John Arnold: Fair is fair... Macbeth play for Cork students has killer lines!
But it was all ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’, as Ecclesiastes wrote in his famous Book of the Bible long, long ago, and I got just a single, lonesome Honour in Irish.
Bhí mé bronach at the time, but as the English writer, Jimmy Howell, wrote around 1660, ‘no use in crying over spilt milk’.
Maybe if I had spent more time studying Wordsworth and Keats and Shakespeare back then, the results might have been better, but shur, what matter it now?
I loved plays and pantomimes and musicals as a garsún and that passion remains undimmed. Though I absolutely adore nearly every kind of dramatic event, my inability to ‘learn lines’ always mitigated against serious participation and negatively impacted any possible progress to the West End or Hollywood!
Not sure what play was on our English Leaving Cert Course, might have been . I had studied Latin up to the Inter Cert so ‘Et tu Brute?’ (You also, Brutus?) and ‘Veni, vedi, vici’ (I came, I saw, and I conquered) were familiar enough to me.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears”, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” and “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once” are other quotes that came to mind recently when I leafed through my old textbook from the last century.
I can never recall actually seeing a television or stage production of while a student.
Amazing isn’t it that, though Shakespeare died over four centuries ago and wrote his plays in an English idiom far removed from the present day - yet his work remains enduring, indeed popular.
Stunning, too, that the themes dealt with by the Bard of Avon - treachery, infidelity, jealousy, power struggles, betrayal, violence, and greed, are all still to the fore today!
Curiosity and a sense of adventure saw me amongst a happy, madding crowd of Leaving Cert students sitting in the Cork Opera House last Thursday morning.
Yes, morning - in my seat well before curtain-up at 10am.
This year ‘The Scottish Play’, , is on the English Syllabus for the exams next June.
I think it’s normally the cast tend to use the ‘Scottish Play’ idiom, but it’s OK when writing to mention the word ‘Macbeth’!
The husband/wife team of Jenny Fennessy and Dylan Kennedy formed the Red ’n Blue Theatre Company about six years ago – the Red is for Glenville-born Dylan and the Blue represents Waterford - Jenny is from Ballysaggart.
The couple are passionately in love with each other and also with theatre and drama.
Putting on big, professional productions is a very expensive business. Red ’n Blue is a company funded by Dylan and Jenny themselves so plaudits to them for their bravery and ambition.
For this , Dylan was the director while Jenny played Lady Macbeth with a cast of ten others and a creative team of five.
Both Dylan and Jenny had worked with the Royal Shakespearean Theatre in the past and their attraction and adulation for Macbeth was very obvious.
I was riveted to my seat as were the students. I never knew that ‘Knock, knock - who’s there?’ came from – yes, I’d heard of the three witches at the cauldron cackling ‘Toil and trouble, boil and bubble’, but the plot of the play was only vague in my head.
The language was of the time, with thy and thee and thou and doest and giveth and keepeth and so on.
Do we know of any fairly major world leader at present with an ambitious wife always prompting him to greater power? Sounds familiar in 2025, you betcha - well, in a nutshell that’s the plot of . Lady Macbeth loves her husband but, boy, does she crave power, domination, and to hell with anyone standing in the way of her man.
Jenny was powerful, hugely persuasive, yet tender and delicate in her own way.
Ruairí Leneghan as Macbeth is a noble type but his ambition has no end. No fault in that, you may say, but Shakespeare paints his characters as flawed - sometimes fatally. So, with power in the play comes the ability to basically ride roughshod over any potential enemy.
as a stage play is raw and brutal - the killing scenes are graphic and horrendous with nothing left to the imagination.
Before the play started, I could see virtually hundreds of mobile phones - Smart and otherwise - winking and blinking in the auditorium. There was no call for ‘phones off’ yet not one caused an interruption.
The student audience were brilliant - silent when needs be and raucous and angry when the scene unfolding on stage demanded such a reaction.
‘Is this a dagger I see before me’ and ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ are other lines which stuck with me.
A man that coined ‘To be or not to be’, ‘Breaking the ice’, ‘Wild goose chase’, ‘Laughing stock’ and ‘Eaten out of house and home’ was truly a genius, and the passing decades have not dimmed his lustre.
At the finale last Thursday, the applause and cheering were deafening and deserved.
We snuck in backstage from Half Moon Street, and there were Jenny and Dylan on their knees with crew taking down the set.
They’re off to Thurles in early November for more stagings of their wonderful Scottish play.
was a visceral, in your face, full frontal depiction of power-lust, violence and revenge - whew, truly breakneck action with awe-full twists and turns. I loved it.
For something completely different, we have a play in Bartlemy Hall tomorrow night. It’s quiet in its own way and based on fantastic, even chilling stories told by a group who gather in a country pub on a winters night.
No murder or mayhem here, but we are drawn into the back-story of the characters.
Storytelling is part of our heritage and culture, and a play about storytelling is just part of what we were and are. Ah yes, indeed, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their entrances and their exits; and one man in his time plays many parts...
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