A sense of place

As an adult, however, Roche, who’s now 53, has covered a reasonable amount of distance, including the United States, where one of his plays had a Chicago production and another was done in San Francisco.
The forthcoming Irish Arts Center production of Roche’s “Poor Beast in the Rain,” which played its initial preview performance on West 51st Street last weekend, will be the first time that one of his plays has been made available to New York audiences.
As it happens, “Poor Beast in the Rain” is the middle play in what has come to be known as “The Wexford Trilogy,” the opening play being “A Handful of Stars” written in 1988, and the play that closes the ring being the “Belfry,” which came along in 1991.
“Poor Beast in the Rain,” which was first produced in 1989, doesn’t depend on either of the other two parts of the trilogy in order to work, in the opinion of the author, who will arrive in New York on Nov. 9 in order to attend the play’s final previews and the Nov. 13 opening.
Speaking last week from his Wexford home, Roche said his play, which won the 1989 George Devine Award, and, later, the Thames Television Award, could stand on its own, without reference to the play that preceded it or the one that followed.
“The only linkage,” Roche said, “is that all three of them make use of the local language and slang, so to speak.”
Counting “The Wexford Trilogy,” Billy Roche has written seven full-length plays, including the most recent one, “Haberdashery,” which has yet to be produced.
His most recent staged new play was “On Such as We,” which played to full houses at the Abbey Theatre.
In addition, there was Roche’s fourth play, “Amphibians,” which was written on a commission from London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, and directed there, at The Pit, by Michael Attenborough. “The Cavalcaders” was staged at the Abbey’s downstairs space, the Peacock, and starred the late Tony Doyle.
Even a cursory examination of Roche’s oeuvre turns up a slight but perhaps significant detail: nothing he has ever written takes place in a kitchen or in a family parlor. Indeed, all are laid in places of business, or at least locations where people congregate. “Poor Beast in the Rain” is set in a Wexford betting shop, on a weekend “leading up to the All Ireland Final.”
As for other locations, “A Handful of Stars” takes place in a billiard hall, and “Belfry” is set in a portion of a church in Wexford. It was initially supposed to have had a barbershop as its setting, until one of those occurrences that writers sometimes experience happened to Roche.
“I started out to write a play about a small town barber,” he explained, “including a card game, one of the participants of which was a man called Owney, a sacristan, a 44-year-old mama’s boy who falls in love with a married woman who came to the church to change the flowers. Owney, a fellow with the smell of celibacy about him, began to speak to me. Eventually, he took over the play.”
The barbershop, and its proprietor, lingered in Roche’s mind so strongly that they turned up in the playwright’s most recent “On Such As We,” with Brendan Gleeson playing the leading role.
“The Cavalcaders” takes place in a shoemaker’s shop. The hero, Terry, is a man who lost his wife to his best friend and never got over it. “His life had become a wasteland,” Roche said.
The writer’s only play not set in one or another workshop situation appears to be “Amphibians,” the setting of which writer describes as “a strange part of Wexford, a place that juts out into the sea and is inhabited by people who have a kind of duality, people who seem to belong more or less equally on land and in the sea.”
This particular play is one of the few works in which Roche has drawn upon a classical source. “It’s based in part on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham was a father who sacrificed his son foe higher ideals,” he said. The 11-year-old boy in the play is named Isaac, which the writer describes as “a name you hear in Wexford.”
Roche descries “Amphibians” as “my ‘Misfits,’ ” referring to John Huston’s 1961 film, utilizing an Arthur Miller screenplay dealing with the obsolescence of cowboys who are reduced to driving wild mustangs into box canyons from which they cannot escape, capturing and sending them to glue factories.
It is, obviously, a film Roche admires.
“Trojan Eddie,” a 1996 movie Roche wrote and in which he played a small role, supporting the stars, Richard Harris and Stephen Rea, is a narrative that focuses on man and his personal dignity being even now, inaccurately, referred to as “Irish gypsies.”
“I wanted to write a story about a rich Traveler,” he said. “In a way, the film is based on the story of Dermot and Grainne, with the Harris character, an older man who more or less buys a young wife, with Harris playing a character based on young Grainne’s husband, Finn MacCoul.”
Billy Roche started his professional career as a musician, having formed, early on, a band he named, with obvious irony, The Roach Band.
“We toured around Ireland, playing bars, colleges and dance halls,” he said. “We even released two singles, ‘The Shamrock Shuffle’ and ‘Italy.’ I was the singer and I fronted the band.”
Roche, whose wife, Patti, works in the housing section of the Wexford Council, is the father of three daughters ranging in age from 22 to 28, Cathy, Andrea and Valerie.
Unlike writers such as Sebastian Barry, Hugh Leonard and Tom Murphy, Roche never writes about the members of his own family, at least not consciously. “Things are buried, sort of hidden away, and sometimes they come forward to haunt me and tell me what they have to say,” he said.
Of “The Wexford Trilogy,” Roche said, “I was learning to write when I was writing those plays.”
The writer still acts, when the opportunity arises. “Not so long ago, I was in a tour of Frank Gallati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ” he said. “I played several small parts, including Muley, the farmer who tells Tom Joad how the tractors came and knocked down the shacks and houses where the victims of the Dust Bowl had lived. We played theaters like the Gaiety in Dublin, and the Cork Opera House.”
And his passion for music continues. “On Such As We” features, logically enough, a barbershop quartet. “They sing things like we used to sing”, he said, “things by the Beach Boys and other people.”
“Belfry,” the final play in “The Wexford Trilogy,” was done by Chicago’s Organic Theatre Company, and “Amphibians” was staged in Florida.
Even with these productions to his credit, Billy Roche is still not well known in the United States. With a little luck, and a successful staging, the Irish Arts Center’s version of “Poor Beast in the Rain” may change all that.
Despite having written plays on commission a few times, he said he really doesn’t like doing it. “It takes me three or four years to do a play,” he said. “Doing it on commission, you feel you’re working for someone, and sometimes plays don’t work out the way you thought they would, or hoped they would. I realize that when you’re not working on a commission, you’re writing off your own back, without wages, sometimes for years. A commission, at least, gives you time and wages.”