.
Fifty-odd years later, when Manchán was born, that
passion hadn’t abated. Though he grew up in Donnybrook, he spoke no English
before the age of four. “Ever word I spoke in Irish was, for her, a bullet in
the gut of the English oppressors.”
But in his teenage years, his faith waned. At 19,
he fled. He joined an “overland” expedition across Africa. They got stranded in
the jungle in Congo, and were then abandoned by the company. They thought they
had been left to die - but Manchán had never felt so alive.
He kept travelling, surviving rabies and war in
Ecuador, and months living in an Indian cowshed, seeking enlightenment.
Then his brother, Ruán, came out to get him.
Teilifís na Gaeilge was being set up and Ruán had brought with him a
new-fangled, digital, video camera. He wanted to make a documentary.
It was in part a “mission of mercy,” with Ruán sent
by the family to bring the lost son home. But Manchán had himself come to a
conclusion: “I was just fleeing.” It was time to go back.
Still, he was half naked, drinking his own urine
(an ancient mystical tradition) and prone to speaking in new-age gibberish. His
brother turned the camera on him and tried to capture the edginess of Manchán’s
cultural experiences (in Irish), while slapping some sense into him whenever
Manchán strayed too far into esoteric nonsense.
It made for a successful mix, and they crafted out
a niche as makers of pioneering Irish-language travel tv. Then, in 2008, he
made a series about travelling around Ireland speaking Irish, No Bearla. In a
Dublin pub, he pointed at the beer tap and said, “Ba mhaith liom pionta beoir.”
“Fuck off,” said the barman.
Magan started to wonder what entertainment was
available in Irish. Of 75 plays staged at the Abbey Theatre in the previous ten
years, he found, just four had been in Irish. And then he happened to go to a
play at the Project, where the Franco-Irish actress Olwen Fouéré was performing
in a French version of Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. The
audience was spellbound.
“Could we try this in Irish?” he thought. “Could I
put on a play that would be 70-80% in Irish, but 100% understandable by people
who don’t speak Irish?” So he wrote a play, Broken Croí - Heart Briste. He had
no money, so he acted in it himself. Despite this, it was a hit.
For his new play, Focal Point, for the educational
company Team Theatre, he wanted to explore what it’s like when a language dies.
But there’s a paradox there: how do you portray the absence of a language in a
medium that’s all about language? So he reached out to physical theatre
specialist Mikel Murfi, who is directing.
“I want to create a guttural, visceral feeling of
what it’s like when an entire mode of communication is obliterated,” says
Magan.
His weapons may be different to those of his
ancestors. But the fight to save the language is the same. Who knows: perhaps
theatre may prove more effective. After all, it’s about winning hearts and
minds. For in this fight, the oppressors are ourselves.
Focal Point is at the
Project Arts Centre from February 4 to 8 and is available for tours to schools.
See www.teamtheatre.ie.
Shortall on the arts Eithne
Shortall Published: 20 January 2013
The problem with just about everything as Gaeilge
is that it reminds us of the Leaving Cert. For most people, that’s the only
time it was necessary to understand the language. The exam was the only
situation (apart from as a secret code when abroad) in which speaking Irish
ever made sense.
The arts
are subject to the same connotations. A book or performance that is undertaken
because quotas have to be met, or because funding is available, is about as
appetising as sitting the state exam all over again.
Irish-language
theatre has generally seemed more concerned with promoting the language than
telling a good story. Lately, however, there have been some excellent
productions as Gaeilge. Tromluí Phinocchio/Pinocchio — A Nightmare was one of
last year’s most enjoyable plays, and Manchán Magan has been making satisfying,
topical work in Irish for a couple of years. These were already good
productions — interesting premise, clever staging — and they used the language
to elevate them to greatness. It made sense that Irish was spoken. In some
instances, speaking it seems crucial. Tromluí Phinocchio is darker than the
Disney version of the same story. Setting the action in Connemara gave it a
romantic eeriness that supported the evocative imagery on stage. Bilingualism
reflected the conflict inherent in the story of a puppet who wants to be a boy.
Broken
Croí/Heart Briste was Magan’s first theatrical outing, and explored Ireland’s
reluctance to learn its first language. His next production, Bás Tongue (Focal
Point), featured the national language on life support. When you think back to
plays watched at school, you wonder why anyone outside of the Gaeltacht would
discuss drugs as Gaeilge. When talking about the country’s mother tongue,
however, no other language seems suitable. And this is a discussion worth
having.
Great
theatre has come from exploring identity, and Irish pertains to our notion of
country. When the Abbey staged Paul Mercier’s Sétanta in 2011, it was the first
Irish-language play the theatre had produced in over 25 years. It prompted a
debate about the dearth of Irish on our main stages. One explanation was that
the standard of plays being submitted was not high enough.
Works
should be produced in Irish because they want or need to be, not because they
have to be. The arts prides itself on challenging political correctness and, as
with unchecked political works, good drama can be overshadowed by an agenda.
WB Yeats,
a co-founder of the Abbey, argued that we could establish an Irish identity in
which the language was not essential. “Can we not build up a national
tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit
for being English in language?” he wrote in 1892. “Can we not keep the
continuity of the nation’s life ... by translating or retelling in English,
which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is
best of the ancient literature?”
The
intervening 120 years suggest we can. Ireland’s literature has a uniqueness
that derives from the first official language, but does not require it be
employed. From Synge to Friel, the English we use has a blás. Irish can be a
stage device that enhances a work and produces great beauty. But just as you
don’t produce a gun on stage that will not be used, the language should be
wielded with purpose.
Interview with Manchan Magan |
Focal Point
By Caomhan Keane, Entertainment.ie
The Irish
language is on life-support, and so too is its greatest scholar in this
bilingual play that forces you to imagine a world without sláinte, or any
remotely similar word...
A cynical
scholar's son who hates the futility of his father's life collecting vanishing
words like endangered butterflies gives a lecture in a language that he
love-hates, to an audience that hardly understands. What he doesn't expect to
encounter is a vibrant young born-again Gaeilgeoir who finds meaning in her
life through Irish. Could words hold cures like rare Amazonian orchids? This
boy and girl slug it out, trading bilingual insults, revealing transvestite
words, exploring the hypocrisies and secret beauty of Irish - and experiencing
the liberation that comes from coining new terms for old things.
Léigh anois
go cúramach na treoracha agus na ceisteanna dar le Manchan Magan.
You have
revised your Fringe show, Bas Tongue, from 2011 and renamed it. Why?
I wasn't
happy with what I had written first time round. There is that wonderful sense
with theatre where you have an audience locked in a black room under your total
control, doing what you want with them. Louise Lowe is the great example of an
artist who does that. I wanted to do it with Bas Tongue, to get across to them
a sense of what it would be like if a language died. To have that visceral,
gut, physical sensation. I failed, ultimately.
Why?
I failed to
get the drama, the feeling. I liked the ideas in it but it was too analytical.
I was bombarding the audience with didactic information and while all the
information was good, it was worthy; it was turning out like a debate, a device
to try and beat my facts into the audience’s heads. It was, ironically, a bit
like Mikel Murfi’s last play, The Great Goat Bubble.
Murfi has
taken over from Willy White as director. Why did you choose him and what was
involved in finding the show its new legs?
There is a
thing now in contemporary theatre where one is constantly throwing out new
plays. In every year’s Fringe you must have a new play prepared. I spent two
years writing that play - Bas Tongue as it was called at the time, and when it
went onstage I still hadn't nailed it.
I thought if
I could interest Mikel Murfi, the foremost person in physical theatre in
Ireland-non-linguistic, non-intellectual theatre, I might be able to get him to
make me rewrite it the way I felt it should have gone. Fortunately he has good
Irish, so we sat down and he went through the script with me, pointing out all
the parts where I was over egging the pudding and crow barring a whole rake of
ideas in where one eloquent one would work.
Why should
people who have already seen Bas Tongue come back?
That play
was a nice attempt, but failed on so many levels. Those people, who trusted me
because of the quirkiness of my first play, were all let down. Thank god there
was a lot less of them. Word does get out.
I sold them
a pup the first time round. I can’t impinge on their good will to come again.
But I would adore it if they would. Everyone who came saw that what I was
trying to do was worthy, it was just painfully executed by my writing. But I
wouldn't have seen the solutions until I saw it fail. I think I have come
closer this time.
There are so
many great companies working through Irish at the moment, isn’t there?
There is a
sense of reality that you don't get in a lot of hipster, contemporary Dublin
theatre. Just put it on and it will be great. All our friends will come.
The companies that are doing it in Irish- Branar, Moonfish, Mouth on Fire, are
having to put forward logical, well argued proposals for each bout of funding.
And it’s not like you are entering into the vast cavern of the Arts Council
where you don't know how the judgment is being made and whose pulling the
strings. With Foras na Gaeilge, two people stand in front of you and you will
get direct feedback as to whether you are doing it right and whether you are
doing it wrong.
They are
creating an entirely new audience. The Project Arts Centre has its audience. It
doesn't need to stretch itself much. The same people have been coming for ten
years. Anyone trying anything in Irish, in particular the new generation, who
aren’t presenting work up in Club na Muinteoiri. They are creating a whole new
medium, a whole new art form and are having to be super innovative in how they
convey a language that mightn't be understood entirely by all the audience
It makes us
go back to real theatricality in Ireland that has ignored physicality and
expressionism which French and German theatre has had for so long. Embracing it
is the only way theatre through the Irish language will succeed.
Somewhere in
the Gaeltacht, Coffee is being sprayed all over a computer screen!
I'm not
willing to support the final buttresses of that old Irish language. We have a
young generation coming out with fluent Irish that they retain for about two or
three years. They are the ones I want to start talking to and start engaging
with,
so we can create a theatre that is really wide, inclusive and expansive, rather
than depending on that tiny gene pool that we’ve had to depend on for so long,
that made an inward looking art.
You’ve
written a book, presented TV shows, yet theatre seems to be where you’re
voice-and argument, seems to have really taken hold. Although that could just
seem that way for me because I occupy the same pond?
If you want
to develop new ideas amongst the imaginative creative class, theatre is the way
to do it. The thinkers and movers and shakers don't watch TV. You could put it
on radio, but it is hard to control your message as there are commissioning
editors stuck in a 1970s perspective. Theatre is one for the few times that you
can put on an idea for zero money and reach the mainstream.
For 2k you
can put a show on in a central Dublin theatre, with no experience and reach a
good enough audience. You'll get reviewed by the Irish Times, the Indo , you'll
be on RTE Radio. The ideas on your shows will be discussed. I don't see any
other way that you can get that control.
What is your
message?
I saw the
language dying. I still see the language dying. And no one is speaking out
about it, except organisations that are funded to do so. I can’t go back to my
own Gaeltacht as it breaks my heart, I don’t hear Irish anymore. It’s happening
now, people are sleepwalking as our language jumps over the last cliff. I need
to be out there shouting about this no matter how much of an idiot it makes me.
Focal Point
runs in Project Arts Centre from 5th - 8th February 2013 at 8.00pm. Matinees on
Thursday and Friday at 11.00am. TICKETS: €10 - 15.
BÁS TONGUE REVIEWS
Bás Tongue - Irish Theatre Magazine Review by Ruth Kennedy, 21 September 2011
Ever had
a row in a pub about the Irish language? Then you have to see this play.
Worried you’ll understand “sweet faic all”? In Bás Tongue at
Project Cube, they’ve taken care of it – the Irish parts are surtitled in
English. An old-school gaelgóir (Manchán Magan) goes head to head with a
Tesco’s check-out girl turned Irish language zealot (Roxanna Nic Liam). The
pair bitch and moan at each other in at least four languages, trading insults
and stories about words, music, poetry and the drawbacks of a bilingual sex
life.
Writer and linguistic gymnast Manchán Magan covers vast ground in 50 minutes.
The show is both reverent and dismissive of Irish language traditions and
sacred cows – the voices of O’Riordán and Ní Dhomhnaill are heard alongside the
sound of ripping dictionaries and the whack of obscure grammar books hitting
the floor.
Director Willie White has delivered an entertaining and thought-provoking show.
Both performances were relaxed and polished. Roxanna Nic Liam interacted
gracefully with the audience, with perfectly timed storytelling and the odd
blast of Leona Lewis in Irish. The surtitles can be a bit jerky at times,
but the best part is the dull orthodoxy about the Irish language is dying - what
replaces it is for the audience to decide. Definitely something new to talk
about in the pub. Ruth Kennedy
IRISH
EXAMINER Review
by Padraic Killeen, 27 Sept 2011
Bás Tongue – Project Arts Centre (4 stars out of 5)
A bilingual play by Manchán Magan, Bás Tongue opens
with Magan taking position at a lectern before us, the audience. His character,
it turns out, is delivering a speech in honour of his father, a fictional titan
of Irish language scholarship. The wheels come off, however, when Magan
realises that we, his audience, are deeply estranged from our mother tongue.
From here, the play soon erupts into a battle of wills between Magan’s grumpy
character, (who would abandon us, the great unwashed), and an enthusiastic
gaeilgeoir (Roxanna Nic Liam) who – in translating his Irish for us – would try
to save us.
Though the play’s contrived formal features are a
little stifling in the early stages, Bás Tongue
gathers an irresistible momentum as it goes along. Crucially, the melding of
spoken Irish and English is fluid and effective. Yet, more importantly still,
the play gets the theatrical stuff right. The imagery – whether relayed through
dialogue, gesture or action – is imaginative and powerful. When not locating
fertile images, Magan highlights the residual beauty of a language that is now
rapidly becoming lost to us.
One great meta-theatrical flourish near the end finds
himself and Nic Liam handing out a rare Irish word to every audience member to
take home and care for like an ‘Irish word tamagotchi’. It’s both hilarious and
poignant. By the finale, the play has worked its audience into a profound
longing for its own language even if it can’t quite quash a prevailing sense
that this longing will never be assuaged. Padraic Killeen
Bás Tongue, IRISH
TIMES - REVIEW by Caomhan Keane
Manchán
Magan is mad as hell. And he’s not going to take it any more. Rethreading the
ground and format covered in Broken Croí/Heart Briste here, what emerges
is a comic assault on the hypocrisies of the Gaelgoir set while excavating the
grievances of their opponents.
“Should
we not prepare for the death of a language?” asks Magan’s unnamed character.
“No,” responds Roxanna Nic Liam’s convert with a cult-like appreciation for her
mother tongue. So they go at it, exposing a teanga that can be bitter and
negative yet also full of grace and beauty.
Anyone
who has found themselves on the condescending end of a Gaelgoir’s snout will
emphasise with the isolation such snobbishness begets and Magan flips between stark
imagery, bitchy dismals and sudden realisations to crystallise both arguments,
leaving us to draw our own conclusions. The production struggles to maintain
the Oedipal subplot and errant surtitles but it is funny and furious enough for
these chinks to be excused.
Caomhan Keane
ENTERTAINMENT.IE - REVIEW by
Caoileann Appleby. 3 stars.
A lecturer (
Manchán Magan) is giving a talk about his
father's works, though the funereal flowers suggest a eulogy. Assuming that the
audience won't understand him, he relies on his translator
(Roxanna Nic
Liam) to get his point across: but she isn't inclined to co-operate.
The fight is on between the coldly rational Gaelgeoir purist, in favour of the
death of Irish and a global oll-theanga; and the younger, newer speaker, whose
practical Béarlachas is nevertheless connected to an imagined dreamy Celtic
past.
They battle with battered dictionaries, stolen diaries, poetry, and Pepsi,
but their polarised positions don't offer the audience much room to see a way
forward for them, or for Irish as they have categorised it. We are told that
aitheantas is the most important thing, and given an Irish word to take care
of, but little mention is made of the only way in which a language can survive:
if children learn it. Nevertheless, Magan's writing is powerful in parts, and
Bás
Tongue is a stimulating, intellectually demanding show that asks a
lot of its audience, and it gets it: even while assuming that we won't.
PROJECT ARTS CENTRE BLOG - REVIEW
Posted by
Zara Sep 26 2011 - Review of Bás
Tongue (Manchán
Magan) directed by Willie White
I’ve
always been interested in languages, of almost any kind, but my self-discipline
lacks the force of my enthusiasms, so I’m fluent in almost none of them. Sign
Language, mathematics, !337$|)34\< (leetspeak), musical notation… all have
known the ephemeral caress of my interest, but I can never seem to stick with
anything. If you’re reading this, you probably have the same fascination. The
arts are all about communication, about manipulating different forms of
language to express an idea. If you care about the arts, you care about
language. If you’ve ever come across some esoteric little nugget of text-speak
or internet jargon – “ymmv” or “afaik” – and
gathered it eagerly like a pearl, or if you’ve ever laughed with someone over
bizarre local slang – like “tome” or “sips” or “bushing”* – then you know how
magical language can be.
I really
do not know why or how the magic got sucked out of the Irish language for most
of us, but it happened. I don’t know what it is about our school system or the
culture at large that is so hostile to it, but this play goes some way to
undoing it.
Bás
Tongue is
written by Manchán Magan and directed by Willie White (until recently, Project
Arts Centre’s artistic director, and now director & CEO of Ulster Bank
Dublin Theatre Festival).
A jaded
scholar (Magan) attempts to deliver a lecture on Irish poetry, but he’s losing
patience. The language he uses and describes seems dead in the water, its
demise has long been foretold and few in the audience seems to understand a
word he’s saying. He gets into a long, wide-ranging debate with a
surtitle-operator (Roxanna Nic Liam) bubbling with a newfound love of the
language, who rejects his pessimism and snobbery and insists that the language
can and must be saved. As they argue back and forth, the most interesting
dynamic that emerges is his ambivalence: he clearly loves the language,
harbours a reverential awe of its history and idiosyncrasies, but he is
protective of it to a fault, resisting those changes which offer its only hope
for survival. He considers neologisms and Anglicisms as polluting toxins and
the mangled Gaenglish occasionally used by young people as a weak substitute,
an embarrassing desecration of the Mother tongue.
There’s a
part of him that wants to let go of the language, give it a sort of Viking
funeral and let it drift away, instead of allowing it to suffer what he regards
as an undignified diminishing at the hands and clumsy tongues of young
Anglophones like this girl, who has nothing like his fluency despite all her
ardour. He questions her motives, sneers at her naïveté and mocks her idealism.
She does rather have the wide-eyed, breathless enthusiasm of an 8-year-old who
has found an injured rabbit on the side of the road and imagines she can nurse
it back to health. When she talks about the bewildering richness of the Irish
language, its monstrous vocabulary that has never yet come close to being fully
recorded, the effect might perhaps be more depressing than inspiring: what hope
is there that it can be saved? There’s simply too much. And so much has been
lost already.
The play
is written with wit and eloquence and has moments of profound sadness,
particularly when it deals with the feeling of isolation that comes from
linguistic barriers: from having not enough words, or the wrong ones. The
writing pulls you in all directions, making persuasive arguments on both sides
about the stakes and the challenges involved in reviving the Irish language.
Personally,
I’ve come to the realisation that all we need to reclaim and re-energise the
language is ourselves. We still have a collective identity as Irish people and
we’ve stamped it all over the English language. No one speaks English the way
the Irish do.
Take our
innate sense of drama. Something is not merely “very”, it’s “fierce.” I’m
fierce happy about this. Something is not merely bad, it’s “brutal.” If it’s
good, it’s “deadly”, or it might even be “savage”. If it’s excellent, it’s
“savage cabbage”. My little brother and I express this in Irish as “sabháiste
cabáiste”, but unfortunately “sabháiste” is not a real Irish word – at least,
not according to his school fóclóir. We tried translating it directly but the
best we could do was “cabáiste bhrúidiúil” – brutal cabbage – which of course
is not the same thing at all.
The point
is, as long as we retain our sense of ourselves, the connection we have with
our ancestors who spoke our strange bockety national tongue remains unbroken,
despite the fact that we’re soaked in Béarla up to the eyeballs. At the moment
we’re still predominantly using someone else’s language – which the play likens
to wearing someone else’s knickers. But we still have our own voice.
This
isn’t a proper review. I don’t think I could write one. I loved the show. I saw
it twice. The second time, I brought my mother, a schoolteacher, in the hope of
thereby infecting a classroom of kids with a newfound appreciation for the
teanga. At the end of each performance, each member of the audience for Bás
Tongue was handed an Irish word on a card, to keep and to treasure and to nurse
as you would a seedling, to keep it alive and help it grow by sharing it with
others. I went twice so I got two words. I gave one to my little brother. I
hope he finds a way to connect with his national language. And I hope you do
too.
* “tome”
means “cool”, “sips” means “ugh, I am not in favour of this” and “bushing”
means drinking outside, generally illegally, and possibly in a field or a
graveyard somewhere.
NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY IN IRELAND BLOG - REVIEW
Bás
Tongue is a play
about how the Irish language is dying, and of course, we don’t speak Irish. Nor
do most people in Ireland. The surtitles were something of a necessity, and one
would think that they’d have practice syncing them up. Maybe it’s because of my
background as a techie, but it can’t possibly have been that hard. Not only was
the timing off, but more often than not, surtitles would be projected for a
fraction of a second—hardly enough time to read them. I’ll back off that,
though, because to the actors’ credit, I did get a pretty good idea of the
story line.
Manchán
Magan, a Béarlóir (anglophone), is attempting to give a lecture in
his father’s memory. He’s clearly disappointed that nobody in the audience
knows Irish, but continues anyway. Shortly thereafter, surtitles appear, along
with the subtitle operator (Roxanna Nic Liam). Magan is an Irish purist,
and despises the surtitle operator’s so-called “pidgin Irish.” Which is odd,
because you’d think that some Irish is better than no Irish at all, right?
In 2007,
Manchán produced a television series entitled No Béarla, in which he
attempted to get by in Ireland speaking strictly Irish. He doesn’t get very
far. In Hegemony of Language, an article by Shahid Siddiqui, three
options are offered as “responses” to English—in other words, what people like
Manchán are to do when two languages collide. He says we can either accept
English, reject English and speak our ‘Bás Tongue’ instead, or we can learn
English without rejecting one’s own language. While clinging to one’s mother
tongue sounds like the right thing to do, realistically, his third solution is the
most viable. The fact that languages can travel is a marvelous thing.
Suggesting someone give up the language they grew up speaking would be
blasphemous. But we live in an international world. People travel, and people
must communicate as they do so. People need a common language, and English is
pretty well suited for the occasion. I don’t agree with Gramsci’s views that
society can be ruled by one social class, or think that it should. I do think,
however, that we need some linguistic common ground, and in Ireland, at least,
English does a near-perfect job. Magan, for some reason, disagrees.
To prove
his point, Magan insists upon a “Pepsi Challenge” of Irish. He pours a cup,
explaining that this cup of Pepsi represents his pure Irish. He proceeds to
spit in another cup, labeling it “diluted, polluted, pidgin Irish.” This
scene’s been put on YouTube, for your viewing pleasure. The surtitles work in this one.
If I’m
honest, I don’t share the same attachment to English as Magan does, and he
deserves some credit for that. I like English; I’d go as far as to say I have a
passion for it. Stephen Fry summed up my thoughts pretty well. All that having been said, I
think other languages are pretty, and I put some effort into learning them. Je
m’appelle un petit pen d’français, par example, and in middle school, yo hablar
español. Not very well anymore, though, as you can tell. But I have no
comprehension of what it’d be like were my language to die, and that’s
basically what’s happening to Irish. I can’t imagine clinging to my language,
but that’s because I’ve never had to, and likely never will. I count myself
lucky for that.
The play,
though satirical, was moving. I respect his love for the Irish language,
because it is a beautiful language, and what’s happening to it is tragic. At
the end of the play, the actors passed out cards bearing Irish language words.
They asked that we keep these words alive, that we use them to pepper our
conversations. My card read
teallaire
| tyall-era |
brat
I’ll be
honest, it isn’t like, watching yet another Real Housewives with my
girlfriend, I’m going to proclaim, “These women are such spoiled teallaires. I
mean, really.” (I can’t really think of another instance I’d use ‘brat’ in
conversation, let alone its Irish translation.) But I do appreciate the
sentiment, and as my contribution to the Irish language, by the time I go home
for the holidays, I’m going to serenade my family with the Irish national
anthem. That’s the plan, anyway. You’re welcome, Manchán.
Globe
trotter speaking up for our mother tongue, Irish Examiner 2011
In his TV show No Béarla and in
his plays, travel writer Manchán Magan aims to preserve our ‘precious’ Irish,
says Pádraic Killeen
FOLLOWING
the success of his debut play, Broken Croí/Heart Briste, in 2009, Manchán Magan
returns to this year’s Absolut Fringe in Dublin with his second effort, Bás
Tongue. Like the earlier play, Bás Tongue is bilingual, playing on the frisson
between English and Irish. It examines the strange relationship we Irish have
with our beleaguered ‘teanga náisiúnta’. Magan is known for his globe-trotting
cultural programmes for TG4 and RTÉ, but he is also a travel writer, novelist,
and a provocative commentator on the state of the Irish language. His 2007 TV
show, No Béarla, pulled no punches in revealing the frailty of the mother
tongue. It was an honest account of how diminished Irish is among the
populace. It earned the mercurial Munster-man some “cold shoulders and hostile
looks” from many in the gaeilgeoir community. “I was just trying to highlight
some of the issues around the language,” he says. The criticism from within the
Irish-speaking community both hurt and vexed him. Magan is, after all, a
descendant of the famous O’Rahilly clan that was so central in promoting Irish
language and culture in the wake of the Gaelic Revival.
Partly as a response to the gaeilgeoirí, then, Magan was inspired to try his
hand at producing an Irish language play and - with the assistance of director
Tom Creed - brought Broken Croí/Heart Briste to the stage in 2009. The show was
a big hit, showered with positive reviews, nominations and awards. Within days
of its opening, Magan was approached by the Abbey theatre and BBC Ulster with
queries about future work. He is working on a commission for the Abbey. “Broken
Croí did ridiculously well - a lot better than I thought it deserved to do,”
says Magan. “But it was new. It was someone doing something new with the
language. The concept was that it would be 60% in Irish, but 80% understandable
to English speakers. “It’s linguistic engineering. You use certain words that
the audience will need to understand the play. Everyone has, maybe, 1,500 or
2,000 words that we’ve just picked up from school. So there are things you can
do with that.” Whatever the engineering behind it, the show worked. And so
Magan now returns with a new effort employing a similar approach.
Again, it’s a two-hander and again Magan performs onstage (despite being, on
his own account, “a shite actor”). Bás Tongue takes the form of a comical and
fevered debate between a committed scholar of the language and a member of a
new generation of young Irish lovers - the graduates of the gaelscoileanna -
who now constitute a subculture on the island, complete with their own
hipster-gaelic lexicon. “The guy’s an absolute snob about Irish and he loathes
this new street-Irish being spoken in Dublin and Cork,” says Magan. “So that’s
where the dramatic conflict comes from.” There are gags about “transvestite,”
words like ‘talún’, references to the impression that listening to poet Seán Ó
Riordáin’s made on traditional Irish speakers (in the words of Máire Mhac an
tSaoi: “like chewing sand through your teeth”), and metaphors about how donning
another language is like “putting on someone else’s knickers.” Ultimately,
however, Magan’s agenda remains an earnest one. “What I want in this play is to
give people a visceral sense of what it is to lose a language - to lose
something that we’ve had for over four thousand years. There is something vast
and precious being lost here,” he says.
Though he can occasionally sound pessimistic or melancholy about the state of
the Irish language, Magan’s conversation is chiefly marked by a concrete optimism
that insists the future lies in “playing” with the language, and he points to
the success of the Welsh rock band Super Furry Animals in engaging with their
own native tongue. Magan’s co-star, Roxanna Nic Liam, describes Magan as a
“realist.” Nic Liam is a graduate of the gaelscoileanna, and she knows all too
well that being realistic about the language inevitably triggers sorrow. “There
are some words in Irish that describe things or feelings for which there are no
words for in English,” she says. “They only exist in Irish. So there will be
some things that will be completely lost. You won’t even have a sense of it.
That’s what I find quite sad. The future for spoken Irish, she says, is in
forming a “symbiotic” relation with English on the island. One wonders if the
theatre of Manchán Magan is not already kick-starting that process. Irish Examiner - Pádraic Killeen, 20 Meán Fómhair 2011
CATHERINE FOLEY’S REVIEW FROM BEO.IE
http://www.beo.ie/alt-bas-tongue.aspx
Bás Tongue
Bhí Catherine Foley i láthair sa Project Arts i mBÁC (
ionas
go mbeadh an BEO
in ann trácht ar an mBás)
nuair a léiríodh an dráma ‘Bás Tongue’ le Manchán Magan.
Tá dráma cliste,
spleodrach, álainn scríofa ag
Manchán Magan. Cuireann sé argóintí na teanga Gaeilge os ár gcomhair agus cé go
dtuigimid go léir na constaicí agus na
buanna ar fad a
bhaineann le labhairt na Gaeilge sa tír seo, pé sa Ghaeltacht nó sa Ghalltacht
atáimid, agus cé go bhfuil cainteoirí Gaeilge
ag snámh in
aghaidh an easa don mhórchuid, cé go bhfuil sé sin ar fad ar eolas
againn, tá rud éigin úrnua agus
scléipeach, liriciúil,
spreagúil,
teann agus
drámatúil
cruthaithe ag Magan. Tá mothú, teannas agus
fuinneamh ag baint leis na hargóintí a chíorann sé ina
dhráma, Bás Tongue. Tá filíocht, greann agus áilleacht ag baint lena línte.
Tá beirt sa dráma – fear
imníoch,
tirim atá
sáite sa seanashaol agus
é ag iarraidh
léacht i gcuimhne ar a athair a
thabhairt agus tá an pháirt seo ag Manchán Magan é féin. Ansan, tá cailín
cathrach, atá tar éis Gaeilge a fhoghlaim, í
díograiseach,
dáiríre agus i ngrá leis an dteanga. Tá an pháirt seo
ag Roxanna Nic Liam. Tá sí ina rúnaí ar Chumann na nGaeilgeoirí. Labhrann sí
faoi thábhacht agus faoi
anam na teanga agus ar sí:
“Domsa ’sí an Ghaeilge an rud
is luachmhaire atá
agam”.
Taobhú
Gan amhras, déanann an fear magadh dá pearsa agus dá cuid
mothúchán,
mar ghlacann sé leis an dtaobh eile den
díospóirecht.
“Move on, a chroí,” a deir sé léi. Ach,
ní mhaolaíonn
an cailín ar chor ar bith. Éiríonn a guth níos láidre de réir mar a théann an
dráma ar aghaidh, agus glacann sí chuici féin tacaíocht an lucht féachana. “
Ceist ionannais í seo, ceist chroí, ceist talún,” a mhaíonn
sí agus tá an lucht féachana ar a taobh. Má tá tú faoi dhraíocht ag an teanga
agus ag guthanna na n-údair a chloisimid i rith an dráma – mar shampla Peig
Sayers, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, beidh tú,
i
nganfhios duit féin, ag iarraidh í a spreagadh ar aghaidh.
Ag an am chéanna, glac leis go bhfuil pointí sa dráma ina chasann an taoide
agus go mbíonn an lucht féachana idir dhá chomhairle,
meallta
ag fear na spéaclaí,
fear an tsearbhais, fear
na
fíricí tirime, mar tá cás láidir le déanamh aige.
Cé go dtuigfimid ón tús gur duine
righin, tirim,
imníoch atá
fréamhaithe sa stair é agus é ag iarraidh
léacht a thabhairt i gcuimhne ar a athair
iomráiteach,
mórthaibhseach, GB Ó Ceallaigh, laoch sa
seanmhódh agus údar mór Gaeilge, tá ‘an fear’ ina
abhcóide láidir,
feidhmiúil in ann
a phléadáil go paiseanta i nguth ioróineach,
searbhasach
faoi chúrsaí agus faoi staid na Gaeilge mar atá sí inniu. “But, let’s not
pretend go bhfuil gach rud sa gairdín rosy (gach rud togh agus rogh). An bhfuil
éinne anseo sásta glacadh leis nach dtuigeann formhór agaibh céard atá á rá
agam . . ..?” a fhiafraíonn sé den lucht féachana. Meabhraíonn sé dúinn agus
don chailín gur scríobh Séan Ó Ríordáin go raibh “teanga ár sinsear, fuar marbh
go deo.’ Deir sé nach dtuigeann aoinne cad tá á rá aige nuair a thosaíonn sé ag
tabhairt a léachta. Caithfimid glacadh leis go bhfuil an teanga imithe, a deir
sé.
Chomh Marbh le hArt
Is “polemic” é an drama, atá faoi stiúir Willie White, ach ní dóigh liom go
n-éiríonn sé leadránach nó tuirsiúil ag aon phointe mar tá ceol, filíocht agus
guthanna na Gaeilge
fuáilte isteach tríd síos. “Éist
le Peig,” a deir an cailín agus tá draíocht faoi leith sa ráiteas san. Leanann
an fear air ag iarraidh a
chur ina luí orainn go
bhfuil an Ghaeilge marbh agus nach bhfuil in ann do chainteoirí Ghaeilge anois
ach í a úsáid “
go mortasach in amharclann poiblí... ar
nós Chríostaithe sa Collisieum surrounded by lions”. Ach, ag an deireadh tá sé
nach mór ciúnaithe ag an gcailín. “Huh!” a deir sé.
B’fhéidir go bhféadfadh rithim agus luas na cainte a mhoilliú i rith an
léiriú, ach go háirithe sa dara chuid. B’fhéidir go bhféadfadh an léiriú deis a
thabhairt don lucht féachana na focail agus na hargóintí
atá
faoi chaibidil a bhlaiseadh i gceart. Éist leis an bhfocal ‘cloch’ ar
sí. “Mura gcoimeádfaimid an
tsnaidhm idir sinne agus
ár dtimpeallacht, strainséirí a bheidh ionainn inár dtír féín”.
“Is í seo mo theanga, mo
bhealach teagmhála sa
domhan deacair gránna seo.” Tá sé ana-chumhachtach an tslí ina iarrann sí ar
bhean na soilse na soilse a ísliú. Íslítear an solas. “Níos mó anois,” a deir
sí, agus ar sí leis an lucht féachana: an dtuigeann sibh
an
bhrí atá le clapsholas anois. Is nóimid fíordhrámatúil é. B’fhéidir go
mbeadh sé go deas cleas nó dhó eile mar seo a fhuáil isteach sa léiriú agus
tacú leis na bhfocail mar seo.
