Giving voice to memories of the golden oldies

Efforts to find the oldest woman in Limerick have resulted in an opera, writes Colette Sheridan

A QUEST to find the oldest woman in Limerick sounds like an unlikely subject for an opera but writer and director, John McIlduff, was commissioned to do just that as part of the ‘Made in Limerick’ strand of Limerick City of Culture.

McIlduff worked alongside his creative collaborator, composer Brian Irvine, in a venture that aims to involve the experiences and reflections of as many old people as possible. These will be sung by five professional opera singers who narrate the stories that unfolded when researcher Maria Larkin spoke to the women.

The project was sparked by the desire to go deep into the city, says McIlduff. “We wanted to meet people along the way and we were conscious of wanting to tell a historical story but from a different point of view. So we came up with the idea of a quest. We decided we weren’t going to write the opera in a traditional way. On day one, we let what happened happen.”

While asking up to 100 individuals for the identity of the oldest woman in the city, the venture had a domino effect. “We met lots of people along the way and collected information. Maria interviewed and recorded people. We were looking for a slant on history and different stories. It wasn’t going to be about old men with beards and historical moments. We were looking for the small stories from women, talking about what happened in their lives. We built all that into a gigantic song for the first act of the opera. The second half is us telling the story of who we think is the oldest woman in Limerick.”

Instead of using an official data base to identify the oldest woman in Limerick, McIlduff and his team were directed to a nun, Sr Anthony, who is 104 years old. She was born in Tipperary but spent most of her life in Italy, working as a nurse in hospitals in Rome and Florence. She now lives in a nursing home in Milford.

For the opera, transcripts of what Sr Anthony said while being interviewed about her life, will be read out. “She spoke very happily about her time in Rome and said she met six Popes. She met the king of Afghanistan who gave her a gold coin. She recalled seeing Hitler and Mussolini pass by her convent in a jeep in 1938.”

Not everyone interviewed had such gems to relate but aspects of about 30 women’s testimonies are used in the opera. The aim “is to try and build a genuine piece of art through a network of people and places”.

Ageism is rife in our society that prefers to worship at the altar of youth and beauty rather than celebrate the wisdom of elderly people. “In the context of Ireland and Western Europe, older people are being pushed more and more to the side. But age shouldn’t matter. What matters is participation and enthusiasm.”

Belfast-born, Paris-based McIlduff, says working in the arts is tricky as one gets older.”I’m just over 40. It’s complicated being an artist. When you start off young, you have all sorts of ideas which you try and make happen. But little by little, it’s extremely hard to make a living from the arts. So less people get to do it. By the time you’re 60 or 70 or 80, there’s not many people of that age that are still practising artists.”

Part of the wider goal of The Oldest Woman in Limerick is to deal with the invisibility of older people. “This interesting sounding opera hopes to engage and entertain audiences, “reflecting a great range of emotions and celebrating the life-affirming joy of the human voice.”

• The Oldest Woman in Limerick is at the Lime Tree Theatre, Mary Immaculate College, in Limerick, from December 12-13.