If we re to believe tabloid newspaper reports we Irish have turned out to be almost irredeemably racist. It s said that if you walk around any inner city area where refugees have been housed you ll encounter deep, local resistance. In some cases, you ll even see racist slogans scrawled on walls, screaming Cead-Mile-Failte s like: Bosnians Go Home.
Helen Casey, Artistic Director of the Pale Mother Theatre Company is not denying that this may be the case. But her first production, as a playwright, focuses on a more positive point-of-contact between one particular refugee and an Irish family. The play,The Good Room, opens at Andrew s Lane on March 27th at 8.15 and runs until April 1st.
It doesn t go in to this story at the stereotypical level of all Irish people being racist. Because that, in effect, is not what happened to this particular guy whose story we re telling, Helen explains, referring to Marko Zegkovic, a Bosnian who also plays a part in the production.
For example, when he s down in the aliens office that is going to be done, dramatically. The people there are quite sympathetic but, within the confines of the system, they can t extend that friendship or make the whole thing a more humane experience for the guy. There is, of course, the odd racist remark in the play, but we use it more to highlight a kind of black humour. For example, Marko speaks a lot of Serb-Croat so a lot of the other actors don t know exactly what he s talking about. So they surmise as to what he might be saying. And some of what they surmise is quite ridicuolious! In other words, the profile that s being built up about this guy is the kind of profile we all do build up around refugees. But it s more in ignorance than racism. And I believe that kind of ignorance is more representative than the racism we re reading about in all the papers. I m not saying the Irish aren t racist. There is a lot of prejudice against refugees, but not among these characters, specifically.
Instead, says Casey,The Good Room parallels the lives of an Irish mother and a Bosnian refugee, both of whom share the sense of loss and dislocation, both searching for an escape from their personal grief. The meeting of these two divergent worlds offers a glimmer of hope for the future.
Indeed, Helen Casey suggests that ten years from now Irish plays will automatically integrate into their texts refugee characters whereas Pale Mother Theatre Company are reflecting these new social realities as they are actually beginning. But why did this particular subject matter strike Helen as so appealing for her first play?
I went over to Sarajevo in 1997, to attend the first festival that had been staged since the war broke out, she says. And the writer of the previous play I directed, Slobodan Snadjer, brought me to the various theatres. There was a lot of emphasis in those plays on people from different cultures. And I wanted to work on a drama of people from two different worlds. So the whole thing was prompted, basically, by that visit to Sarajevo.
Casey s other major productions were two plays by Brecht, The Mother and Fear And Misery. I just love his technique of theatre, she enthuses. His alienation effect, the use of various elements, within drama, to create a dramatic effect, never leaving it all up to just two or three actors on stage. He augments that with slide projections, whatever. And I ve developed from there. SoThe Good Room really is a very episodic, filmic kind of play. And it moves in a non-linear fashion.
In fact, speaking while in rehearsals, Helen Casey claims the experience of working on this play is fascinating on every level. Particularly, it seems, the meeting of these two cultures which is turning out to be a learning process for all concerned, including Irish actors like Una McNulty, Patrick O Donnell, Derek Reid and Frank Smith.
Even workshopping through some of the scenes, in the two languages, and hearing Marko try to convey his sense of loss, is so enlightening, she says. So there is that sense of integration, with all the actors learning so much about Marko s country and culture and habits. Even in terms of small things like manners, in relation to the politeness towards people he would naturally have, and show. So if we can extend part of that whole learning process out to a broader audience at large, then maybe we can go some way towards undoing the kind of ignorance that does, as I say, at the moment, tend to dominate relationships between the Irish and refugees like Bosnians.