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THE CELTIC CONNECTION • MAY 1994
Capricorn Strings
Music store with a difference
• Irish harps made to order. We have three differenct sizes 22, 29 and 36-string.
• Wooden flutes. Excellent sounding made from solid hardwood (cherry, curly maple, rosewood)
• Uilleann pipes and Highland pipes
• Ethnic drums, djembe (African), doumbeks (Arabic), bodhrans (Irish), tablas (E. Indian)
• Other instruments made to order include: Hammered dulcimer, tone drums, thumb pianos, mandolins, Irish bouzouki, cardboard dulcimer with an increadible sound.
• Large selection of instructional videos, cassettes and music books.
1769 South Nlcholsdon Street, Prince George, B.C. V2N 1V7 Send for free catalogue or call toll free 1-800-665-9448
\$fj$y Stage Eireann Dramatic Society
Producers of Irish Plays
O'Casey, Behan, Leonard, Friel, Synge, Keane are some of Ireland's renowned playwrights
whose work we have produced or performed.
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Promoting Irish culture through the performing arts, Stage Eireann Dramatic Society is constantly looking for people interested in trying their hand at acting, directing or backstage work in our community theatre group.
Help Keep Irish Theatre Alive
For more information: Contact Ann Carr (604) 228-9527
Woods Tale of Death Celebrates Irish Life
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Petal after petal drifted to the ground and out of each sprang a dozen women with hooks and seed and implements to sow and harvest. They yoked the Strange Knight to the plough and so began the endless task of restoring the land to life and the beginningjiif happiness.
— At The Black Pig's Dyke Vincent Woods
By BRENDAN LANDERS HROW AWAY the gun, men. Now, men. And give peace a chance. That's the message delivered in At The Black Pig's Dyke and the delivery is so powerful it's like being lovingly lambasted by the cannon of the doves.
Playwright Vincent Woods pulls no punches in his demand for an end to the culture of violence and a beginning of a new era of peace and harmony in Ireland.
It's a timely offering, as the politicians feel their tortuous way to their meeting of the minds. A meeting of the hearts is probably a bit much to expect. That's left to the artists. And the women.
Woods comes from County Leitrim, where the ancient tradition of mumming still thrives. During the winter, the mummers, people cloaked and disguised in straw, travel the roads and visit houses to act out dramas of heroic conflict, death and resurrection. At the Galway Arts Festival of 1991, Woods was asked by Maeliosa Stafford, director of the Druid Theatre Company, to write ■ a play about mumming.
He did. And he wrote a stunner.
The play is set in the locality of the Black Pig's Dyke, near the Ulster border. It's a place where sectarianism sets the rules — where perception is warped by political correctness and where you're seen to be, not what you are, but what your great-grandfather was, what foot your granddad dug with and where your father dipped his wick. It's a place where fear ordains the social graces — where life is no longer lived with the appropriate gusto but manipulated (and destroyed) by men fighting wars.
It's a very sick place. A very male place. And in the middle of it all, the women try to muck through. They try to live.
Lizzie Boles is a widow. She's also a Catholic. Back in her prime, it was her misfortune to tall in love with Jack Boles, a Protestant. Wary of the bigotry inspired by mixed marriage, the happy couple moved across the border to a farm in Fermanagh.
But there's no getting away from it. Trouble follows them, in the person of Michael Flynn, a gunman with an unrequited "gra" for Lizzie. Michael's love for her is as twisted as his love for his country, handicapped by the blinders of narrow tradition, corrupted by violence, personal ambition and simple selfishness.
JackBoles is murdered and Lizzie is left to raise their daughter Sarah. Jack's murder comes as no surprise to Lizzie. She knows
A MUMMER CLOAKED AND DISGUISED IN STRAW
An ancient custom acted out in At The Black Pig's Dyke
her history and it's peppered with murder and hatrecf. Jack's father and brother before him were murdered. Life has become a litany of murders.
The legendary black pig is digging himself deeper and deeper into oblivion and heartbreak is the order of the day. Jack Boles is dead and gone and Lizzie's heart, in turn, is broken.
Now Sarah is grown up and has found herself a man, Frank Beirne. But war still stalks the land and malevolence lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce on yet another generation. Frank's brother has been murdered by a loyalist assassin and Frank has avenged his heart.
He drives and moves "stuff for the gunmen, but when he finds out that the "stuff is to be used for sectarian killings (to hit another mixed marriage at a wedding party), his conscience gets the better of him and he turns informer. His days, of course, are numbered. Another lamb to the slaughter.
You'd think after all this, playwright Woods would ease up on us, but no. The man is as relentless as life itself and that's one of the strengths of his work. He just keeps coming at you.
At The Black Pig's Dyke is rife with tragedy but the play itself is a raucous celebration of life. It's a feast of song and dance and poetry. An orgy of rambunctious mummery. The Belfast Telegraph described it as an epic tale of murder, mystery and Celtic mythology." "Astonishing, a
must-see near masterpiece," said The Guardian. They were both right.
The Druid Players (and nobody could do it better — this work is perfect for them) take us on a ribald tour of the Irish soul across the generations.
It is a primitive exhortation to live and let live, to leave hatred aside and to lust and love the abandon (watch out for a wonderfully lascivious performance by Deirdre O'Kane as Miss Funny). The experience is so delightfully, feraUy bawdy that it makes us wistful for the pagan days of yesteryear.
Wouldn't it be a fine thing, this play suggests, if the men would move over for once and let the women, the mothers, have a go at running things.
Suffice it to say, that everyone involved in the testosterone-riddled military five-step that constitutes the current Irish peace process, the "die-harders', the begrudgers" and the "I'm not talking to themers" should go see this play and take on its message.
At The Black Pig's Dyke played to packed houses for a week during the World Stage theatre festival at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre. Word spread throughout the city like wildfire.
After a few days there wasn't a spare ticket to be got. Rumour has it that the play and the Druids soon will be headed for New York. If I have the money I'll go to see it again.
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