ARTS Diaspora’s dispatches spun for the stage

CASE STUDY?New play 'My English Tongue, My Irish Heart' centres on generations of Irish emigrants' experience of life in England.

Diaspora’s dispatches spun for the stage

Ciara Moynihan

What is it like, really like, to try to start a new life in a foreign country? How does it feel to walk away from all that is familiar? To suddenly be an outsider? To feel your identity slip, or harden? A new play, ‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’, based a book by Knock-born author and academic Dr Liam Harte, explores these and other aspects of the diasporic experience. Written by award-winning Irish playwright Martin Lynch, it opened in Belfast last Friday, the first night of a month-long tour of venues in Ireland and the UK, including The Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, on Thursday, May 14. Harte’s book, ‘The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001’, surveys the memoirs of writers of Irish birth or background who lived and worked in Britain between the early eighteenth century and the present day. Featuring 60 autobiographers, both renowned and obscure, it challenges perceptions of the Irish in Britain as ‘an unliterary people who cleaved more to the spade than the pen’. The writers covered include Mary Davys, Laetitia Pilkington, John Denvir, Tom Barclay, WB Yeats, Patrick MacGill, Elizabeth Bowen, SeΡn O’Casey, Louis MacNeice, Alice Foley, Dónall Mac Amhlaigh, Bob Geldof and William Trevor.
‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’, also tells the story of Irish emigration to England through the generations, exploring the perplexities of living with, and between, two worlds. In a departure from the book, however, the play centres on a fictional young, educated couple – Gary, a Mayo Catholic, and Susan, a Tyrone Protestant – who emigrate to England.
Their contemporary story is interwoven with tales of those who have gone before them, from lawyers and labourers to pickpockets, politicians and professional street preachers. Dr Liam Harte’s interest in emigration and the experience of the diaspora was shaped by his own lived experience. He was born on a small farm in the village of Meeltrane, about four miles from Knock in the direction of Kilkelly. His parents still live there – but he has settled in England.
He first left Meeltrane in the early 1980s to go to university in Galway, where he studied English and History. For the past eleven years, he has been based at the University of Manchester, where he is now a Senior Lecturer in Irish and Modern Literature. “The subject of emigration was often discussed in our house when I was young,” Harte tells The Mayo News. “I grew up listening to my father’s stories about what life was like for him and his brothers when they worked as seasonal labourers on farms in the north of England during the 1940s and 1950s. These stories came back to me when I moved to London in the 1990s to take up my first academic post.
“While in London, I became curious to discover if there were many autobiographical accounts of Irish life in Britain, and found that the general consensus was that Irish emigrants were more comfortable with a pick in their hands than a pen. As one acquaintance bluntly put it, ‘the Irish were diggers and drinkers – full stop’. So I decided to do some digging myself, to see if I could prove otherwise.” His book, published in 2009, was the fruit of that labour.
Harte recognised that some of the first-person accounts of emigration in ‘The Literature of the Irish in Britain’ could form the basis of an engaging stage production, and so, in 2013, he approached playwright Martin Lynch. The two decided to collaborate, and the path to ‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’ was paved.
So what lay behind the decision to introduce the fictional characters of Gary and Susan? “We wanted to make my work on emigrant lives more accessible to non-academic audiences, including people and communities that have been affected by emigration – which includes most people in Mayo and indeed Ireland as a whole – and to do so in an entertaining way,” Harte explained. “So Martin set about bringing some of the historical characters in my book to life, and in the process he created some new characters, notably Gary O’Donnell from Cong and Susan Hetherington from Dungannon … his intention was to give expression to the concerns and dilemmas emigration poses for a 21st-century Irish couple, and to contrast these with the concerns of emigrants from earlier times, going right back to the early 1700s.”
As the project went on, it became clear to Harte and Lynch that a selection of Irish songs about emigration could be incorporated into the play to great effect, and so audiences can expect traditional ballads about exile, as well as blasts of more recent songs by the likes of The Saw Doctors, The Pogues and Paul Brady.
Throughout ‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’ the dilemmas and challenges – material, psychological, emotional, spiritual – that confront the Irish who have migrated across the water are explored.
“In addition to the very basic struggle to find work and a place to live, there is the process of having to adjust to a new culture and society, at which some are more successful than others, depending on factors such as education and class background,” said Harte. “And then there are the deeper complexities that emigration throws up, issues to do with identity and belonging, which aren’t immediately apparent when one leaves Ireland. Martin and I were keen to dramatise the effects of emigration on the characters’ sense of identity and belonging - and on that of their children.
“The more we discussed the play script, the more we wanted to address the whole question of the second-generation Irish experience in England. This features strongly in the second act of the play, when Gary and Susan have children. Where will their allegiances lie? Will they be Irish or English? Must they choose? Can they be both? These are questions the play explores.”
Many authors find it hard to see their books transmogrified, for stage or silver screen. For Harte, however, the experience has been exhilarating, and he’s thrilled with the end result. “It’s a very fast-moving play, with a rich mix of voices, personalities and songs, so audiences certainly won’t be bored! I’ve been sitting in on some of the rehearsals in Belfast in recent weeks, and it’s been quite exciting to see a cast of five actors inject such energy and passion into the script. And it’s not only the standard of the acting that has impressed me – the the quality of singing in the play is truly excellent.”
In a fitting hat-tip to the thousands of men and women who have criss-crossed the Irish sea, a portion of the box office takings from the ‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’ tour will be donated to two emigrant welfare charities, the Safe Home Programme in Mulranny, and the London-based Aisling Return to Ireland Project. Both provide great support and advice for long-term emigrants and help those who wish to resettle in Ireland to do so.

‘My English Tongue, My Irish Heart’ will be staged at The Linenhall Theatre on Thursday, May 14, at 8pm. Admission €10/€7 (concessions). To book, call 094 902 3733 or visit www.thelinenhall.com.