It’s tough to articulate it, because although it may be a common experience, it is also largely unconscious. And trying to dig up what’s buried in your psyche is an unpleasant business, it’s like hunting for a corpse by following your nose. Something stinks, it’s unnerving, but it’s not obvious. It’s a low-grade anxiety that you catch a whiff of every now and again.

I once was woken up every other night at 3.01am, and I couldn’t figure out why. I am blessed with the ability to sleep usually, but for a few weeks the experience dominated my life, because sleep ceased to be guaranteed. But it was intermittent, so after one night’s full sleep I’d forget about it, only to find myself a couple of nights later being dragged into consciousness to stare at the clock saying 3:01. I tried to figure out what was the cause, but in the middle of the night my head isn’t the clearest. Was it the central heating kicking in on a timer? A neighbour leaving for work slamming the door? Couldn’t figure it out. Gradually, the knowledge that I was not heading for a guaranteed full night’s sleep took its toll. I couldn’t drift off, I couldn’t relax. I became sort of dishevelled inside, and tetchy, and out of sorts. Eventually I figured it out. I set my alarm for 2.55am, and listened. Sure enough, at 3.00, a very low beeping came from somewhere in my room. It was a travel alarm in my suitcase at the bottom of my wardrobe, set at that time to wake me to catch a plane home from the last time I had been away.

It’s as vague as that, as intermittent, the disquiet I feel about the internet. Not the practical stuff, the banking or the plane tickets or the news. And research and entertainment is fun too, the youtubes and wikipedia and the googling. All that is wonderful, even though there is so much bile and venom and chaff to sift through.

It’s about my interaction with others, through social networking, instant messaging, online chat, and dating sites.

On face value, such interactions add to my life. I share a joke or a video online with my friends, it’s instant and fun. I go rooting around the 1911 census online and share my discoveries with others, who then tell me the stories behind their ancestors and what they’ve discovered. I ask in my status line if anyone wants to go see a movie or go to a show, and I get responses. I hear about parties or festivals and exhibitions online, and I go to them, and know who else is going. I keep up to date with the news from my cousins, spread all over the world. Friends who are travelling on the other side of the planet might as well be next door, I can see how they are getting on every day, and see their photographs almost as soon as they are taken. On a sadder note, I’ve learned about people’s deaths online, and passed on the news to people who hadn’t heard.

So far, so good. It’s all so plausibly social.

When it comes to dating sites, I’ve given up on them, however. And my problem with them is a concentrated version of the flaw in online social networking with friends.
It is this: what did we do before the internet? What was so wrong with it? What have we lost in the transition? Because socializing and keeping in touch used to be part of everyday activities that served us perfectly well for eons.

I’m not a Luddite. But with every advance in human civilization, there is a drawback. And  we only really notice what we’ve been deprived of when it begins to hurt – like not getting a particular vitamin in a new diet that tastes amazing. Over time, something begins to go wrong with your health, it’s vague and unsettling and hard to pinpoint.

Keeping in touch with people used to be done in company. Whether it was in a pub or chatting with neighbours or simply chatting on the phone, the information we swapped was part of a matrix of interactions that only happens when you are actually talking to people. Our tolerance levels of other people’s personalities and idiosyncrasies had to be quite high, but we never noticed it.

You’d never walk into your local and have only one request on your mind, that you would announce as you came into the pub. “Who wants to see the Tarantino with me tonight at 7.30?” If you think of it literally happening, it seems quite absurd. Would you turn on your heels if no one wanted to go with you? If you found someone who did want to go, would you leave together right there and then to see it? No, you wouldn’t. The very idea would be absurd. You would be meeting your friends to spend time with them. Chatting. About the weather, about NAMA, about the X-factor,  their latest break up or holidays or anything else. The primary purpose is, of course, truly communal: taking people as you find them, and seeing what happens. You’ve no agenda, but you’re meeting a basic human need, to hang out. And if a friend is being a bit of a bore, or a bit down, you still pass the time with them. They’ll be in better form next time. It’s a basic kindness, a basic generosity of spirit. You give of yourself your actual presence, and you get the same in return. What comes out of a night such as that might be a pleasant surprise. You might meet a new friend of a friend that you like – you might even want to ask them out. It happens organically. Naturally.

Of course I still have nights like that. I’m not a complete geek. But I know if I didn’t have the internet, I’d be out socializing much more. And I think I’d be far more content with myself and my life.

The internet seems social, as I say, but it’s actually a way of controlling your life and your interactions to such a degree that ordinary “passing the time” socializing seems too much like hard work. When it comes to dating, it gets quite grotesque. Relationships are built not on a negotiated checklist of sexual preferences, but quite simply on a sensation of ease that you stumble upon, when you meet someone and there’s a mutual attraction. If it feels easy, and the body language is good, and you can have a laugh together, you will want to spend more time discovering the person, and, hopefully, vice versa. It’s a slow, tentative, gentle process, because it has to be. Not for everyone, I grant you, but for me. For all the fact that I used to be a webmaster and still design blogs for my friends, the internet is just plain wrong for me when it comes to dating. I need time, plenty of time, to get to know someone. And the internet just doesn’t offer that – it’s all about the instant moment, scratching an itch.

The internet allows us to control our interactions in a way that is impossible in the “real” world. We set the agenda, and it is based on our want, our need, our taste, our hunger. There is one thing that is guaranteed to magnify our desire, our sense of lack, our need for connection, and that is when we focus on it, to try to satiate it. Desire is an ourobouros – a snake that eats itself.

Online, we ignore those who don’t immediately satiate that need, respond to our joke, reply to our message on a dating site, or like our facebook status update. We can spend an evening interacting like that and by the end of it we’re still on our own. We’ve been mentally stimulated, but emotionally we’ve been in a vacuum. It’s a curious, subtle deprivation. And the only symptom of it is an unease, a restlessness, an anxiety. A tiny alarming sound in the middle of the night.

Along the way I realised there is a story to be told about where older gay people go, because the gay “community” is largely pub- and club-based, which is really not ideal. I believe there are many older LGBT people who feel excluded and isolated.

In the light of President Mary McAleese’s admirable project to encourage old men to feel more included in Irish society, I think we should begin to put our own shop in order, and follow her example as a community. For example, the Irish gay rugby and soccer teams could follow the GAA’s example and reach out to older gay people specifically.

So I am happy to publish this press release here, and can’t wait to see the final product, as I missed it the first time around.

Critically Acclaimed Show Returns!
Silver Stars
Now Auditioning

“Silver Stars”, an innovative song cycle based on stories from older gay Irish men, is now casting.

Performers with passion required.
There are at least 4 central roles and places in the choir. Seniors and first-time performers are especially welcome.

Open casting session will be held on the following day:
Wednesday July 15th; 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Casting Venue: The Abbey Studio (TEAM Building), 4 Marlborough Place, Dublin 1

The Workshops will take place on Monday the 20th and Tuesday the 21st of July.
Times to be confirmed.

Rehearsals: 3 evenings a week from August the 24th through to September the 26th.
Time; 7.00 to 9.30 pm

Songwriter Sean Millar has been gathering stories of honour, exile, spirit, survival and love from older gay Irish men and transforming them into powerful and evocative songs. Theatre innovators Brokentalkers have created settings for each song.

The original run of the show was part of the spring 2009 Bealtaine festival. The show was a great success, playing to full houses every night. This current production is in association with the Abbey Theatre and the Dublin Theatre Festival.

The show will be performed in the Cube at the Project Arts Centre and will run from Tuesday the 29th of September through to Sunday the 4th of October, 2009.
SPREAD THE WORD!!!!!

Important
If you are interested then let us know!
Pre-register your details by emailing us at brokentalkers@gmail.com

It was with high hopes that I went to see Woman and Scarecrow at the Peacock, especially given the mouth-watering cast that included Olwen Fouéré, Barbara Brennan and Bríd Ní Neachtain. Knowing the play was addressing death, I was confident that given Marina’s rich knowledge of myth and loss, I would find myself challenged and disturbed.

Right from the start, one has to cope with the accent, the wogious midlands drone, flat, unrelenting, as dreary as bogland. It alienates, deliberately – and I don’t mean that this Jackeen doesn’t understand or can’t relate to it, I mean that each character is tied by phonetics into a specific geographical area, the bogs east of the Shannon, and by colloquiallisms into a specific time, an Ireland that is long gone. But, because the style is not natural realism, we know this isn’t a story about quirky Tullamore folk from the fifties. Audiences relax when they see and hear the familiar, but the tension created by the contrived nature of Carr’s world can serve to heighten awareness and catch one by surprise with powerful emotions, offering a rich wry perspective on life. When I saw By the Bog of Cats in the West End, with Holly Hunter, I found myself shaken to the core, blasted by a fierce grief, despite having been constantly irritated by Hunter’s inability to master the accent, and, in retrospect, the directorial insistence that it was that specific Offaly brogue or bust. I attributed the power of the piece to the script, and also to Hunter’s emotional commitment to the piece. And it was also wonderfully funny.

Visually, this production is stunning; the set design is by Conor Murphy. It opens with a home movie of the young Woman, a girl in a red coat playing on the seashore, projected onto a scrim; then, as it grinds open, sounding like the gates of Hell, she dances across the stage, one of the most beautiful openings of any show I’ve seen in a long time. There is a wonky bed set high on an indoor snowdrift, and lying langorously in it, there’s the Woman, Olwen Fouéré, dying of spite, bickering with her alter-ego/guardian angel/dream lover/Scarecrow, Barbara Brennan. Death is waiting in the wardrobe, growling, “making a bracelet out of infant ankle bones”. And immediately, we’re right in it. This is quintessential Carr, clever, unapologetic, caustic, pugilistic, absurd, bitter, merciless. We have to figure it all out for ourselves. We must banish all memories of Tom Murphy’s Bailegangáire – an impossible task, really, for Siobhán McKenna’s swansong as the dying bedridden Mommo is still etched in my heart after over twenty years.

Woman and Scarecrow is inhabited by unashamedly one-note characters, as if tightly bound into corsets of wrought iron, squeezing out all sentimentality, maturity, and hope. The message is that life is brutalizing, rancorous and toxic. Compassion is absent. Happiness is baffling, self-awareness brings no relief from twisted complexes. Self-examination is forensic, pathological, in the detached sense of an autopsy report; in Woman and Scarecrow, there is no enthusiasm or life force or joie-de-vivre waiting to be undammed, no redemptive cathartic release is possible, to go pulsing through the heart after the knotted tourniquet of hate is untied. In the Woman’s arteries, after a life spent using up everything she had giving everyone else what they wanted, there is only venom. These characters are already dead, ghosts of themselves. But even the word ghost is grossly inappropriate – ghost comes from the word for spirit, life, breath. Looking for life? Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

Woman asks at one stage “When did it all turn to tragedy, Scarecrow? When did I stop lampooning the world, and why?” In some ways this is Carr speaking – she has given up the ghost in this play, and, casting her cold eye on life, it’s as if she has immersed it in liquid nitrogen with her gaze, and shattered the resulting brittle shapes with an icepick. Woman and Scarecrow is cadaverous. Beckett, in comparison, had a deep rich humour that enabled us to mine existential depths with his characters. Carr’s humour, however, is in her sophisticated wordplay, a barrage of pithy ironic complaints, that gives us no room to catch our breath. By the time death comes in the end, (for of course death comes in the end) and Woman and her Scarecrow/Ghost Mother arrange themselves for us in a posed and dismaying still life portrait, my heart was as cold as marble.

This is an analysis of a failed marriage, a self-sacrificial suffocated woman and a philandering husband, a marriage that was a façade for procreation. A study of the gangrenous effects of a girl losing a mother, herself self-loathing and bitter, too early in life. A portrait of a stifling repressed community. It is a reflection on lives unlived. It is played with bravery and total commitment by all the cast, but the absence of subtext in each character poses severe challenges for even the most talented of actors. In particular, I was struck by Barbara Brennan’s compelling physicality, agile and angular, and Olwen Fouéré’s astonishing capacity to bare all, emotionally as well as physically, always impresses.

The one moment of aching loss that I felt in the evening is not in the script – director Selina Cartmell had Barbara Brennan move hauntingly across the stage, as the Woman is describing to the redoubtable Auntie Ah (Bríd Ní Neachtain) her last memory of her long-dead mother, and in that moment something shifted for me. But it was fleeting, over in an instant, a hint of what might have been.

I left the theatre as bitterly disappointed as the Woman herself, with the confusing relief of leaving a morgue, albeit a strangely beautiful one. Not wanting to say goodbye, because I still hoped in some way that, if I could stay long enough, I would see a flicker of life in the corpse, some flash of recognition, some insight about life that would enrich or comfort me. Like the Woman herself, I had no such luck.

I reviewed this production with Pavel Barter of the Sunday Times on Nadine O’Regan’s show The Kiosk on Phantom FM.