When Handel set off for famine-ravaged Ireland in 1742, with a scandalous singer in tow, his career was at a low ebb and prospects for his new oratorio didn't look good. Dubliners know the rest – and this week they can see his fateful voyage re-enacted on the Liffey, writes ARMINTA WALLACE
IT'S THE spring of 1742. A boat is making its slow, tortuous way up the Liffey into Dublin, carrying an elegant – if somewhat frail – English gentleman, accompanied by two servants and a strikingly handsome woman. Are they on some kind of nefarious economic mission? Or could it be an illicit affair? As it happens, it's neither. It's the composer George Frideric Handel, travelling from London to stage his latest work, an oratorio based on biblical texts, entitled Messiah.
This momentous journey is being re-imagined in a delightfully immediate and vivid way in Fishamble Theatre Company's new production, Handel's Crossing. The play will be performed from Thursday to Sunday this week on board the ship, the Jeanie Johnston, which is docked at Custom House Quay. The production is part of the Dublin Handel Festival, which marks today's 250th anniversary of the composer's death, and an extra frisson of authenticity is added by the fact that the 21st-century audience will arrive, as Handel did, by boat, courtesy of a Liffey River Cruises ferry from Bachelor's Walk.
For contemporary Dubliners, Messiahis something of an institution. For Handel and his small personal retinue, it was more of a Wild West adventure.
“The audience has the benefit of hindsight,” says Jim Culleton of Fishamble, who is directing the production. “We know how well it went, and how successful Messiah has been ever since. But Handel and his two servants, and the singer who has come from London with him to sing the contralto role, Susannah Cibber, are full of apprehension and fear.”
THEY HAD GOOD reason to be worried. Handel was at a very low point in his career. His company, the Royal Opera, had gone bust at the end of the 1720s, leaving him with crushing debts. In 1737 he produced four operas in an attempt to break even, but they all flopped at the box office, rejected by a London public whose taste in music was moving away from the highly self-conscious artifice of Italian opera seria. When the 52-year-old composer himself suffered a stroke and, some say, a nervous breakdown, it looked as though his career was over.
So when the viceroy of Ireland invited Handel to Dublin to produce a charity concert, it represented something of a last throw of the dice for the man who was once the darling of the crowned heads of Europe.
“His servants are at a low ebb as well,” Culleton points out, “because he hasn’t paid them for ages – and one of them is pregnant.”
In his script for Handel's Crossing, playwright and novelist Joseph O'Connor uses this web of tension between the characters to reflect some of the themes of Messiahitself. The play was originally commissioned by Lyric FM, part of a series of radio plays inspired by pieces of music. When the opportunity came, courtesy of Temple Bar Cultural Trust, to rework it with a site-specific setting on the Jeanie Johnston, it was, O'Connor admits, too good a chance to turn down.
"I love Messiah. I always have," he says. "I think it really touches people. It's got this particular mix of brokenness and hope and joy. It's very dramatic and very powerful. And reading accounts of the first performance, that's how people felt on the night.
“Certainly, as a kid growing up in Dublin in the dreary old 1970s, it definitely became a part of my sense of the city – and the city’s past. It was an intimation that there had been another time when things of epoch-making significance had happened in Dublin; that Handel was one of our pantheon of stars. Johnny Giles and Phil Lynott and Synge – and Handel.
“He lived on Abbey Street while he was here, and he thought it ‘a very fine and wonderful thoroughfare’. Every time I walk down Abbey Street I think about Handel’s ghost. It’s nice to think of him haunting the place.”
Handel's Crossingwill offer Dublin audiences an opportunity to take a similarly unusual perspective on the city. Be warned, though: you can't just turn up and expect to get in. Seats must be booked in advance, and because just 48 people can fit on to the Liffey River Cruises boat and therefore attend each performance, the shows are booking out faster than you can say "baroque bonanza".
An unusual perspective on Dublin is, according to Culleton, an integral part of what Fishamble Theatre Company is all about – “taking a playful look at things you might have walked past every day, and never noticed”.
The company has done site-specific work before – notably with the Temple Bar-based show Whereabouts several years ago – but even for Fishamble, staging live theatre on board a docked famine ship has proved to be a challenge. “Working on the boat, you have a ready-made atmosphere,” says Culleton. “But of course there are lots of other distractions. In the theatre, for instance, we have to give a fire announcement at the beginning of a play. For this we were told: ‘No need for that. If anything happens, just do what the crew tells you.’ There are lots of different systems in place that we have to get used to. But we’re learning our aft from our port and all of that.”
The size of the performance space has also made things interesting for the actors, who include Alan Stanford as Handel, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú as Susannah Cibber and, fresh from his stint on Broadway in The Cripple of Inishmaan, Aaron Monaghan as Handel’s servant.
“The ship looks quite big from the dock, but it’s quite small inside,” says Culleton. “But if anyone complains about being cramped, just think: in famine times, the Jeanie Johnston took 250 people. And we’re worried about how we can fit 50 people in.”
For O’Connor, who set his hugely successful novel Star of the Sea on a famine ship, the history of the Jeanie Johnston plays a major role in the drama.
“One of the things the play deals with is that the year before the world premiere of the Messiah, there has been a really disastrous famine in Ireland, which most people don’t know that much about – but it was at least as bad as the great Famine of the 1840s,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of people had died. So the world of Messiah is a very dangerous place. It’s full of perils, spiritual and physical. That’s the space that it comes out of.”
FOR THE MODERN Handelian, used to Messiah'scosy respectability, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that in its day the work was highly controversial, even notorious. Handel's contralto, Susannah Cibber, had been at the centre of a major sex scandal in London. Her husband Thomas, the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, had rented her charms to some of his debtors, charged others to watch her through a hole in the wall – and then accused her of adultery and divorced her.
Meanwhile, Handel’s choice of biblical texts for a work that was destined to be performed outside an ecclesiastical setting – in the music hall in Fishamble Street – caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the religious hierarchy of the time, among them the Dean of St Patrick’s, Jonathan Swift.
“Handel saw it as a show,” says O’Connor. “And he had an eye on the box office. Susannah Cibber was certainly a great contralto, but I think that casting her was partly Handel realising that people would be willing to come and pay to have a look at this woman, who was – in some ways – almost like a Monica Lewinsky figure.”
It didn’t do any harm in terms of box-office receipts, either, that Handel claimed to have written the oratorio in three feverish weeks the previous year. Into the bargain, he claimed to have seen the face of God.
“I think he liked the idea that it was divinely inspired and that he just wrote it down,” O’Connor says. “But he did show extraordinary generosity in giving all the money from the first performance to charity. It’s a great story. The music comes out of desperation, and the play is about that – about hope out of desperation.”
Messiah may be a couple of centuries old, but there surely couldn’t be a more relevant message for our times.
Thursday’s performance of Handel’s Crossing is sold out. Three additional performances at 7pm on Fri, Sat and Sun have now been scheduled and are selling fast. For ticket information, contact Temple Bar Cultural Information Centre on 01-8883610
