Featuring a tour-de-force performance of Tom Fool by Frankie McCafferty, who now directs this student showcase. 

Woods’ play is set along the Fermanagh-Leitrim border, capturing the “tale-end” of a folk tradition of mummers that survives and thrives in this remote rural region. Supposedly imported to Ireland from England, mummer plays were adapted to accommodate local characters and colours, which along with a wider vestigial tradition of wren boys, biddy boys and straw boys, constitute a vivid folk tradition of Irish theatre that has for too long been ignored by theatre scholars and practitioners, who have relegated this fascinating theatrical practice to the fields of folklore and ethnography.   

For this play, Vincent Woods leans into his childhood memories of the mummers to place this vital performance culture from the liminal borderlands of Leitrim and Fermanagh centre-stage as he tells the story of sectarian divisions and suspicions between erstwhile neighbours that spills down through the generations in a grotesque cycle of violence. At the Black Pig's Dyke adopts the ritualised cycle of ceremonial battles between Cromwell and St Patrick dramatized in stock mummers’ plays to critique the Troubles’ seemingly endless cycle of killings, so that the masked identities of the mummers in their strange straw masks as they invite themselves into isolated rural households to enact their bloody feuds, becomes a malevolent metaphor for the culture of “neighbourly murder” that characterised the conflict in these remote border areas.  

At the Black Pig’s Dyke is a border play in more than one sense, for not only is it geographically located in the shadowy borderlands of rumour and ragwort separating two political states on this island, but it plays with the porous borders between past and present, myth and modernity, history and memory, to expose those other invidious borders - both personal and political – that act as barriers between rural communities and endure today, even as the actual physical border of partition becomes increasingly less visible... 

Woods’ play was a watershed moment in Irish theatre history. It toured internationally to London, Glasgow, Toronto and Sydney. Its stunning theatricality, utilising ancient folk forms of performance, ironically helped theatre break free from the stranglehold  social realism long held over the Irish stage, just as it helped liberate Irish theatrical practice from its ‘literary’ tradition harkening back to the founding of the Abbey Theatre. It elevated instead the creative force of actors, action, and images in a frenetic kinetic production that pioneered the way for future generations of theatre makers to explore the physical, aural, and visual languages of the stage. 

The staged reading / workshop production will take place on the 26th and 27th March.  

All are welcome.