sea behind, lean against peeling iron, salt and rust, – deck lunges, knees absorb, spray sticky on my cheek.Stacey Gregg
WHO Ian, twenty-four, from Belfast.
TO WHOM The audience (see note on ‘Direct audience address’ in the introduction).
WHERE On a ferry from Holyhead to Dublin and a train from Dublin to Belfast.
WHEN Present day.
WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED The play tells the story of ten interrelated characters from Belfast. The Lagan is the river that flows through the city. This speech comes at the very start of the play and charts Ian’s journey from England back home to Belfast.
WHAT TO CONSIDER
• | Ian has moved away from home and is living in London with his lover Stefan. Stefan was his German tutor. |
• | Ian has not come out to his parents but is eager to do so. |
• | He has spent a year in Africa and considers himself well travelled. |
• | Having moved away from home he is very critical of Belfast’s small-town ways. |
• | He is described as having ‘airs and graces’ and thinking he is better than others. Note how judgemental he is about the strangers on his journey. Decide to what extent he is a snob and to what extent this is borne out of his own fear of inadequacy and insignificance. |
• | Decide to what extent he has a love/hate relationship to home. By the end of the play he chooses to stay in Belfast for a while. |
• | His mother says of him: ‘Looking awful Londony. Wish he’d cut his hair.’ |
• | He wears tweed and carries a man bag. |
He has a teenage sister called Aoife who is pregnant and wants an abortion. She is the reason for the ‘cryptic summons’. |
|
• | A kraken is a legendary gigantic sea monster. |
• | Aoife is pronounced ‘Eefa’. |
WHAT HE WANTS
• | To protect himself. By casting himself in the role of the ‘romantic traveller’ and noting his journey as a poet might, he copes with his fear of returning home. Note how he needs to distance himself from the ordinary people on the boat and train and how he refuses to make the journey by air, where there is very little opportunity for poetic reflection and where passengers are herded like cattle. |
KEYWORDS mysterious undulating beautiful barren divorced primitive
Ian
sea behind, lean against peeling iron, salt and rust, – deck lunges, knees absorb, spray sticky on my cheek.
Someone lights a smoke. (Miffed.) There’s only two decks, and this is not the designated smokers’ area, actually.
(Posturing, a bit grand.) Never waste the crossing faffing round arcades or queuing for Fanta. Always spend it up here, mysterious, – the roar of the engine and the horizon, the upturned bowl of sky, – (Spotting something.) seabird! Undulating M, soaring, clockless, – (Looking down.) imagine the eye of a kraken, staring back up through the ocean swell…
Pulls out his notebook. Scribbles.
‘Undulating M.’ That’s a keeper.
[…]
Dublin appears, black against low cloud, ghostly. My hands, brown against the hard white light – mad she’ll think me for not just flying back to Belfast from London. God knows what’s up. I’ll take my time sure. Sure I’ve long passed caring for the relentless advice. Mother’s cryptic summons, pfft – she’s not the boss of me, takin my time so I am, happy to take the Holyhead ferry to Dublin, the two-hour train / north.
[…]
Skanger swaggers out. Drops a carton at his arse. People actually behave like that. Maybe I’ve been away too long […]
Wonder how my sister is. Wee Aoife. Seventeen now? Mad. Haven’t been home enough. Haven’t been back best part of a year. Before that, nearly a year again. Too often if you ask me. I’m over it. Home…
Crew prop open one door and we bottleneck, obedient, till some Irish voice mutters ‘somethin somethin the other bloody door.’ Spill onto the walkway, catch the Dart to Connelly Station.
[…]
On the train to Belfast there’s a wee woman keeps trying to trick me into conversation, but I’m not havin it. Some old-boys’ club banterin the girl serving tea. Woman opposite rolls her eyes. Ironic: find her just as irritating.
[…]
Cross the border. I know cos my mobile buzzes with the change in network. Farmland and scrag smudge by in silent hurry. Love this journey. Weird. Something about zooming through the barren, littered land. I’ve travelled a fair bit, actually, and the natural Ireland is divorced, irrevocably divorced from the urban. The natural Ireland is – answers something no other landscape can replace. Can’t explain it. Maybe – maybe it is just recognition of the landscape of memory, childhood. Or maybe it’s something more primitive, in the blood and bone of me…
‘Irrevocably divorced.’ That’s good.
He scribbles it down. 