Art matters. The island that’s produced Wilde, Yeats, Heaney, Kavanagh, Branagh, the Clancys, Manahan and Harris to name but a few, remains a vibrant, creative sod of earth. And may it always be so.
Art is not the sole preserve of the cravat-donning citizen of Sandymount who knows Michael Colgan on a first name basis. It’s a joyously accessible medium, be one’s stage the parish hall, a packed Theatre Royal or the dizzying heights of the West End of Broadway.
As natural storytellers – tell me there’s not someone on your street or a few fields down from you who keeps you entertained for hours when you just popped in ‘for minute’ – we seem well disposed to narrate. To lyricise. To enterain.
And when a country becomes economically hamstrung, as we’ve been more than once since independence, the stage, the screen and the written word appear to rein us in that bit more following bouts of material indulgence.
Take the work of Waterford playwright Jim Nolan, for example. A new Jim Nolan production is not only a highly anticipated event for his native city, but for Irish theatre as a whole.
In the ordinary language of daily life, Jim has, so, so often, revealed the wit, the candour and the raw emotion of Waterfordians.
