*UC Berkeley and Stephen F. Austin State University's Irish Theater Study Abroad Programs were treated to a special private performance of O'Kelly's "The Cambria" in Samuel Beckett Dance Studio at TCD. Special thanks to Donal and Sorcha for making the journey to perform for us and participating in a talkback with us afterwards.
The Cambria is a play about Frederick Douglass’s
journey to and arrival in Ireland written by Donal O’Kelly. The play opens with
Douglass boarding a ship called The Cambria under a false name, and closes with
his arrival in Ireland and the reception he receives from the Irish people.
Douglass is traveling under an assumed name because he is fleeing from
persecution after having written a book about his life as a slave. From the
moment he shows his ticket as he boards the ship, it is clear that his race is
significant to the people around him—the other people on board the ship express
surprise that he, as a black man, has a first-class ticket. The audience is
quickly introduced to a host of characters, from a young girl who believes
Douglass is a minstrel because of his race to her slaveowner father to a singer
with strong abolitionist leanings. After his identity is discovered, he
believes he will be sent back to his former owner upon arrival in Ireland;
however, the Irish people not only welcome him, but embrace him as a hero
figure. The play not only serves the purpose of depicting the ways in which
blacks were treated, and the attitudes many people had toward them, but also
serves the purpose of bringing Douglass’s travels to Ireland more people’s
awarenesses; it creates a space for a discussion of the ways race and slavery
played a role not only in Irish society, but in society as a whole.
Throughout the course of the play,
two characters in particular demonstrate negative attitudes that many people
had towards blacks. On the one hand, Douglass is first approached by the little
girl with the music box; she naïvely assumes he is a minstrel because he is
black and, as such, wants him to perform for her, but she does not have
negative feelings toward blacks. On the other hand, Douglass is also faced with
the little girl’s father, Dodd; he not only has the negative feelings toward
blacks that his daughter lacks, but also actively enacts these feelings by
trying to subjugate Douglass and to “put him in his place”—according to Dodd,
below decks rather than in a first-class cabin. These two characters embody two
ways in which racism can manifest itself; through ignorance and naïveté, as in
the case of the daughter, or through malice, as in the case of Dodd. It would
seem that these two characters are counterbalanced by the abolitionist woman,
who does not have negative feelings toward Douglass because of his race.
However, such a reading of her character is reductive; it is true that she
wants to help Douglass, and to do what she believes is right. The problem with
this, though, is that she disregards Douglass’s expressed wishes in her desire
to help him—he wants to quietly make his way to Ireland without a fuss, but she
ultimately reveals his true identity, exposing him to scrutiny and hostility.
In the play, these attitudes are represented as specifically American
attitudes—these traits show themselves in the American characters, but not in
the Irish characters who receive Douglass at the end of the play.
There are a total of two actors who
perform in this piece: Donal O’Kelly and Sorcha Fox. The version of The Cambria that we saw was very toned down; the set
consisted of a trunk and a box sitting on a oblong mat patterned like the
planks on a ship’s deck, the actors did not once change their costumes, and
they sat on the trunk and box and acted out toward the audience. These choices
are fascinating, because the actors must then convey everything about the characters
they portray through their voices and their (seated) bodies. Although the
actors are both Irish, they portray a cast of characters who come from various
backgrounds; the actors adopt accents, speech patterns, and voices in order to
distinguish the characters, as well as distinct ways of holding themselves as
they sit. It would be easy to problematize the fact that we have two Irish
(i.e., white) actors playing the roles of several black characters, but that
would be ignoring the fact that actors constantly play characters who are not
like themselves; both actors also play the roles of American characters, though
neither of them are American, and Fox plays many characters who are men, though
she is a woman. In spite of having a minimum of props and movement across the
stage, O’Kelly and Fox do a fantastic job of conveying character and setting as
the play progresses. This allows for the audience to focus on the distinct
characters they create, and on the relationships between those characters, which
draws attention to the action and trajectory of the play itself, rather than to
showy costumes or fancy set designs.
Before seeing this play, I had no
idea that Douglass had ever traveled—or fled, as it were—to Ireland. Had I
known that, I certainly would not have expected him to have been welcomed as a
hero figure. However, when I stop to think about it, I realize that perhaps
this is not as surprising after all; by the time Douglass arrived in Ireland,
the Irish people had themselves been oppressed and subjugated by England for
many, many years, and may have related to Douglass’s plight as a black man who
has been enslaved by a white owner. Certainly, the reception he received from
the Irish people upon his arrival indicates that they at least sympathized with
his desire to escape from slavery—and with his decision to have done so. The
parallel between the oppression and subjugation Douglass experiences and that
which the Irish people experience is brought home by the end of the play. When
Douglass arrives in Ireland, he is greeted by Daniel O’Connell—a man known for
campaigning to repeal the Act of Union, which had officially united Britain and
Ireland. The presence of O’Connell necessarily brings the struggle for Irish
independence from Britain to the fore, linking it with Douglass’s independence
from the man who owned him as a slave.
~Fion Lau
The author
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