BERNARD FARRELL is flying in more ways than one. Speaking on the phone from Dublin Airport he's just picked up the Sunday newspapers and, following the five positive reviews his play "The Last Apache Reunion" received in the dailies, all of the Sundays are also singing its praises.
The play is indeed required viewing, a bittersweet evocation of one of those illuminating moments where the past collides with the present as four boyhood buddies meet again fifteen years after disbanding their schoolroom gang, The Apaches. However, to talk about the play's denouement and its central subtext is difficult in that, like "The Crying Game" it has a sting in its tail, which is not unrelated to sex.
The most that can be said is that Bernard Farrell's play deals, to a great degree, with the kind of bullying young people inflict, and encounter, during school days. Himself the product of Glasthule, a working class area on the southside of Dublin, Farrell claims that "The Last Apache Reunion" is not autobiographical.
"I went to Monkstown Park CBS and they used to have reunions every five years but I never went to any of them. But I've talked to a lot of people who did you and tapped into that at one remove. One friend went to one in the Dalkey Island Hotel and when he went to the room it was in, and opened the door he saw these fat oul' fellas and immediately closed the door, thinking "that certainly not the right room" but he soon realised it was. That's the kind of moment where you are slapped in the face by that kind of passage of time."
Bernard Farrell, who previously worked for Stenna Sealink, admits that he is fascinated by the whole concept of reunions. "So the whole thing is exploring how people change and comparing their actual achievements with the ways in which they said they were going to succeed. And making them face a specific, shared experience from their past."
Common to all characters in the play is that, irrespective of the passage of time, those who were the bullies in school remain bullies and, likewise, in relation to those who were victims.
"And what you find is that one character, Jimmy, though he is a bit of a wimp, now bullies his wife," says Farrell. "And a lot of it I'd root in the relationships that used to exist in schools between the brothers and the students.
"A lot of the Christian Brothers would bully students and maybe as a way to reassert themselves some students carried on that cycle of violence in terms of the weaker students in a classroom. The play isn't about teachers and students but it must be seen in the context of a Christian Brothers School."
So which was Bernard, a bully or one of the bullied? "As Anthony Clare says in the programme, everyone seems to remember bullying going on at school, but not being bullied. I think, fortunately enough, that I was never bullied because what saved me was that, if I wasn't great academically - and I wasn't - I was good at football and that saved me."
* "The Last Apache Reunion" by Bernard Farrell is currently showing at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.