The Cavalcaders: Billy Roche’s Signature Play

Kevin Kerrane

To call any work of art a ‘signature’ piece is to suggest that it embodies the deepest preoccupations and most distinctive techniques of its creator. The Cavalcaders (1993) is that kind of drama: an iconic reflection of Billy Roche’s singular talent. It combines familiar elements from his earlier plays—a public space as the setting, a pattern of sexual betrayal, a fluid sense of time, a subtle use of music, and a secondary cast of unseen characters who seem just as real as those on stage. Roche not only integrates all of these components; he complicates each of them, and may even take one or two to a dramatic breaking point.

As a result, the play demands inventive stagecraft, and so a full discussion of The Cavalcaders should take account of its unusual production history. For example, the same director, Robin Lefevre, has overseen all three major runs of the play: 1993 at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, transferring in January 1994 to the Royal Court in London; 2002 at the Tricycle in London; and 2007 at the Abbey in Dublin. The first two of these featured Billy Roche himself in the role of the exuberant Josie, a singer in the quartet named in the play’s title, and a worker in the shoe-repair shop that serves as the play’s single setting. The 2007 production was the very first show in the newly configured Abbey, and as an intimate story enhanced by music it provided an ideal showcase for the theatre’s improved sightlines and acoustics. The Cavalcaders has also been staged in Northern Ireland, Wales, Australia, and the United States—and in a translated version in Japan, where it was given the title of one of the original songs Roche wrote for the play: Sayonara Street.

These incarnations and permutations of the script help to clarify its challenges. The Cavalcaders can be difficult to stage successfully, partly because of the very qualities that make it a signature work. For example, the critic Benedict Nightingale, who regards the play as a ‘near masterwork’, has observed that its relatively minor impact at the Royal Court in 1994, after a triumph at the much smaller Peacock in Dublin, resulted from the cast’s intimate acting and strong Wexford accents: ‘those sitting further back than row D had trouble keeping up with a plot that itself somersaulted disconcertingly through time.’⁷⁵⁵ The following analysis, which surveys a few options taken in various performances, has benefitted from personal interviews with Billy Roche and Robin Lefevre, and from the sheer luck—and pleasure—of having seen all three major productions of this most intriguing play.

Setting

The stage image of an old-fashioned shoe-repair shop establishes a link to the traditional public spaces of Roche’s Wexford Trilogy (1988-91), whose plays were set in a snooker hall, a betting shop, and a church belfry and sacristy. A later play, On Such as We (2001), takes place in a barbershop along a main street where commercial modernisation appears to threaten an authentic town culture. (In that play one symptom of unwelcome change is the disappearance from the street of a traditional shoe shop.) The Cavalcaders uses modernisation as an opening premise: Terry, the former proprietor, stands glumly in the disused shop while Rory, who was once an employee, chatters about his plans to reopen it as a mechanised business. A moment later the audience is looking at the shop as Terry remembers it—about seven years earlier, when it was still a busy place.

The imagined location, at the centre of small-town life, hearkens back to ‘The Shoebox’ in Roche’s early novel Tumbling Down: a small shop at the edge of Wexford’s main square, The Bull Ring. The proprietor, Johnny, is a popular figure in the town, and in several respects—his singing skill, his heavy drinking, and his early death—he prefigures the character of Josie in The Cavalcaders. Although Johnny is sometimes described working alone at his bench, he is seen only through the front window of The Shoe Box; Roche does not take the reader into the shop. Of course The Cavalcaders brings the action inside, but a production in a proscenium-arch theatre can also suggest that the picture frame of the stage is like a window facing the street, thus inviting viewers to think of themselves as part of the community.⁷⁵⁶

The effect is heightened in scenes of singing, because the shop space doubles as a rehearsal site for The Cavalcaders. The quartet, led by Terry, works on routines they will perform at local venues. An old piano (positioned against a wall at stage left in all three productions directed by Robin Lefevre) becomes a more crucial prop than any tool of the cobbler’s trade, and in fact The Cavalcaders barely dramatises the shop as a business. The bustle comes not from customers but from the four workers, whose banter quickly establishes this setting as an essentially male space. In Roche’s plays, such spaces—like the snooker hall in A Handful of Stars or the barbershop in On Such as We—are always modified subtly by the introduction of female characters. In this play the two women, Breda and Nuala, sometimes come into the shop for the music, but more often for romantic reasons. Each of them loves Terry, and each in her way is frustrated by his inability to receive that love, much less to return it.

As The Cavalcaders proceeds to explore Terry’s troubled mind, its use of stage space transcends the realism of Roche’s other single-set plays. Paula Murphy has suggested that the opening image of the shoe shop—’small, claustrophobic, and jumbled’—foreshadows the main character’s journey into his cluttered psyche. The audience never sees the shop’s back room, but in the present action of the play Terry sometimes stares fearfully toward it, as if at a source of hidden traumatic memories, and through that doorway (stage right) the ‘ghosts’ of his past eventually emerge. In a way, Murphy concludes, ‘the shop itself represents a human cranium.’⁷⁵⁷

More literally, for all four Cavalcaders the shop is an arena of conflict where moments of unity (joking at work, singing in harmony) are gradually overshadowed by scenes of discord and distress. When Christopher Murray surveyed Irish drama of the 1990s, he was struck by the ways that Roche’s plays undercut the notion of ‘home’—not only by avoiding the traditional Irish settings of kitchen, drawing room, or tenement, but also by showing characters failing to gain entry to ‘some sanctum or state that would appease their sense of dislocation.’ This alienation, Murray says, is epitomised in The Cavalcaders:’Roche effectively suggests the possibility of community through a barbershop quartet, but as the play unfolds we see the desperation and history of betrayal beneath this joyous illusion.’⁷⁵⁸

Adultery

Each installment of the Wexford Trilogy had featured a story of sexual betrayal: Stapler’s extramarital affair in A Handful of Stars, Danger Doyle’s theft of Steven’s wife in Poor Beast in the Rain, and (at the very heart of the drama) Artie’s short-lived romance with Angela, Donal’s wife, in Belfry. In The Cavalcaders adultery becomes exponential.

Terry’s personal history includes three sexual burdens: his illegitimate birth, his intimacy as a teenager with the wife of his beloved Uncle Eamon, and his desertion by his own wife. The audience hears how Terry’s wife ran away with his best friend, Rogan—and then sees a similar conflict play out in the dramatic foreground when Rory’s wife leaves him for Ted, a fellow Cavalcader. At the centre of the story Terry carries on a doomed affair with Nuala, a much younger and very vulnerable girl—and when Terry rejects her, Nuala becomes the mistress of a married man who abuses her. At one point Josie recalls Terry’s wedding ceremony, when Rogan stood at the altar as best man: ‘I’m not coddin’ yeh, yeh could nearly smell the treachery in the air, boy!’⁷⁵⁹ The Cavalcaders is so awash in sexual intrigue that Josie’s remark could serve as an epigraph for the whole play.

Roche’s work generally reflects the increasing liberalism of Irish society, and most of his characters experience little remorse about illicit sex. (In Belfry the sacristan Artie and the married Angela consummate their romance in a church tower.) Terry’s portrayal is exceptional: the playwright has called him ‘my most guilt-ridden character.’⁷⁶⁰ This guilt is not grounded in Catholicism. It derives first from shame—the stigma of illegitimacy in a small town. Terry appears to have absorbed some of his mother’s feelings of unworthiness; he remembers her almost hiding in her own neighborhood, peering out from behind a half-door (30):

The poor crator was so ashamed of herself that she became just a little face in that auld dark doorway in the end. Practically disappeared, she did…. I mean, if it wasn’t for me Uncle Eamon I’d’ve been lost altogether. Yeh know Communions and Confirmations and all the rest of it. Sure he worked wonders with me when I think of it—considerin’ like.

Uncle Eamon was Terry’s rescuer and mentor, a surrogate father. Eamon founded the original Cavalcaders and made Terry promise to keep that musical legacy alive. Throughout the play, Terry describes his uncle as a magician as well as a musician (he ‘worked wonders’), and Eamon’s tuning fork, a recurring prop, is like a wand. If the Camelot story provides the scaffolding for The Cavalcaders, as Roche has often said, then Eamon is Merlin.⁷⁶¹ After Eamon composed music for a Mass, Terry says, ‘he was like a god around here that time now, yeh know. They’d nearly get off the path for him, man. Until she got her hands on him, of course. By Jaysus, she really sapped the magic out of him alright, boy’ (60).

Terry is referring to Eamon’s wife, an obviously disturbed personality who might charitably be described as ‘sexually unwell.’ When the boys were in their teens, she seduced Terry—and then tried to seduce Josie, who was unable to go through with the act when he saw her crying. Years after the event, she suddenly decided to tell Eamon about her liaison with Terry. This sense of primal sin is the second dimension of Terry’s guilt; it is apparently the reason he tells Nuala ‘I’m not a nice fella. I’m not!’ (44). He even seems to feel that he deserved to be cuckolded. When Josie calls Rogan ‘a bum’, Terry replies: ‘what we done and what he done was no different’ (50). In an interview Roche has observed that Terry, because of his betrayal of Eamon, ‘feels unworthy of love, even though he’s surrounded by love. He can’t embrace it. That can be an Irish male dilemma, I think.’⁷⁶²

All this turmoil in plot and character can create difficulties for the play in performance. The knot of illicit relationships may be less problematic than the main character’s demeanour: typically sombre, brooding, and emotionally guarded. On stage Terry sometimes seems like a Hamlet without soliloquies. Even as the script gives the audience a strong rooting interest in him, it challenges the lead actor to convey feelings that the character is trying to repress. And when Terry does emote, the effect can be shocking—especially near the end of Act One, when Nuala’s consuming neediness drives Terry to a speech of emotional devastation:

What do I care. I mean I don’t care where yeh go, do I. Just go. Back to your Da’s farm or somewhere. Back to the funny farm if yeh like. I mean I don’t care. It makes no odds to me one way or another where you go or don’t go, because you don’t mean doodle shit to me like, yeh know. I mean I swear I don’t give you one second thought from one end of the day to the next. Yeh know? Doodle shit! That’s all you are to me. (45)

Liam Cunningham’s performance of this scene in 2002, at the Tricycle Theatre, was intensely physical—as dark and brutal as Artie’s whipping of Dominic at the end of Act One in Belfry. Yet Michael Billington, reviewing the Tricycle production for The Guardian, still complained that the protagonist seemed undramatically passive, merely ‘a permanently defeated character with some unappeased sadness in his soul.’⁷⁶³ Billington wished for a greater dramatic contrast between Terry ‘as he is’ and ‘as he once was’—suggesting another basis of difficulty, at least for some critics, in the time-scheme of the play.

Time

The Cavalcaders maintains two time sequences. Its ‘present’ frames the play in the first and last scenes, with a few intermittent returns, as Rory is cleaning out the old shoe shop before its modern makeover. In this sequence, covering less than a half hour in the characters’ lives, Terry converses with Rory, or ruminates on his own, until Breda joins them in the play’s final moments. The ‘past’ of The Cavalcaders, the centre of the story, takes us back about seven years to cover a few months during Terry’s relationship with Nuala, when he was in his forties and she was half his age. This sequence occurs inside Terry’s mind, and within it the audience sees all six of the play’s characters interact—and hears them reminisce or argue about events even further back.

Two-track time schemes are a familiar convention in plays like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie or Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, in which a narrator brings the audience along on a memory trip. Roche himself had done something similar in Belfry when his narrator, Artie, haunted by the end of his affair with Angela, started to obsess about the day the affair began, replaying that day from multiple angles, in no obvious order, the way that any heartbroken lover might remain at the mercy of fractured memories.

The Cavalcaders complicates this premise by running its two time sequences with no narrator to guide the audience. And in Act Two, under the pressure of Terry’s heightened emotions, the flashbacks jump the tracks, commingling or appearing out of sequence. Some reviewers have found these shifts chaotic: in 1994, for example, Paul Taylor quipped that ‘whoever erected the signposts on this stretch of memory lane should try a career in maze-making.’⁷⁶⁴ By contrast, in 2002 Fintan O’Toole praised ‘the rhythmic unfolding of the past through a series of flashbacks that gives the story a wonderfully rich texture.’⁷⁶⁵ In Act Two, as time becomes psychological rather than chronological, the skills of the lighting designer and of the actor playing Terry become even more essential in making transitions intuitively clear—but the shifts in The Cavalcaders do not seem inherently more daunting than those in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which even includes a flashback nested inside another flashback.⁷⁶⁶

Fluid time in The Cavalcaders creates several moments of strong irony. After the audience has learned of Nuala’s death—a suicide motivated by her married lover’s abuse and Terry’s final rejection—Terry remembers an intimate moment from an early phase in their relationship. Nuala says: ‘Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed of the things I ask you to do to me.’ Terry replies: ‘I’d do anythin’ yeh want me to do. As long as yeh don’t ask me to hurt yeh or anythin’.’ As the scene ends, Nuala remarks: ‘You’ll probably do that anyway—in time’ (86).

At the conclusion of The Cavalcaders, back in the present, it becomes clear that Terry has found stability with Breda, a voice of mature sense in all the prior scenes. Earlier Breda had delivered an ultimatum similar to Nuala’s—telling Terry, in effect, We’re both single. So if we’re to see each other, why should we sneak around? What are you ashamed of? Terry was unable to respond. But at the end of the play he and Breda are living together (they may or may not be married), and as they leave the shop she insists that he must stay home until his ‘flu’ symptoms are gone. The audience understands, of course, that Terry’s aches and fever have come from the stress of the evening’s memories.

Is this a happy ending? The Cavalcaders has not traced out a change in Terry; in fact, by replaying his memories of cruelty to Nuala, the play has dramatised a third dimension of his guilt. According to director Robin Lefevre, ‘People who have been damaged, the way Terry thinks he’s been damaged, don’t change that much. Billy and I agreed from the very first production in 1993 that we’re not in the business of redeeming Terry for an audience. That’s who he is. You have to pick the bones out of that.’⁷⁶⁷

Lefevre’s directorial strategies have differed in each major production. In 1993 Terry’s role was performed with smoldering intensity by the great Tony Doyle. (After Doyle’s death in 2000, Roche added a dedication to him in the published version of The Cavalcaders.) Doyle was 51 when the play premiered, which made it easier for audiences to appreciate the age gap between Terry and the fragile Nuala (Aisling O’Sullivan). When Liam Cunningham played Terry eight years later, he had just turned 40, and his performance was so sexually charged and physically intimidating that Terry’s repeated line ‘I’m old and you’re young’ had less credibility. When Stephen Brennan played Terry in 2007, age was not an issue, but the actor remained more grounded in his character’s morose moods, both in past and present scenes, than either Doyle or Cunningham had been. As a result, the other performers took up the slack. Two of them were reprising their roles from 2002 in London—the luminous Ingrid Craigie as Breda, and the gifted musician David Ganly as Ted—while John Kavanagh replaced Billy Roche on stage, adding a different flair to the portrayal of Josie. As a result, the Abbey version became more of an ensemble production. ‘It was easier’, Lefevre says, ‘to pick up on the idea that this wasn’t The Terry-Nuala Show or The Terry-Breda Show. Everybody had something to contribute.’

Music

In performance some of Terry’s rough edges can be smoothed out when The Cavalcaders sing, because the audience now sees and hears him as more expressive and soulful. Roche was a professional musician before he became a writer, and all of his plays teem with music, whether emanating from a jukebox in a snooker hall or chimes in a belfry. But in The Cavalcaders music—like adultery—is not just a dramatic element; it’s substantive.

The play draws theatrical energy from eight musical passages, four of them original compositions. The first is an old music-hall number made famous by George Formby: ‘I’m Leaning on the Lamppost on the Corner of the Street/ Until a Certain Little Lady Comes by.’ Early in Act 1, the quartet is in the shop doing vocal warm-ups. Ted is at the piano in the corner, and when he hits the first note the other Cavalcaders suddenly turn and sing the Formby song toward the audience, momentarily breaking the fourth wall. In every production of the play this moment has elicited surprised laughter or applause as the gap between stage and audience space is suddenly vitiated. The effect was especially striking in 2007 in the reconfigured Abbey. Fintan O’Toole observed that the new design by Jean-Guy Lecat restored the fan-shaped auditorium to its classical roots by ‘raking the tiered seating down from where the balcony used to be, so that much of the audience is now level with or a little above the actors.’ The result was a ‘triumphant’ theatrical intimacy, beautifully realised by The Cavalcaders in performance.⁷⁶⁸ In effect, the 2007 Abbey production restored something of the studio-theatre experience of the original Peacock performances of 1993.

Two of Roche’s original compositions dramatise contrasting romantic predicaments: ‘One Heart Broken’ is a lament by an abandoned lover; ‘Sayonara Street is a fond farewell by a man initiating a breakup. Within the play both songs have been written by Terry, and both express his own conflicts—the continuing ache of having lost his wife to another, and his current struggle to escape Nuala’s devouring emotions.

According to Lefevre, ‘Billy uses music in this play the way that music should be used in the best musicals. It’s in the place of a scene. It’s not music tacked on; it actually moves the whole action forward.’ A clear example comes in Act One, after the first verse of ‘One Heart Broken’, when the singers gather at stage left around the piano to practice their four-part harmony by humming very softly, while at center stage Breda tells Nuala about ‘the auld days’ in the community, with details (some amusing, some ominous) of Terry’s wedding day. Instead of simple exposition, the scene offers a reverie set to music.

In a drama of shifting moods—humour, passion, pathos—music bridges many gaps, especially in Act 2 when Terry’s memories converge. Near the end of the play he hears eight bars of the ‘Alleluia” from the Mass written by Uncle Eamon, first as played on the piano by Ted and a moment later as sung by the choir at Eamon’s funeral. Both passages stir Terry’s guilt even while conveying forgiveness. As it happens, this ‘Alleluia’ is part of a complete Mass composed by Roche himself: ‘I wrote Uncle Eamon’s Mass,’ he says, ‘because I was so immersed in the play. I wondered: ‘What would Eamon actually write? How would it sound?’ … And I meant it when I wrote it. I was trying to get to the heart of that little town and what religion meant to them, and the sacredness of life, and the disappointment of being let down.’⁷⁶⁹

Eamon composed his Mass using the piano that is now the play’s most important prop. Inside this family heirloom, in the final scene, Rory discovers a small plate engraved with the name of the original tuner, ‘R. Deacon’, an itinerant who may well have been Terry’s father. In any case, when Terry agrees to have the piano moved to the home he now shares with Breda, he is also taking ownership of his own past, with all of its consonance and dissonance.

Off-stage characters

The six people seen on stage in The Cavalcaders are far outnumbered by the invisible figures made real for the audience through recurrent reference. Roche’s previous plays had included significant unseen characters, with sharp focus on an off-stage mother in each installment of The Wexford Trilogy, but The Cavalcaders goes much further in summoning up a town’s shared life, past and present, good and bad.

Among the off-stage characters, Terry’s ex-wife (never given a name), becomes a kind of Guinevere: Josie says that ‘she lives like a nun now’ (46) as she tends a garden and nurses Rogan. Surprisingly, Terry still idealizes Rogan, and often praises the boxing skills of the friend who betrayed him. In an interview Roche refers to Rogan as ‘Terry’s younger, more vital self’ and ‘a shadow, a doppelganger, a spiritual brother.’ In this interpretation of off-stage characters, Josie’s alter-ego would be Jacques LePouvier, a Frenchman who used to visit the town, and a formidable boxer in his own right. Jacques is Josie’s ‘spiritual god’, Roche says, ‘what he’d love to be, the essential gallant part of him. And at one stage when Terry and Josie fall out, they’re arguing about their alter-egos. You can almost feel them leaving their bodies and then coming back.’⁷⁷⁰

These remarks suggest the extent of Roche’s debt to depth psychology and myth studies. Besides alluding to Camelot, The Cavalcaders draws on one of Roche’s favorite books, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. For example, Nuala’s poetry about the rowan tree as her mystical protector alludes to Celtic lore regarding the healing and sustaining powers of the mountain ash.

As a representation of the eternal feminine, untamable and capricious, The White Goddess is made manifest in references to Terry’s wife, but she is also incarnate in the play’s on-stage women.⁷⁷¹ When Nuala asks what Terry’s wife was like, Breda replies: ‘She was a little bit like you—a little bit like me’ (29).

The vocabulary of The White Goddess is particularly helpful for stressing the complexity of Roche’s female characters. At first glance, the play appears simply to privilege ‘the four lads’ while mapping a pattern of female perfidy over the course of three generations—and a few commentators on The Cavalcaders have used the word ‘misogyny’ as if identifying Roche with Terry.⁷⁷² A closer look suggests that this drama offers an incisive critique of its male protagonist by developing an off-stage character, a Gothic figure appropriately named Poe, as a projection of Terry’s dark side.

Poe is the most disturbingly real of Roche’s unseen characters. An undertaker who also manages the local variety shows, he seems a harmless cartoon-figure at first. Poe has a big face, described as looking like ‘a well-slapped arse’—and when the four Cavalcaders watch through the window as a gorgeous bank clerk (‘Beautiful Bundoran’) walks down the street, they note that the undertaker is ogling her too: ‘he’s after catchin’ his big chin in the spokes of his bike’, Terry says (15). As a concert organizer, Poe frustrates The Cavalcaders with uncertain bookings and unfavorable placement on programs, but he is also unintentionally funny in his role as MC. Rory quotes him as announcing: ‘Frank McCarthy, the well-known memory man and clairvoyant will not be appearin’ due to unforeseen circumstances’ (32).

Poe’s characterization becomes progressively more sinister, and far more vivid than if he were actually seen on stage. ‘He’s a Poe by name and nature’, Josie says—and then suggests that this dour personality may result from Poe’s trauma as a young man when he went down to the basement of the funeral home (Rory calls it ‘the dungeon’) and found his father lying dead after a freak accident (31). Rory refers to Poe’s wife ‘Morticia’, but the joke turns sour when Terry tells how Poe once cut off all her hair: ‘He was goin’ off to some convention or somethin’, and he was afraid of his life that she’d go out on the rantan while he was away’ (35).

The sick side of Poe is most evident when Nuala reveals in Act Two that he has been her secret lover. ‘He used to beat me’, she tells Terry. ‘With his belt. Down in the cellar below his shop. … He told me I was like Eve. He said that Eve came into the Garden and ruined everything’ (73). Nuala says that Poe dumped her when she became pregnant, and she tells Terry of a plan for revenge against this Confraternity man, who wears ‘his pioneer badge and his fainne and his black diamond on his arm and all the rest of it. Well maybe he won’t feel so tall when I spill the beans on him’ (72).

Poe may be in the play to represent a pillar of the community who, in reality, is a hypocrite and pervert, but he also expresses the darkness within Terry, just as Uncle Eamon had provided a beacon of grace and benevolence. These two off-stage figures can be seen as the poles of Terry’s personality.

When Terry instinctively takes Poe’s side by warning Nuala to remain quiet (‘That man is a married man with a family’), she responds by equating the two lovers who have turned her away: ‘I’ll show you. I’ll show him too. Because you’re nothin’ only a pair of lousers, Terry. Dirty lousers, yeh are, the pair of yeh’ (74).

Roche also uses off-stage characters comically—for example, by shadowing the quartet itself with a younger singing group called Downtown Munich, who seem to have copied The Cavalcaders’ repertoire, including specific musical arrangements and hand movements. (Terry says these rivals should be renamed ‘Downtown Mimic.’)

This other quartet caricatures The Cavalcaders, and even foreshadows their breakup. Early in Act Two, Rory gleefully tells Ted about Downtown Munich’s fiasco the night before: ‘The big fat lad fell off of the stage and everythin’, he was that drunk. They started arguin’ in the dressin’ room after you were gone Ted, yeh know. The fella with the glasses kneed the big lad in the bollix and all’ (54-55). A few moments later Ted admits to Terry that he is having an affair with Rory’s wife and has asked her to move in with him. Then Ted leaves the shop, and The Cavalcaders, for good.

Seven years later, in the present time sequence of the play, Rory has custody of his daughter, who is now ready to make her First Communion. His loving description of this child makes her another of the play’s compelling off-stage characters (13):

Oh she’s a real little madam now the same one! … I was lyin’ in bed there though Terry yeh know and next I hears her stirrin’ inside the other room. She gets out and toddles across the landin’ to the bathroom—a little sleepy head on her. I hear her do a little widdle then flush the toilet after her and then she goes runnin’ back to her little warm bed again and I think to meself, ‘How did I get her this far and all eh?’ Yeh know! … They’re deadly little sounds though … (He chuckles and basks in the thought of it all.)

In the world of The Cavalcaders such small bits of domestic happiness assume monumental importance, especially as expressed in the everyday poetry of Wexford speech. Rory’s loving words also reflect his resilience. Like Terry, he lost his wife to a supposed friend, and near the end of the play he tells Terry of having encountered her, now pregnant, on the street with Ted: ‘I just said hello to them and that … All water under the bridge now’ (87). Rory’s statement masks profound grief, and yet his pain has not metastasized into bitterness or cruelty. He remains upbeat, or at least tries bravely to seem so. In using Rory to round out the play, Roche provides Terry with a dramatic foil who—unlike Rogan, Poe, or Uncle Eamon—is there to be seen, and admired, on stage.

The ending of The Cavalcaders affirms the play’s signature status in yet another way: by crystallising a vision of life—empathetic and forgiving, yet resolutely unsentimental—that underlies all of Roche’s work. When Trevor R. Griffiths reviewed the original production at the Royal Court in 1994, he singled out Tony Doyle’s ‘brilliant’ performance as Terry, but gave most consideration to the playwright’s generous spirit:

Billy Roche’s skill as a dramatist lies in his ability to show us convincing images of our shared humanity and the ways in which the texture of our lives is made up of quiet desperations and betrayals, minor-key achievements and qualified local victories. … [His play] is an elegantly comic elegiac tribute to ordinary people muddling through and coping with their human failings.⁷⁷³

This sense of commonality helps to explain why The Cavalcaders has appealed to audiences outside Ireland, from Theatr Clwyd in Wales to Sambyakunin Gekijo in Japan. The play has crossed boundaries of geography as well as genre by transforming Wexford into a universal town.

In The Cavalcaders the town’s boundaries are broad, and its extended community includes the dead (Josie, Nuala, Uncle Eamon) as well as the living. The town’s culture runs deep, layered with music, fisticuffs, magnanimity, gloom, poetry, treachery—and love. This extraordinary range gives The Cavalcaders special standing among Billy Roche’s artistic achievements. It may be both his darkest and most hopeful play. And no other work so fully dramatizes his core imaginative premise—Wexford as the world.

Extract From: The Art of Billy Roche: Wexford as the World, edited by Kevin Kerrane

Cross Reference: Conor McPherson’s essay

See Also: Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Frank McGuiness