Giving voice to Travellers’ tales

MICHAEL Harding has written 20 plays, two novels and a novella but he says he’s not a writer.
“I’m just a storyteller,” he suggests in his gentle Cavan accent. “I don’t call myself a novelist or a playwright. I love stories and I love storytelling,” and these two elements are at the heart of The Tinker’s Curse, his own play that he directs and performs at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on June 9 and 10. 
Infused with black humour, The Tinker’s Curse begins with Mikey Rattigan, a broken-hearted Traveller, who’s after climbing Croagh Patrick to do penance for his sins. The play follows Mikey across the country as he tells the story of his life, in a rich, poetic language, and his struggles to deal with the loss of his wife and daughter. 
For Michael, the essence of storytelling is listening. And this is especially true of The Tinker’s Curse as the play was written in collaboration with Travellers. To capture their stories, as well as the colour and rhythms of their speech, Michael met with Travellers for six months in 1994. From over 30 hours of recordings, he weaved their stories into an elaborate fabric.
“The Travellers I met were extraordinary storytellers,” Michael explains. “I invented the part of the play about the Traveller man who climbs Croagh Patrick but all the stories I tell are real. The language of the play is verbatim as it was spoken to me. I didn’t make up any of the phrases.”
To ensure the play was faithful to the source material, it was performed exclusively for Travellers for the first four months and played to 500 members of the community nationwide. The reception was very positive.
“They liked the play very much,” Michael says. “It bears witness to the complexity and sensitivity of emotion in the Traveller community that isn’t often open to strangers. They could identify with the stories and its authenticity. It showed their life. But it depicts a human story. It’s not just about Travellers – it’s about human beings.”
After trying to come up with a title for the play for a year or two, Michael accidentally stumbled across it. When he chided his daughter for something she should have done with her horses, she replied, “I couldn’t give a tinker’s curse”. It got Michael thinking about the meaning of the phrase and, near the close of the play, Mikey Rattigan reveals the haunting origin of the expression.
The Tinker’s Curse has evolved into a monologue. When Michael originally wrote the play for Livin’ Dred Theatre Company, the story was the same but the author presented it from three perspectives: Mikey’s wife, their dead son and a settled man.
It was only when it was nominated in the Best New Play category at The Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2007 that Michael thought about experimenting with the format and adding music (it features the music of Finbar Coady).
Far from finding the idea of standing alone on stage while delivering a monologue intimidating, Michael relishes the prospect. “I enjoy performing it. I don’t feel like I’m acting: I feel like I’m telling a story,” he says.
“I try to engage with the crowd in a personal way. I say ‘Hello’ as they’re coming in. I stop to chat to the crowd during the show. They join in the singing. I get absorbed by the magic of the story.”
Michael has penned the novels Priest and The Trouble with Sarah Gullion and the novella Bird in the Snow. He won the Hennessy Literary Award in 1980 for his short stories and, in 1990, received both the Stewart Parker Award for Theatre and the Bank of Ireland/RTÉ Award for excellence in the arts.
Michael was writer in residence at the Abbey Theatre in 1993 and the company has produced six of his plays. He also acted with the Abbey and in 2004 won the Best Actor award in the Dublin Theatre Fringe Festival for his performance in his own play, Swallow. He currently writes a weekly column for The Irish Times.
That one of his novels and a trilogy of his plays, Una Pooka, The Misogynist and Sour Grapes, deal with the Catholic Church in Ireland is hardly surprising given that, in 1980, Michael was ordained a priest.
He served in a parish in Fermanagh but broke with the Church in 1985. Michael had initially attended the seminary in Maynooth but left to become a teacher. After teaching and a spell as a social worker, he returned to the seminary in his mid-20S.
“In the 1970s, the Church was evolving. It was the time of liberation theology, the Church was becoming less prescriptive and it looked like priests would be allowed to marry,” he remembers.
The Second Vatican Council, opened by Pope John XXIII and continued by Pope Paul VI, promised to introduce significant changes to the Church. In 1978, within months of each other, Paul VI and his successor, John Paul I, were dead. The election of Pope John Paul II in 1978 signalled a return to tradition.
“The Polish pope stood for a restoration papacy. Everything went into reverse. It was a major mistake and the consequences of it are well known by now – abuse and fear of sex. All the great theologians were taken off the shelf and banned. It was an act of intellectual barbarism. It was a major tactical mistake. I had no place in that Church and moved on.”
Michael started practising Buddhism in the 1990s and finds it “very enriching”. Yet he rues the vacuum created by the Catholic Church due to the actions of some priests.
“People miss it,” he says. “It’s very sad that the Church is morally compromised. It’s good for society to have a healthy church. But we don’t because of what the clergy did.”
Michael has fond memories of working in Clare. In 1991, Theatre Omnibus produced his play Brian Boru in Ennis and, as part of this, arranged a street parade. “We had a 7ft Brian Boru on a hearse going around Ennis at midnight. The parade had a ghoulish feel. It was great fun,” he recalls. 
His plots, characters and settings change but Michael Harding’s philosophy remains the same: “Stories are at the centre of everything.”