Bonding over those difficult to pronounce Irish names that only the most ardent gaelgoirí thrust upon their child we meet TG4’s Manchan Magan to discuss his new Fringe show Broken Croí/Heart Briste, the story of a disillusioned Gaeilge fanatic seeking revenge for the death of the language on his star pupil, a lonely 18 year old dancer.
You’re best known for your documentary work for TG4. What made you want to cross over to do a play?
I’d done TV for ten years and traveled the world and I got sick of the medium. The way you have to contract every thought into small sentences just seems so reductive. So I got into writing books which is so solitary, and so word-focused. I got interested in yoga, which lead to contemporary dance, and there were some theatre companies who were combining dance with theatre and I thought “Why can’t we do something like this with Irish”? So I wondered if I could put something on stage with just enough Irish that English speakers could understand everything that was going on. The only way of doing that was to make it physical. The last thing I wanted to do was focus on that tiny, dull ghetto of Irish speakers.
Could you tell me a little about the challenges that bilingual theatre present?
It’s sort of an engineering construct in that every sentence you are communicating and every idea you’re trying to get across isn’t going to be understood. It’s fifty percent in Irish. I use the construct of an Irish lesson so that it starts off with a teacher teaching the words that are going to be needed in the piece. And during the class, more is revealed, things come out.
Do you have a lot of experience with fanatical Gaelgoirí?
It’s a direct reaction to No Bearla, which was liked by a lot by English speakers, liked a lot by people in the Gaeltacht ,but Gaelgoirí in the universities in Dublin and Cork hated it. I genuinely upset them. Some of them were crying because I had dared to say the language might not be in full health.
Why isn’t there more theatre in Irish?
There has to be such an agenda in a person’s mind to write a play in Irish. Any book that’s written now, like Gafa, is written for a Leaving Cert Curriculum. The writers know the only way they are going to make money is if the Department of Education accepts it. In the last 10 years the Abbey has had 75 plays in English and four plays in Irish. The Abbey – Amharclann na Mainistreach – was set up to promote the Irish language. It’s a shameful legacy.
Ireland, and Dublin in particular, are littered with festivals. Why is the Fringe important as opposed to other theatre festivals?
Because it’s the bottom feeder, and because it allows experimentation. It allows new things. Theatre in Ireland is so staid and so caught up in the same “big” names who come back and do the same thing. It’s so tired. The quality in the Fringe is often dire but you’ll see some beautiful bright sparks.
Are there any shows in the Fringe this year that you are looking forward to seeing?
In Ireland we are so repressed and so locked in our bodies that anything that frightens us into using them excites me, and the director of the festival Wolfgang Hoffman is putting a show together that does just that.
