INTERVIEW: Legendary Irish rugby match inspires playwright
Photo: Ed Malone, Henry Raber, David O’Hara, Rob McDermott, Chase Guthrie Knueven and Sarah Street star in Alone It Stands at 59E59 Theaters, as part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival. Photo courtesy of Heidi Bohnenkamp, 2019 / Provided by Karen Greco PR with permission.
Over the years, sports have inspired many theater artists to stage competitive battles beneath a proscenium. Whether it was St. Ann’s Warehouse mounting Beautiful Burnout about the physical world of boxing or Second Stage’s wrestling-infused production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, the theatrical offerings focused on sporting action are rare, but prove to be memorable.
John Breen is something of a prophet when it comes to asking for advice from the sports muse. Many years ago he crafted an exciting, palpable show focused on a legendary rugby match between a small Irish team and the world-renowned All Blacks of New Zealand. That play, Alone It Stands, is now being revived and finally receiving its New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.
Breen returns to his seminal piece to direct the limited engagement, which is part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival. The setting is Oct. 31, 1978, when the economy is tanking and Ireland is in a violent struggle with Northern Ireland. No one thought the Irish Munster team would beat the All Blacks, yet history was in the air that night.
In the play, six actors play 62 characters.
“I was a director for about 10 years before I wrote the play,” Breen said in a recent phone interview. “I trained with the Abbey Theatre for about a year and a half in 1988, and I apprenticed myself to a director that had a trainee for a couple of years. And I had been directing for about 10 years, and then in 1998, I was kind of looking around for my next project. And I remember this amazing game that happened in Limerick in 1978, and I thought that there was a story in it because the victory had meant so much in the country at the time. You’ve got to remember, Ireland in 1978 was a very, very grim place. There was nobody that you could look at and say, ‘They’re the best in the world at what they do.’ There was no U2. There was no Riverdance. … There was a war in Northern Ireland, the drip, drip of atrocity from the North all the time.”
Breen remembers those times as being gray, colorless. Unemployment was skyrocketing, and despair was commonplace. And then there was this team that dared to pitch a David-vs.-Goliath battle against the All Blacks.
“I remember as a kid when this smallish rugby team beat the All Blacks, who were universally thought of as the greatest rugby team in the world,” the playwright said. “The country went mad. It really had an extraordinary positive psychological effect on the national psyche at a time when we really needed it, and then 20 years later, I was kind of looking around. And everybody seemed to have forgotten it, so I wanted to look at that. And I also I suppose wanted to look at the place I was from, which was Limerick, which is a pretty tough town. It has this amazing, inclusive sporting philosophy, and I wanted to pay a tribute to that and celebrate that. And as a director, I wanted to stage a rugby match, as simple as that.”
Breen thought it would be a lot of fun to stage a rugby match beneath a proscenium. At first, he wanted someone else to write the play, but after they didn’t take the bait, he turned to himself in the mirror.
“I thought I had to write it,” he said. “I was researching the project, and I talked to a load of people. And everyone I talked to had an amazing story about that day. My older brother talked about this incredible tackle that happened. We had a bar in Limerick, which is a real rugby bar, and all these players coming into the bar after the game, so anyone I talked to, their eyes would light up. They’d go, ‘That’s an amazing idea. You’ve got to do that.’ But I was thinking, where’s the story? … Where’s the drama?”
Breen found his drama when he read a paragraph in The Irish Times, Ireland’s newspaper of record, that stated something extraordinary and sad about one of the Munster players. The coincidence was one of those unfortunate turns of fate, something devastating on a personal level.
“I just thought, oh man, that story has to be told,” he said. “Then I was hooked.”
He added: “I had very, very modest ambitions for it when I wrote it. … I didn’t see a great crossover between rugby fans and theatergoers.”
In order to bridge that gap, Breen decided to write the play so that it could easily transfer to different venues across Ireland, including rugby clubs. That means there are virtually no props and only six actors.
“They wear the All Black costumes in the first half, the Munster costumes in the second half, and I did it with no set,” he said. “That kind of set the tone because when you have very little, your imagination has to take over. … And then a couple people in the press discovered it and re-eulogized it, and then six months later we went to the Edinburgh Fringe. And then we were in huge theaters in Ireland and the Sydney Opera House and Kuala Lumpur and all sorts of mad places, and now we’re in New York.”
Audience members may know the final score before Alone It Stands begins, but they will be surprised by the heart and drama at the center of this sports narrative.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Alone It Stands, from Gyre and Gimble Productions, continues through Jan. 27 at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. The production is written and directed by John Breen, and is part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival. Click here for more information and tickets.
