Michael Harding’s adaptation of his widely-praised 2007 three-hander into a monologue may come with the qualifying approvals of being “a result of ongoing collaboration with members of the Travelling community”, as the flyer tells us, but is at its best as a core experience of supremely orchestrated theatrical storytelling. It is theatrical in the best sense of the word: structured and designed to aesthetic principles reflecting and representing personal, cultural, and social experience, but artificial (in the sense of being ‘crafted’), skillfully executed through live performance, and rich with a sense of living encounter with the subject. It is mediated and poetic, and ‘documentary’ only in the sense of avowedly and particularly presenting itself as a product of collaboration with the community whose lives are here metonymised as an aspect of psychological and social alienation. It should not be mistaken for realism, in spite of its strong claims to authenticity rooted in research and draughtsmanship.

Harding assumes the voice of one Mikey Rattigan, a member of the Travelling community, who begins his narrative upon return from Croagh Patrick. In an effort to find solace for the recent loss of his daughter, he has encountered only silence and emptiness. It is exactly this silence that is the heart of the titular ‘Tinker’s Curse’, which, Mikey tells us, is the empty space from which the first note of a song comes and into which the last goes, and for which there is no cure. The same might be said of any life touched by the tragic death of a child and a sense of dissocation from the social world; this could be brought on by any number of perceptual or behavioural deviations from the mainstream. Here the particulars as told by Mikey are rooted in Harding’s close contact with the stories and storytelling rhythms of the Travelling community.

Mikey’s world is filled with border crossings and shifting boundaries, a world with its own lore and language that comes to define its characters in a seemingly rudderless navigation of life as expected and life as lived. Again, this is entirely universal in its essential truth, but setting the tale amid a mix of stories of prejudice and superstition (which becomes a way of explaining a world that doesn’t otherwise make sense) as befits the particular experience of the Travelling community in Ireland gives the play its particular texture. It also provides the playwright with a rich vocabulary and a gloriously circuitous story structure that seems to drift in and out of anecdote and observation from a familiar and yet alien world, while taking us on a very clear path to its desolate conclusion.

 

It is theatrical in the best sense of the word: structured and designed to aesthetic principles reflecting and representing personal, cultural, and social experience, but artificial (in the sense of being ‘crafted’), skillfully executed through live performance, and rich with a sense of living encounter with the subject.

Harding literally is the show here, though accompanied by Finbar Coady on guitar. He begins the performance in situ, seated initially on the stage, then drifting into the crowd as they file in to take their seats. His neat but tatty dress, black suit and grey sneakers, slicked-back hair and sloping shoulders, presents a figure at once again both unassuming and screaming of signification: he stands out, and so we mark him (as distance, as difference) even as he walks among us. Throughout his performance, Harding’s accent is spot on, drawing on his natural Cavan/Monaghan intonations, but shifting into the particular register of the Travelling community, again with precision and purpose. What seem casual, almost incidental, asides are actually significant indicators of meaning – a story about a half-crazed horse possibly possessed by a demonic spirit is supposed to describe the way a character’s eyes look, but it comes with its own rich set of textual explorations of the liminal spaces between the material and the spiritual that increasingly dominate Mikey’s life, even as he tries to deny that they do. As his wife Julia drifts into a melancholic madness, dabbling in politics and playing a role only, perhaps, to come to embody that which she may in fact be parodying, she is driven further from her daughter Michelle, who is then pursued by ne’er do well Johny Reilly with “a face like a grinning rat” and pretentions to being a Traveller himself. Mikey’s is a life replete with meaning, and Harding knows this; as actor and playwright, ensures clarity and purpose under the guise of nonchalance.

Audiences are being presented with a dark but often funny story describing life on the margins of oblivion, and can expect the pleasures of a well-told tale in attending the show. It works extremely well in Bewley’s Café Theatre not least of all because of its intimacy, and Harding is genuinely spellbinding in performance. But at its heart this play is considerably more clever, subtle, and challenging than its billing as part of the St. Patrick’s Festival would have it; though I suppose if the gambit draws more people to it, there’s no harm in that. Make no mistake though, this is meatier stuff than you may be expecting, and a lot more devastating than the nervous peals of laughter that greet every expletive would have you believe.

Dr. Harvey O'Brien, O'Kane Centre for Film Studies, University College Dublin.