Renowned playwright Jimmy Murphy introduces his latest play The Cartographer's Pen, a drama for Ramor Theatre and Town Hall Cavan based around the signing of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent drawing of the Cavan/Fermanagh border.
Rehearsals of a new play can quiet a rollercoaster ride for a playwright.
For the first week the cast are busy navigating the script, trying to find the meaning in your lines, how they can best respond to them as they convey the real meaning of them to each other, and in doing so gradually bring the play alive. It's tricky work at times, as most lines of dialogue are suitcases filled with information that are used to smuggle information to the audience in order to drive the play forward, and must pass customs at every turn.
We'd just entered week two of rehearsals of The Cartographer's Pen, a commission from the Ramor Theatre to mark the centenary of the border, when something remarkable began to unfold. It was the moment we got to explore the very idea that brought me to write the play in the first place.
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The Cartographer's Pen - JImmy Murphy talks to RTÉ Arena
It was last March when Padraic McIntyre asked me to consider writing a play about the Cavan/Fermanagh border. My first thought was what could I say that's not already been said? 100 years of broad strokes about Catholic/Protestant Loyalist/Nationalist relationships had informed almost everything of significance that had been written. If I was to take on the commission I needed to find a new perspective.
With ideas sparse it looked like I might not be able to take on the task, when I suddenly remembered something peculiar that I'd come across while writing a new play about the last days of Michael Collins, for Decadent Theatre.
As the first maps of the Free State and Northern Ireland were being drawn, depending on the thickness of the nib that drew the official line, the border could be anything from 1 to 6 feet wide.
It wasn't too difficult a task for the cartographers, as for most of its 310-mile journey rivers, fields and loughs lent a natural borderline to follow. It was when it skirted towns, villages and bridges that some difficulty arose. The most extraordinary example of this is in the Donegal town of Pettigo, the only village in Ireland that the border cuts through. You step onto a bridge in the south and step off it in the north.
Using Pettigo, I decided to transpose the conundrum to a major religious site where a sacred rock and holy well sit right on the border, and to which both counties now lay claim. The scene turned out to be trickier than I envisaged as we worked out the thickness of the border, which direction did it turn, its effect on a simple row of hawthorns.
Eventually we got there, and now for the first time in a play, we get to see the border being drawn across an Irish stage. We've stripped away those broad strokes to discover an April afternoon in 1922 when a line drawn across a plot of land for the very first time brought with it a gesture empty of promise and full of history.
The Cartographer's Pen is at the Town Hall Theatre, Cavan, until May 6th - more info here. Decadent Theatre's production of Jimmy Murphy's The Chief opens in Galway in August.
