Peter Paul Schnierer
A Handful of Stars; Poor Beast in the Rain; Belfry; Amphibians; The Cavalcaders; On Such as We; Lay Me Down Softly
Introduction
Billy Roche was born in Wexford on 11 January 1949, the son of a publican. After leaving school, he supported himself with a variety of jobs on building sites and factories both in Wexford and in London. His public career began in the early 1970s; for most of that decade he toured Ireland as a singer and guitarist with the Roach Band, a pub-rock outfit he co-founded. He still lives in Wexford, and his plays are usually set in the town: his first three plays, A Handful of Stars (1988), Poor Beast in the Rain (1989) and Belfry (1991), are collectively known and published as The Wexford Trilogy. This was followed quickly by Amphibians (1992) and The Cavalcaders (1993); the former also set in ‘Wexford, a small town in Ireland’, the latter merely ‘in a small town in Ireland’. Roche then concentrated on writing screen plays based on his own early theatre successes; the film Trojan Eddie (1996, public release 1997) is based on Roche’s original script and certainly the biggest commercial success for a versatile man of literature who has sung, acted, produced, directed for the stage and the screen, and written a novel (Tumbling Down, 1986) and short stories (Tales from Rainwater Pond, 2006), which in turn have provided him with material for adaptations and dramatisations. When he returned to writing original full-length plays in 2001 with On Such as We, he no longer specified the setting; Lay Me Down Softly (2008), his latest play to date, finds its scene ‘somewhere in Ireland’. The conflict between such rootedness in the local, even parochial, and the increasingly insistent demands of modernity arriving late in the backwaters of a backward-looking country is at the core of Roche’s work.
The Plays
A Handful of Stars (1988)
Roche’s first professionally produced play, A Handful of Stars is the first part of what came to be known as The Wexford Trilogy ; it is nevertheless a self-contained play that merely shares some characteristics with the two plays to follow. Since these characteristics can be found in all of Roche’s dramatic texts it makes little sense to isolate the Trilogy and treat it as a single coherent work. As far as it is sensible to draw attention to a parallel in Irish literature, Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy, mainly held together by topography, may serve; Roche’s plays certainly do not possess the kaleidoscopic completeness of O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy.
A Handful of Stars was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1988. It is set in a scruffy pool hall. There is a pool table, a jukebox, a pot-bellied stove and a one-armed bandit. [. . .] Along one wall there is a long bench and a blackboard and a cue stand and all the usual paraphernalia that can be found in a club of this sort.
Similar stage directions begin his later plays, too. They are both precise and unspecific: ‘the usual’ and ‘of this sort’ indicate a generic setting, designed to convey a complex of signals which in turn can manipulate the audience’s assumptions. We know what a pool hall is supposed to look like, we are shown one, thus we establish a horizon of expectations based on our knowledge of the sort of plot usually occurring in such settings: the return of the retired champion, the underdog taking on the ringer, playing for big stakes and whatever else billiard/pool films such as The Hustler (1961) have anchored in our memories. It is not the least of this play’s charms that Roche makes good these implied promises while offering many little twists to them.
The Hustler’s Eddie Felson character here is Jimmy Brady, a ‘good-looking, tough boy of seventeen or so’. His behaviour, brash, aggressive and given to excess, marks him as the adolescent outsider hero of many similar coming-of-age plays; ultimately, and in an Irish context, he is a revenant of Christy Mahon, Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907); Jimmy, too, has problems with his father, an awkward courtship with a woman willing to sacrifice much for him, and a tendency towards self-aggrandisement that strikes those around him as histrionic. His self-image as ‘the King of the Renegades’ and his career in drunken brawling and petty robberies offer little to impress either his fellow-characters or the audience.
Jimmy, for all his centre-stage strutting, remains a rather flat character; Roche’s dramatis personae throughout his work run the gamut from stock figure to enigmatic complexity. The former extreme in A Handful of Stars is marked by Swan, ‘a wily detective’, who is the stereotypical plodding Garda. Stapler, the ‘auld fucker’ of the following excerpt, is on the opposite end of the scale, as the stage directions describing his differentiated emotional responses make clear:
Stapler What’s all this?
Jimmy I won this last night on a boxin’match. I backed a fella called Eddie Harpur. He was fightin’ this auld fucker last night yeh know? He nearly killed him too. Broke his nose and everything.
Stapler is tongue-tied with anger now. He pockets the pound note and makes to leave.
I’m goin’ to tell you one thing Stapler, it’s a good job I didn’t put me few bob on you last night, that’s all. I’d have been up after you this mornin’ to bate the back off yeh with a big hurl or somethin’.
Stapler heads towards the back room, crestfallen.
Hey Stapler.
Stapler (in the doorway): What?
Jimmy You should have ducked.
Stapler is not amused.
This passage, apart from carefully notating mood changes and showing Jimmy at his worst, also serves to further the theme of boxing. It makes an appearance in most Roche plays and becomes the subject matter of his most recent one, Lay Me Down Softly. Ultimately its significance lies not so much in purveying a thematically integrating symbol, but in Roche’s concern with male rivalry and male bonding. A Handful of Stars has a cast of six men of different ages and just one girl, and in all of Roche’s plays there aremanymoremen than women, with longer, more dominant parts and longer monologues. Roche, in terms of gender balance in contemporary Irish drama, is about as far away from Anne Devlin as it is possible to get.
Poor Beast in the Rain (1989)
The second part of The Wexford Trilogy, also first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, is ‘set in an old fashioned betting shop’, where the proprietor Steven and his daughter Eileen run a tranquil operation for customers such as Georgie and Joe; the former a young lad with an eye on Eileen, the latter a man in his thirties who already lives more off his reminiscences than for any prospects. Two events coincide to jolt them a bit out of their daily routines: it is the weekend of the All Ireland hurling final, with the Wexford team playing away, and a character nicknamed Danger Doyle pays a quick return visit to the place of his youthful delinquent exploits with Joe, his womanising, and his eventual elopement with Eileen’s mother, Steven’s wife. In the end, Wexford have won, Eileen has left for London and her mother with Danger, and Georgie is a little wiser.
Poor Beast in the Rain is a typical second play. The pool hall of A Handful of Stars has become a betting shop, Jimmy has grown into Danger, the seventeen-year-old Linda here is modulated into Eileen, but the concerns of the play, with small-town boredom, juvenile delinquency, inept courting and the yearning to be somebody people remember structure both plays. When Roche describes the setting as cluttered with ‘the usual stuff that can be found in a betting shop of this sort – pads and pencils and skewered dockets etc.’, he almost verbatim repeats the corresponding stage direction of A Handful of Stars. In fact, his original draft must have been even more derivative; in his afterword to the published trilogy, Roche reports on the Bush Theatre’s insistence on changes to make the two plays more dissimilar:
And so Poor Beast in the Rain was born – a rainy day sort of a play which is held together by an ancient Irish Myth as Danger Doyle returns like Oisín to the place of his birth, ‘just because he wanted to see his auld mates again’. Danger Doyle, who is a sort of grown-up Jimmy Brady, ran away with another man’s wife ten years ago and the play is really about all the people the pair of them left behind.
Roche is wearing his mythology lightly. Danger Doyle is no poet; in fact, he never fails to correct the embellishments and exaggerations Joe adds to the tales of their youthful pranks. He merely resembles Oisín the Wanderer, exiled for love, but neither has he gone to Tir na nÓg, the place of eternal youth, nor does he, upon his return to Ireland, ruin his future. He is simply living the life of thousands, and if that can be presented in terms of heroic myth, myth has become common. In this, Roche follows Joyce, whose Ulysses/Bloom also is a simple man ennobled by an epic pre-text. Roche himself, in his introductory remarks to Trojan Eddie, has pointed out his method:
And so, inspired by the ancient Irish myth of Diarmuid and Grania, I set to work on Trojan Eddie, the story of an unlucky little fellow who rambles into the strange world of the Irish Traveller and finds himself trapped inside a tangled tale that is unfolding all around him.
In Poor Beast in the Rain, Danger fleetingly acknowledges a parallel, but usually Roche’s characters are incapable of realising their place in latter-day re-enactments of Irish myth. Yet they are not unaware of replicating patterns. They just use a more accessible form of mythology to situate their predicament in a common narrative:
Joe [. . .] I’m just tellin’ this fella here about all the queer things meself and Danger got up to Molly. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we were like weren’t we?
Molly Abbott and Costello would be more feckin’ like it.
When Jimmy in A Handful of Stars is banned from going to the local cinema he is ostracised from his society and its fount of transpersonal experience; yet another variant on Roche’s theme of exile, voluntary or imposed, from one’s community. His texts abound with references to a wide and varied range of films; they share this with many other contemporary Irish plays. Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997) and Mary Jones’s Stones in His Pockets (1996) are two outstanding recent examples, but the practice was well established decades ago: the most striking commentary on this echo chamber common to dramatists and audiences alike was already offered by Hugh Leonard in Time was (1976). English drama is far less likely to assume and use familiarity with the Hollywood tradition.
The one tradition Irish drama can entirely claimas its own, and one that was continuously invoked by the founding figures of the Irish Literary Renaissance, gets short shrift in Roche’s plays. He laces them with Irish words and half-sentences, but he never claims any function for these linguistic diffusions. Unlike the easily recognised stock phrases inherited from the Synge tradition (sardonically parodied by Martin McDonagh) Roche employs the Irish as it appears in most contexts now, as a quarry of phrases half remembered from school: ‘Cuilín amhaín le Loch Garman agus tá sé mahogany gaspipe’ Georgie says in his playful sports commentary; this roughly translates as ‘one point to Wexford and it is blah blah blah’. ‘Mahogany gaspipe’ is the splendid term for the Irish spoken by people who erroneously think they know the language; Georgie’s self-deprecating joke can be seen as a commentary on obeisances to a language that will not live again.
Belfry (1991)
Set simultaneously in the vestry and the belfry of a small Wexford church, the third part of the Wexford Trilogy is Roche’s most intimate play; again it was first produced by the Bush Theatre, London. Like its successor The Cavalcaders it is a memory play, its framing device clearly modelled on Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa of the year before: a lone male figure, Artie O’Leary, addresses the audience and announces that he has a story worth attending to, and proceeds to present that episode from his really rather unadventurous life in dramatic format, with occasional returns of the narrating Artie interspersed. What he has to tell and show us is a tale of love between him, the sacristan of the church, and Angela, a married woman who occasionally helps decorate the altar. The small cast is completed by the simple boy Dominic, Father Pat and Angela’s husband Donal. The first act shows the blossoming and consummation of Artie’s and Angela’s relationship and their betrayal to Donal by a letter in what appears to be Dominic’s scrawly handwriting; he receives a vicious beating at Artie’s hands for that. The second act is one long, elegiac ending of the conflicts played out before: Dominic lives in a home for youths such as him, runs away, is brought back and eventually gets killed by a passing car; Artie’s (offstage) mother dies; he discovers that she was the true whistle-blower. Artie and Donal reach some sort of reconciliation when Donal realises that Angela has found yet another man; even Father Pat, the least developed and most stereotyped figure, will probably come to terms with his alcoholism if not his recalcitrant parish. What remain are the narrator’s memories:
and although she’s been gone out of here over a year now I swear to God her fragrance still lingers about the place – in the transept, near the shrine. Around the vestry and above in the belfry – her scent . . . wherever I go . . . It’s thanks to her that I have a past worth talkin’ about at all I suppose. Although I often curse her for it. There are days now when I find myself draggin’ her memory behind me everywhere I go. I bless her too though. She tapped a hidden reservoir inside of me that I didn’t even know was there.
Many Roche characters feel the same; few find such moving words.
Amphibians (1992)
Roche’s fourth play, first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at their then London home in the Barbican, also nominally takes Wexford as its setting, but the dominant space in it is the sea – not the blue water of high adventure and derring-do but the littoral zone of mudflats and mussel fisheries. The salmon fishers are almost gone; only Eagle, an inveterate traditionalist, resists the pull of the factory that dredges the coastal waters for the molluscs nobody would have stooped to collect in his youth. To the end of the play it remains unresolved whether he, a latter-day Paycock with an agenda, will give in and accept a job there. Everybody else is already on the payroll of Brian Taylor, the well-meaning owner of the factory, who courts Eagle’s sister, Sonia. The main, twofold plot concerns initiation rites: while the young workers Broaders, Zak and Humpy (in decreasing order of menaceful alienation) have formed a group that requires its members to be branded with the image of a crab, Eagle builds a hut on Useless Island, within shouting distance of the shore, so that his son Isaac can spend a night there and become a man, the way generations of fishermen have done – with Eagle, however, as the last to date. Isaac obediently allows himself to be symbolically marooned on St Martin’s Eve, only to find that the resentful crab gang have come to the island to initiate him in their way, forcibly if necessary, and Brian and Sonia have also made the crossing in order to protect him. The climactic violence leaves Brian humiliated, Broaders fled, Zak stabbed, Humpy beaten up, and Isaac deprived of a proper ritual.
Still, this is a happy ending of sorts; the women in the play get their sane and sensible way, Isaac has had a liminal experience after all, and the characters who were set up as unsympathetic get their just deserts. Roche’s tight plotting brings off a difficult feat: the dramatis personae are closely linked, by blood, enmity, memories, attraction. In the hands of a lesser playwright this tangle, just as the poetic justice ladled out liberally, might very quickly seem contrived; Roche manages to convey the impression of a closely knit community where no private move remains without public consequences and where any infringement of the rules of cohabitation will be sanctioned.
Roche’s favourite themes are in evidence again but the strong local colour and the unusual outdoor scenes set this play apart from the others. The initiation motif works particularly well, since its doubling allows Roche to exploit both the atavistic force of a rite of passage and its comic potential in a world that has little time and regard for ‘mere’ ritual. Thus an initiate can meet his imminent branding with ‘This better not hurt me’, and Eagle goes to great lengths to make the night on the island comfortable for his son, newly constructed bed and comic books included; the only thing he inadvertently leaves behind is the ghetto blaster.
He and his son thus remain amphibian – not quite on terra firma, but not quite answering the call of the sea either; they are in-betweeners, topographically as well as socially and historically. If that is their choice, it is a wise one: the landmen are brutalised and without prospects; Maria Brennan, who haunts the play’s interspersed narratives, chose the water and ‘gave herself to the sea’. She, one of the many major offstage characters in Roche’s drama, is yet another female suicide by drowning in contemporary drama in Ireland; why the motif has been used so often in the past twenty years is an intriguing question.
The Cavalcaders (1993)
This is Roche’s first play to receive a professional production in Ireland, on the Abbey’s Peacock stage, before its English premiere. While all of his earlier pieces used their small-scale setting to allow the characters to make points about the past, the present and the (lack of ) future, The Cavalcaders is the first of his more recent plays concerned with formally interweaving the present with the past. It is set ‘in the present day, flashing back to about seven years ago’; even these flashbacks – which constitute most of the play – are full of stories, memories and conjurations of the past. There is almost no plot: four men, Terry, Rory, Ted and Josie, make up a quartet performing barbershop songs; two women, Breda and Nuala, join them in celebrations, love entanglements and reminiscences. We get to see Terry between the two women; others we only hear about. We see Josie courageously or innocently prepare for medical treatment – in the ‘present’ he is spoken of as dead. The shoemaker’s workshop where the play is set is semi-functional in the past and about to be refurbished in the present; a piano is played, tuned, out of tune. There are petty treacheries and a good-humoured acceptance of life’s unpleasantnesses. Songs and snatches of songs punctuate the play.
The randomness of the scenes, the permanently oscillating time scheme (for even in the ‘past’ there is no linearity from the first to the last flashback) and the absence of such dramatic near-necessities as suspense, causality or closure make this Roche’s formally most ambitious and dramatically least satisfactory play. Particularly after the tightly plotted Amphibians, it marks a relapse to Belfry and the then current vogue of memory plays. Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, responsible for the spate of such texts in the early 1990s, achieved its focus through a single man’s recollections and his earnest attempts at communicating them; the result is an unreliable narration that generates its charm by musing on its unreliability. Since such a focaliser, however flawed, is missing in Roche’s play, the task of assembling the backstory is completely devolved on to the audience; the rewards for such reconstructive participation are, however, slight: no extraordinary story emerges. The Cavalcaders is not a bad play – Roche has not written one to date – but it certainly does not represent a major achievement. The author, perhaps for this reason, concentrated on screenplays and other performance-related work; the major text to emerge from that period is Trojan Eddie (1997).
On Such as We (2001)
Roche’s longest play, again for the Abbey’s Peacock stage, features three distinct but simultaneous settings: ‘an old-fashioned barbershop’, a hallway and a bedsit. The plot revolves around Oweney, the equally old-fashioned owner, his affair with the wife of his old school mate P.J., the assorted hangers-on and lodgers that populate the shop, and above all the attempts of P.J. to obtain Oweney’s premises for development purposes by money, cajoling and violence. The final showdown between the two bare-fisted men, blood dripping on the Christmas snow, is a bravura piece of reported action. Oweney emerges as the winner of the bout; whether he will be able to stand his ground against the forces of modernisation remains unresolved.
On Such as We contains more and longer stage directions than Roche’s other plays, and the word that recurs in them is ‘sad’. The elegiac bass notes, never completely inaudible in his work, here dominate the composition, if this metaphor is permissible for a play so full of songs. The usual shop or club location again serves as a forum for (mainly male) attempts at fashioning a meaningful life, but these attempts end in stomach-aches, destroyed affections and pessimism. Visually, this downward slide is most effectively represented by the barbershop: after an attack by two thugs, its mirror is shattered, the bench is ripped out and ‘The living quarters too are wrecked’. Without any obvious parallel, the play evokes the tone of resignation at the end of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904).Maurya’s ‘No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied’ echoes through Roche’s play from the outset: ‘May the Lord Have Mercy on Such as We’.
Lay Me Down Softly (2008)
Roche’s most recent play, yet again for the Peacock Theatre, is also his most mature work. It tells the story of love, friendship and violence among the members of Delaney’s Travelling Roadshow, a large fairground company that includes among its many attractions a rifle range, swing boats, a ghost train, a soothsayer, dodgems and, above all, the Academy, a boxing marquee where ‘All comers’ are offered a fight with the employees. The owner of Delaney’s, Theo, rules his outfit with a mixture of roguish charm and outright brutality; when he suspects one of his men of having shaved off some of the takings, he breaks his jaw. His partner Lily, who is well capable of holding her own, and the (ex-)boxers Junior, Peadar and Dean complete the cast until Emer arrives; she is Theo’s daughter from an earlier relationship. Against the background of Theo’s dubious – and modestly successful – financial dealings, mostly involving betting on or against his own men, and the careful portrayal of life on the road, two main plot lines emerge, both involving Junior, the youngest of the boxers and the one with some semblance of a future before him. Dean, the least controlled of the fighters, administers a severe beating to a harmless, middle-aged challenger, only to find that his victim is uncle to Joey Dempsey, a professional welterweight boxer. Dempsey challenges Dean, wins and two days later fights Junior to a draw. Junior, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Emer, and after his big fight, bruised and cut, runs away with her and the day’s takings. The last image of the play shows Peadar, who has helped them get away, sitting stoically and waiting for Theo’s retribution.
Formally, this is another of Roche’s well-made two-act pieces. The story is clear, suspenseful, interlaced with a rough – and male – humour that seems to emerge from the characters and lends them depth, definition and a slightly frenetic dignity. The imagery is never haphazard: the ubiquitous bandages, for instance, first of all are there to tie and tighten the pugilists’ fists before the fight and to wrap up their injuries afterwards. But they also are a visual reminder of the prevalence of violence in the little world of Delaney’s: characters are continually handling them, putting them on, away, into order. And Roche shows his craftsmanship in allowing the bandages, like the milk cartons, and the trains offstage, to acquire symbolic meaning: they speak of being tied down to a predictable life, of the need for help and ministering to this need, even of the rickety duct-tape nature of the boxer’s certainties.
The most interesting formal feature of Lay Me Down Softly is its correlation of space and action: the entire play is set in and around the boxing ring, with no change in scenery other than a slackening and tautening of the ring’s ropes – another instance of Roche’s mature stage symbolism. But this ring remains a place of anticipation and recollection: all the fights occur between scenes, all the play’s outward action, if that is the right word, happens off stage, and Peadar’s terrible punishment will be administered after the last scene. We the audience are, as it were, only allowed to witness half the play and meet half the cast: Sadie the soothsayer, her lover Ernie, Joey Dempsey and his uncle, the crooked bookie, all these characters are essential but absent.
These absences first of all parallel and thus evoke the sense of nostalgia the play trades upon without surrendering to it: travelling roadshows may not be a ‘forgotten world’, as the programme to the Abbey’s premiere claimed, but they certainly are fading away. In this sense the absence of so many theatrically attractive elements mirrors the disappearance of a form of popular entertainment; the play on this level works as an obituary. Yet all these absences are also the formal reflex of one of the play’s themes: the wish to be elsewhere, to be away. Most of the characters speak of a past that was more stable than their present, and yet they all ended up in a travelling community; their talk is of getting out of that, too, but only Junior and Emer, the two outsiders in this company of outsiders, make the attempt. It takes another outsider’s view, that of the spectator, to realise the layered irony of their escape: they try to reach the milk train, to get them to another place, but that other place will be just another Irish dairy village:
Junior picks up a milk bottle, which he sniffs and tastes like a wine expert.
Junior Daisy Day . . . Don’t tell me: we’re in the midlands, right? Just outside Bridgewater somewhere.
Emer sort of cheers and applauds.
Now if it was Milkmaid we’d be in Stoneyville.
Emer What about Huntley Town?
Junior Eh . . . Fireside Dairies? No, Avondale, though. Am I right?
Emer Bang on.
Junior winks and taps his wily temple.
One way of knowin’ where yeh are in the world at any point in time, I suppose.
Junior I suppose. Good as any.
Emer Mmn . . .
They chuckle and hold hands.
What about you, Peadar, how do you tell where you are in the world from day to day?
Peadar I don’t . . . I’m good and lost wherever I am.
‘Good and lost wherever I am’: that is the summary many Roche characters would be happy to accept; Peadar’s coming punishment at the hands of Theo seems to be a small price to pay for such insight and certainty of place.
Summary
Roche’s plays have generally met with good, even eulogistic reviews; the one characteristic few critics fail to mention is their ‘humanity’.Of course, the term is vague enough to cover most of drama, in Ireland and elsewhere, but it nevertheless draws attention to Roche’s many fundamentally decent characters with their little acts of kindness, their jokes, their liberality. Reviewers have also praised his transposition of Wexford English into a stage language that speaks to audiences on both sides of the Irish Sea. The theatres have recognised this; while there are many playwrights with one or two professionally produced plays, Roche’s record is of another order entirely. To have one’s first three plays produced by London’s Bush Theatre is rare indeed, and the subsequent productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Abbey Theatre placed him centre stage in both Britain and Ireland.
His steady success is primarily due to the sheer quality of his dialogue; he offers excellent parts for actors keen to venture beyond the psychological and linguistic drabness of in-yer-face theatre, whose rise parallels that of Roche without any point of contact. In fact, Roche’s popularity with theatres and audiences alike may well be due to the fact that his work firmly belongs to the mainstream of Irish drama with its emphasis on the local, on stage realism, on ‘authenticity’. National themes are absent from his plays; the telling of stories, often not by dramatic means but as tales recounted by characters, is not.
Billy Roche, in many ways, is as typical a contemporary Irish playwright as one can hope – or regret – to encounter: his plays are easily stageable two-act affairs with realistic settings, no fancy effects work, geared towards second-tier venues with limited casts. They are set in small-town Ireland, with Wexford as the dominant pars pro toto. The characters, mostly male and mostly at the less respectable end of society, grope for and sometimes achieve a little triumph – of being listened to, of solidarity, even of some degree of freedom. They are not interested in world affairs, and neither is their creator. Comfortable routine or disappointment has robbed them of a sense of purpose; their acts of resistance often turn into self-harm. They are either too young or too old, or too much concerned with the past and too little equipped for the future.
If this summary seems uncharitable it is none the less accurate; like most of his contemporaries, Roche would be out of his element writing about, say, global warming or heroism among the Barbary pirates. There is, however, a streak to his work that not only saves it from being merely of Wexford and specialist interest, but places him among the more important Irish dramatists. It is, paradoxically, the very parochialism of his characters and settings that gives him the opportunity to transcend these limitations and meditate, time and time again, on the nature of movement and stasis, the local and the far-off, the sense of belonging and the lust for uprootedness. In Lay Me Down Softly this conjoining of opposites is encapsulated perfectly in the symbol of the boxing ring in the marquee: a space that generates and delimits movement, in a temporary structure that is designed to be on the move and never changes, erected by a group of travellers who fear change. It may be too strong a claim to read and see Roche’s plays as universal, but they are as close to a theatrum mundi as contemporary Irish drama is likely to get.
Primary Sources
Works by Billy Roche
The Cavalcaders and Amphibians (London: Nick Hern, 2001).
Lay Me Down Softly (London: Nick Hern, 2008).
On Such as We (London: Nick Hern, 2001).
Rain; Belfry ( London: Nick Hern, 1992).
The Wexford Trilogy: A Handful of Stars; Poor Beast in the Rain; Trojan Eddie (London: Methuen, 1997).
Secondary Sources
‘Billy Roche in Conversation with Conor McPherson’, in Lilian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon and Eamonn Jordan (eds), Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001), pp. 409–23.
Murray, Christopher, ‘Billy Roche’sWexford Trilogy: Setting, Place, Critique’, in Eamonn Jordan (ed.), Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 209–23.
Wilcher, Robert, ‘Billy Roche’, in John Bull (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 33: British and Irish Dramatists Since World War II: Second Series (Detroit, MI: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001), pp. 240–4.