Dublin 2

July 7, 2009

Got back to my room just as the deluge began.


Saw Tom Murphy's The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant last night. I’d asked to be seated up front, and there I was, able to note the working of those skilled faces. The acting was impeccable; the set magnificent, and the play– a bit of the love child of Brecht and John B Keane, with a family resemblance to King Lear– was meaty, intelligent, fully engaging. I wouldn’t say it is a great play, and the acting was so sublime it may not even be as good as I think it is, but it is the kind of play that makes you grateful, a money-well-spent, an exercise-for-the-brain type of play. In addition to being a little old-fashioned, the work has several (minor) flaws in its lovely affect. The biggest may be an ill-conceived post-mortem soliloquy in which the main character tries to justify a life which has been fully, if not justified, explored in the work itself. The soliloquy did contain the great line, “I loved you as much as was safe.” The soliloquy has the feel of a suggestion made by a nervous producer or director, wanting all the doors at the end to close with a satisfying click.

Crossed over to the Flowing Tide afterward, where I had a lovely conversation with Paul McKee about the play and about theater, and with the merry-eyed bartender about politics. McKee is in a wheelchair, and seems to find that vaguely funny, or in any case doesn’t let it cramp his style. He said he’d tell his daughter in New York to look out for my plays. The bartender, whose name I did not ask, had the most infectious laugh and, like all Irishmen, a bitter, cynical mistrust of every aspect of Irish politics. I came home glowing with their acquaintance and fueld by Bulmers.

Today began at the Hugh Lane, where I visited my much-loved cycad, and followed a three year old Irish/Indonesian boy around as he ran from one work of art to another, improvising a Museum song which sounded like a lullaby played on little wooden bells. His parents followed too-- Irish dad, Asian mom–as surprised and fascinated as I. The featured modern artists were three of them good and one of them bad, none very memorable. I tried to visit Loretto at the Leinster, but, inevitably, she was on holiday. On to the National Gallery, at which I arrived in time to hear a lecture on a wooden statue of Elijah triumphing over the priests of Baal. The girl lecturing was brilliant. Who knew there was so much to know about Spanish polychrome wooden sculpture of the 17th century? Went to the Yeats room to grade my approach to the image which I recognize as me in Eternity– The Singing Horseman. I am much closer now than when I stood there last.

Bought plums from a banshee-resembling vendor on O’Connell Street.

Every muscle in my legs has stiffened into wood.