After our successful production of The Holy Ground two years ago, this is our second production of a play by Dublin playwright, novelist, poet, editor and publisher Dermot Bolger.
Now in its fifteenth year, the Tübingen Anglo-Irish Theatre Group has produced over 60 Irish plays, old and new - but it has always been a particular thrill to be associated with new writers and their work.
In High Germany is a piece, premiered in Dublin in 1990, which is set during the 1988 European Football Championships in Germany.
Eoin is a Dubliner who now lives in Hamburg, but who has played football and followed the fortunes of the Irish team long before it became fashionable in the wave of football-fever caused by the success of "Jack's Army".
Dreams came true when the Irish team not only make it to the Finals, but in their first match, Stuttgart, 12 June 1988, beat England 1:0, the first victory over the "motherland of football" since the late forties.
I was in Stuttgart for that memorable occasion.
12,000 Irish supporters, 8,000 English fans, a great atmosphere, and the thrilling moment when Ray Houghton scored after 6 minutes.
The nerve-wrecking rest of the game, England attacking, Ireland defending and clinging on to that totally unexpected victory.
The rest is history: Italy in 1990 and the US in 1994 would be the next stages for Jack and the lads.
In 1990, I was traveling in Ireland during the World Cup, and saw Germany beat Argentina on a big screen in Adare. It was amazing to note how soccer had by now found its way to the hearths and hearts of local pubs and local folk all over Ireland; even in remotest Donegal the icons of "the boys in green" were displayed prominently above bar counters and in shop windows. Even in Belfast's Shankill Road, it was reported, hard Unionist attitudes softened somewhat towards the Irish team.
| Eoin . . . . . |
Dave Hegarty |
| Director . . . . . |
Eberhard Bort |
| Assistant Directors . . . . . |
Isolde Reutter & Claudia Reicherter |
| Stage . . . . . |
Claudia Reicherter |
| Programme Text . . . . . |
Eberhard Bort |
| Poster . . . . . |
Dave Hegarty |
| Front of House Organisation . . . . . |
Sibylle Metzger |
Eoin, Dermot Bolger's expatriate Irish fan, is one of the thousands who have left Ireland in search of work, and have found a new way of living, in Europe.
For him the 1988 campaign is something special.
Ireland, "after years of attempting to qualify for a major competition," as Mary Hunt wrote in 1989, was "about to embark on the biggest assignment it ... ever faced".
But it is not only this that makes the days of Stuttgart, Hannover and Gelsenkirchen an important period of his life.
It is - as with the football team - also an end and a beginning.
It is the last time that the lads, Eoin, Mick and Shane, will share their football enthusiasm.
It is a farewell to youth, a coming to grips with life in Germany, with the prospect of a family in Hamburg.
What the lads on the pitch have done for him, and for all exiles (as an exiles' team) is to give him, a new sense of dignity, of respect and of self-esteem.
Going through the experience of those three matches, Eoin seems able, for the first time in his life, to define his own identity, to redefine and relocate his sense of "Irishness".
The scattered Ireland of the diaspora is transformed by the performance of a team they can fully identify with - the Irish diaspora paralleled in an international Irish football team!
It is after Gelsenkirchen, on the platform of Altona railway station in Hamburg, that we encounter Eoin, pausing and summing up a last time, making sense of his experience, before he can step on into a new future.
Gaelic football is a superb sport, but it is not a game of the streets, with its high balls and points scored over the crossbar. It is not a game for coats piled to make goal posts and for balls to be kept out of gardens. And more importantly, because we were ordered to play it, because certain teachers went into fits of rage to see a football headed, it could never have the mystique which soccer built up in our minds.
Soccer was our game, our secret language, played with one eye perpetually on the look-out for a figure of authority to come running. These days it is hard to reconcile that street world of twenty years ago with a country where every young child is togged out in the latest ever changing football strip which their parents have been ripped off into being forced to buy, where one cannot switch on a radio without hearing Big Jack or one of his squad plugging some new product. Soccer today in Ireland is big b usiness, employers bend their working hours around international matches, players are rushed from one function to the next.
And today people get touchy to be reminded that twenty years ago a young schoolboy called Liam Brady, who was shortly to become Ireland's greatest ever footballer, was expelled from school for playing an international soccer match for the Irish Schoolboy team instead of a routine Gaelic game for his school.
It seems a long way from the Tramway End of Dalymount Park where I stood as a youth and then a young(er) man to shout and scream at successive Irish football teams who came so close but never succeeded in qualifying for anything; from those days when victory in an international friendly was something to be celebrated for months; when the banjo playing of that midfield tiger, Ray Tracy, was the highlight of the dressing room celebrations after any game; and on away trips one was quite likely to meet a f ew of the players on the skite through some red light district later that night.
And soccer was still largely our game, the young trinity of Brady, O'Leary and Stapleton, who held that team together were working class Northside Dubliners, as was the player and manager who did most to shape Ireland into a professional team, John Giles. We understood Ray Tracy and Paddy Mulligan and Don Givens, the Eamon Dunphys and Terry Conroys, knew the paths their lives had taken, could identify with them and see part of our own lives being played out under those floodlights.
And as we finished school and found our first jobs, emigration was a word from the past, dusty black and white postcards of aunts and uncles whose children had foreign accents and whom we regarded as foreign. It was a shock to our cosy world when Steve Highway declared for Ireland, and then that Cockney Terry Mancini, odd accents shouting among the familiar ones that had grown up on the streets around us.
The genesis of In High Germany (apart from, quite obviously, my experience in Germany during 1988) was standing outside a stadium in Denmark in 1984 talking to three Kerrymen with accents so thick I could hardly understand what they were saying and gradually understanding that the bus they kept referring to having been arriving on had come, not from Tralee but from Munich; of seeing at first hand a new Ireland in exile forming, emigration ceasing to be a word from the past and becoming instead a sudden mundane and expected part of Irish life again; of realising it had not stopped with my generation, that we had just been a brief stutter in the system which has since exploded again over the past decade.
Euro 88 in Germany was the start of the years of glory for Irish soccer, but it was also the end for players like Stapleton who were suddenly old and made us old with them. There was a new guard coming on, a new mirage of voices on the pitch, Scottish, London and Liverpool mixed among those of from Dublin and Cork. This mixture of accents echoed the accents of the followers on the terraces and the accents that their children and grandchildren would speak with.
The Irish nation today has overspilled its borders, the Irish experience today is as much of life in Boston and London as Limerick and Kerry. And perhaps that is why the Irish soccer team has proved such a central and unifying force, perhaps it is the only body which (inadvertently and while simply getting on with playing a game) has come to represent the full diversity of what we are today.
In High Germany was written about and for a new generation of Irish people living abroad. That is why it gives me such enormous pleasure to see this new production opening in Tyneside and then having its first ever production in Germany itself. I owe a great debt to everyone involved, and wish them every success.
Dermot Bolger
Dublin, Oct. 1995