Island playwright edges closer to the Fringe

One-man show I Am Martin Sharry explores family life on Inis Oírr,says Richard Fitzpatrick

FOR a short period, Martin Sharry lived in a house with his uncle and grandfather on Inis Oírr, one of the Aran Islands. The three generations shared the same name, inspiring his one-man show, I Am Martin Sharry, an enthralling examination of family, depression and island life, which opens next week as part of the Absolut Fringe festival in Dublin.

Sharry, born in 1979, was six years of age. His uncle only emerged from his bedroom to eat or to use the toilet. He had the same meal each day at midday — Spam, processed cheese, bread and tea. His hair was plastered back with shoe polish. He was wall-eyed — one eye towards the flames of their fire, the other towards a window. He’d sit, chain-smoking, blowing rings into the corner of the ceiling.

“I was inspired by that memory of just seeing my uncle gazing out into space through the window,” says Sharry.

“That kind of stayed with me. I used to scribble that image when I was doodling. I was interested in investigating why I was doing that, automatically, unconsciously almost. I didn’t want to analyse it directly, but I wanted to find a way into exploring it that wasn’t conceited, that was autobiographical, but wasn’t autobiographical at the same time.”

His uncle’s listlessness stays with you from the play. Medication dulled his senses. He hardly had the energy to bat away flies. His family and the islanders skirted around his illness.

“There was a touchiness,” says Sharry. “They would have been careful, describing him as ‘having problems’, that ‘he couldn’t help it,’ in neutral language like that. They didn’t have the terminology at the time. He would have been diagnosed as having some version of manic depression, but that’s only my interpretation. That’s part of it — it was never explicitly spoken about.”

Sharry tackles it head on in his play, however, mentioning a visit to St Bridid’s hospital in Ballinasloe when his uncle was there. “I remained in the car,” his character says. “It was all phoney. We were happier he was away. Not living in the same house as us.”

Neither is Sharry slow to tackle his own depression, which he evokes lyrically, particularly in one long, witty passage towards the play’s conclusion. He describes himself as a dreamer, “a proper spacer”, prone to “addiction-thinking” and rages of frustration.

His grandfather, or Dado as he was called, looms large. He was born in 1901, and died in 1986, just as electricity was installed in their house, a development he supervised, “breathing over the ESB man as he installed the switchboard. Suspicious of the witchcraft.”

Dado left the island in 1920, emigrating to the United States, but returned in 1932 as the Great Depression took hold, and was married shortly after to another islander. They used to call him ‘the Yank’ on the island, for his “béarla”. The story goes that when he once greeted some island children in English, they giggled at him. He turned on them: “You’re laughing at your own ignorance.”

Sharry says there was “a fierceness” about him. Nobody dared sit in Dado’s chair and there would be uproar if Sharry, or one of his two younger brothers, entered the house by the wrong door. It depended on rules he didn’t understand, which, at the time, he put down to the language barrier, but now he’s not so sure. “There was something to do with the north wind,” he says, “and exits and entrances, to wait for someone to take away whatever curse was brought inside.”

Superstition doesn’t have the hold on the islanders that it once had. The art of gathering — of calling on each other’s houses for nights of story-telling and the transmission of news — has also passed away, says Sharry, who still lives in the house his grandfather built 80 years ago. However, he mentions one incident in the play that is like something straight out of JM Synge’s Riders to the Sea. A woman was washed out to sea while picking periwinkles. Her dead body was kept afloat on her bloated petticoats, bobbing between Inis Oírr and Inis Meáin, but nobody dared haul in her corpse.

“There would have been a taboo about dead bodies — not to touch them once they were claimed by the sea, that they belonged to the sea,” says Sharry. “It was kind of practical, of its time. I’m guessing that it would have been dangerous to retrieve bodies.”

* I Am Martin Sharry is at Smock Alley, 8.30pm, Tuesday, Sept 18 — Saturday, Sept 22. www.fringefest.com