collins takes us into the caravan
When Michael Collins was acting in Glenroe, as Traveller Johnny Collins, he was regularly filmed outside the character's mobile home, but there was never a scene inside it. People used to say to him: "Why do they never go inside the trailer? We'd love to see inside."
"So my plays," says Michael Collins, "they're my way of bringing people inside the trailer."
In Collins's first play, It's a Cultural Thing. . . or is it? (A Traveller in Progress), in 2005, he set out to sketch a modern history of Irish Travellers, as seen through the eyes of a young boy moving with his family from a traditional itinerant life in the Midlands to a halting site in Finglas. It was very much Collins's own story, and he saw it as a means both of presenting Traveller history for a wider public, and of exploring tensions within Traveller culture for his own community.
The play was well reviewed at Dublin's fringe festival, and has toured widely since. On a recent evening, Collins performed scenes from it at a small charity gig in the Cobblestone pub in Smithfield, Dublin, to a mostly Traveller audience: it was intimate, in-your-face stuff, as much stand-up comedy or storytelling as theatre, and it was clear from the reactions of a group of teenage girls who happened to be in the front row that Collins's stories of growing up in fields in the Midlands were as foreign to their urban Traveller lives as life on a halting site would be to any settled teenager.
This coming week, Collins joins a select group of Irish playwrights -- Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Conor McPherson amongst them -- by having two plays on in the same week in Dublin, though, running for a total of four shows between them, the scale is somewhat more modest. On Wednesday, his second play, Mobile, first performed in 2006, is briefly revived for one lunchtime performance at the Axis in Ballymun, Dublin, (details at www.axis-ballymun.ie or 01 883 2100, entry €5); his new play, Worlds Apart, Same Difference plays at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin from Thursday to Saturday (www.projectartscentre.ie; 01 881 9613).
Mobile courts more controversial territory than his first play, tackling feuding in the Traveller community, and resisting both judgment and sentiment in doing so. Using the classic device of divided loyalties, Collins takes a Traveller man ordered by his family to fight another for his family's honour -- but the man he is ordered to fight is his cousin, and they are married to sisters.
Does honour dictate that he fight, or that he abstain?
Collins explains feuding in the context of the dramatic changes in Traveller lifestyle since the 1960s.
Then, Travellers had traditional occupations, as tinsmiths and casual farm labourers, and travelled to where the work was. But cheap plastic displaced the tin, and the combine harvester displaced the men; and as these trends sent Travellers increasingly towards the cities, the promise of social welfare required them to have fixed addresses.
These all led to Travellers settling in halting sites, with two consequences: they were living in larger communities, and were effectively stuck there.
"Sometimes," says Collins, "the fighting could be useful. Years ago, two men would fight, they'd shake hands, they might even have a couple of jars afterwards, and that'd be it.
"Nowadays, with them all congregated together on a site, the two families might keep getting at each other, and it gets out of control."
This hasn't been helped, he says, by unofficial garda policy of not getting involved (there is a garda character in Mobile). Collins recalls one garda saying about a fight: "Once you keep it on the knackers' side of the wall, that'd grand. When you're finished we'll come and collect the bodies."
In Worlds Apart, Same Difference, Collins tackles similarly difficult, and potentially provocative, material. The play tells the story of Miley (played by Collins) who is confronted while at work by a black man, Tiga (played by the actor and comedian, Tiny James, who describes himself as "zero-generation Irish"; see www.tinyjames.com for clips from his stand-up).
Tiga's wife is dying, and he is trying to trace her family, with whom she fell out 20 years previously. He shows Miley a photo: Tiga's wife, it transpires, is Miley's sister. Miley finds this initially difficult to take.
"But your kids!" he exclaims. "They're going to be called gypsy knacker black nigger bastards!"
Though it may be more abrasive than much issue-driven theatre, Collins's play makes for a melting pot of multicultural insights. In depicting Traveller hostility to Africans, he is both holding a mirror up to his own community and parodying the attitudes of mainstream Irish society to Travellers.
Just over a hundred years ago, John Millington Synge wrote the first major play about Irish Travellers, The Tinker's Wedding. Traveller characters crop up in occasional plays since then; mostly, they're an occasion for comedy.
"I do not think that these country people, who have so much humour themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice," Synge wrote about The Tinker's Wedding.
In Michael Collins -- and in Rosaleen McDonagh, another playwright who is a Traveller -- their community has finally found a voice of its own. There's plenty of comedy in Collins's plays too; this time, though, it's being wielded as a weapon.
colinmurphy@independent.ie
- Colin Murphy
Irish Independent
