The Rose Tattoo: ‘There will be women in the audience cringing that these things are even talked about’

Its Irish claim to fame seems to belong to another planet. In 1957 the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo opened the first Dublin Theatre Festival to great acclaim. The script has a condom fall from a character’s pocket, causing consternation. Contraception was illegal in Ireland at the time, and condoms difficult to source, so the actors performing the play at the tiny Pike Theatre instead mimed the dropped condom.

Scandal erupted. Alan Simpson, who had founded the theatre a few years earlier with his wife, Carolyn Swift, was arrested and charged with “producing for gain an indecent and profane performance”. The case never went to trial but it bankrupted the couple and ended their marriage. It “destroyed us”, Swift (who became The Irish Times’ dance critic in 1979) said later.

It’s an Ireland inconceivable today: quaint, almost, but undeniably repressive.

Condom furore aside, the play, which was first staged in 1950 and is set in an Italian-American community, presents a dilemma: how do you keep it relevant in contemporary Ireland? Vanessa Fielding’s new production, at the Complex arts centre in Dublin’s north inner city, has made an adroit and inspired shift: she and Catherine Joyce have set The Rose Tattoo in a modern Irish Traveller context.

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“The impositions and the characters’ confines didn’t stand up in today’s liberal Ireland,” Fielding says, but “certain things about the play just made complete sense” if you changed the setting. The condom incident, for example, “would have a degree of offensiveness for Travellers”, a community where people have traditionally married young and not had sex before marriage.

The Rose Tattoo explores female emotional and sexual awakening within a confined community, following the death of the central character’s husband, who had been unfaithful, and as their teenage daughter comes of age. The play evokes an Ireland past, when roles were more restricted and religion was dominant.

During a break in rehearsals, Fielding and some of the cast of Traveller and non-Traveller actors – Denise McCormack, Christine Collins, Lloyd Cooney – talk about how the play’s Italian community on the periphery echoes that of Travellers. McCormack, who plays the central character, Sara, says it is “a very claustrophobic community where there’s all eyes on her. Everyone’s watching”. On a halting site: “You can see in everyone’s window.”

Collins, who is a Traveller, plays Estelle, the dead husband’s lover (and has performed since she was six weeks old: she played Blackie’s daughter in Glenroe for 12 years). “This translation coincides with reality and not fiction,” she says. What’s familiar? “My life. I recognise it all. The pressure on Traveller women to be and act a certain way would be very formidable.”

The play references sexuality outside marriage. “Obviously there’s things that happen in natural life, but they’re not things that are talked about. The play challenges these things. It doesn’t matter what culture you come from: people make mistakes; they’re human. That’s what I love about the play. Sara’s sexuality, her spirituality, the spirituality of the strega [or wise woman]: they’re all very real things. I can relate them to actual people in my life. They’re not fiction. Inside my culture these people exist.”

Grief, sexuality, love, how you raise your kids: it’s all supposed to be done a certain way in the Traveller community. So breaking it almost condemns you automatically

Even before a whiff of romance, the widowed Sara “is acting very sporadically through grief. But people are trying to rein her in, because she’s almost too out there, and in the eyes of people watching she’s giving them too much to talk about. In our culture a woman that’s grieving is still supposed to act like a lady. So at a funeral, yeah, cry and sob, but don’t be overly exerted or dramatic,” Collins says. “Grief, sexuality, love, how you raise your kids: it’s all supposed to be done a certain way in our community. So breaking it, or acting outside of it, almost condemns you automatically.”

Fielding agrees, saying Sara is “an emotional person. When she loses her husband there’s a lot at stake”. There are mental health challenges, a loss of identity. “She doesn’t know where she belongs,” as a widow. “It’s difficult to accept your future is likely to be a lonely one.”

McCormack says the conflicts are “reflected in her relationship with her daughter as well. That’s really strong in the Traveller community, how she doesn’t want her daughter to be with a man before they’re married. The mother is trying to guide her daughter away from maybe mistakes she made, because she married a settled man.” The play looks at mental health, and how people are restricted because of what other people will think or say. “Freedom is a big thing in the play. Freedom of choice and will, being able to make your own decisions.”

Fielding and Joyce describe their production as a translation because much of the original was in Italian. There’s some Cant, and they have altered place and character names. Smithfield horse market figures; a casino becomes a bookmaker’s; a New Orleans hotel becomes the nearby Cobblestone pub. Permission from Tennessee Williams’s estate was “an endorsement”, as it is stringent about changes. (Fielding recalls working on The Glass Menagerie in the West End: “They had costume approval.”)

Lloyd Cooney, who plays Al, Sara’s love interest, grew up in Henrietta House, “the flats behind the big houses” nearby, and there’s a “buzz building already for everybody in the community to see the play that’s coming to the markets”. He sees similarities with growing up on a campsite: “The two big blocks of flats that look in at each other, with a communal pram shed. Everything that Christine does be talking about, I recognise from where I grew up. If there’s murder in the flats everybody’s out on the balcony, everybody’s looking at each other, knowing everyone’s business.”

Collins thinks the play “will be a very big eye-opener for Traveller men and women. It is very authentic but very delicate but very raw all at the one time. I know there will be Traveller women sitting in that audience and they will be cringing these things are even talked about.”

If your brother’s living next door and your sister’s living next door and your auntie and uncle are on the same site, how do you live your own life with that kind of invasion or intrusion?

While condoms long ago lost shock value in wider society, “even right now it’d be a major thing in the Traveller community”, Collins says. “If a Traveller girl was around a boy and a condom fell out of his pocket she’d have a heart attack. If she knew what it was. Because there’s all possibilities she’d be absolutely oblivious to what it was.”

Talking later to Joyce, Fielding’s co-translator, she agrees it would still cause a stir, but “there’s differences within the Traveller community. We’re not a homogenous group. I can’t generalise. But when we look at the story in its entirety, and at the Traveller community as a whole, we’re still, in terms of development and the pace of society, probably 20 years behind society in general. Because the traditions and the customs and the belief value system are very insular to our community, and they’ve been retained for longer.”

She hopes Travellers will see the show and “forget about what’s morally correct or incorrect and see the entertainment value”.

Joyce, a human-rights activist and manager at Blanchardstown Traveller Development Group, didn’t want this to be “another typical old Traveller story, based in the past, based in tradition. It needed to be a contemporary piece of work. We didn’t set out to be a representation of the whole Traveller community because that wouldn’t be possible, in a lifetime’s work.”

She brought Fielding and some of the non-Traveller actors for “a glimpse into what it’s like to live in a Traveller site, so they will be absolutely able to play those parts with an understanding of what it’s like to live surrounded with your own community, and with expectations about certain kinds of things you can get away with, and you can’t do, on a site – particularly if your brother’s living next door and your sister’s living next door and your auntie and uncle are on the same site. So how do you live your own life, on a site with that kind of invasion or intrusion?”

Today there are gay, lesbian, transgender Travellers. Divorce is a bit more prevalent; marriage into non-members of the Traveller community is becoming more the reality

Joyce continues: “So you have somebody like Sara in this, married to a settled person, living on the site, who’s losing the plot in relation to her place in society but then struggling with the dilemma of bringing up her own daughter, and how she’s in some ways hypocritical when she’s trying to be strict on the daughter.”

Twenty years ago a character like Sara “probably wouldn’t exist, or she wouldn’t be visible” among Travellers. Today there are “gay, lesbian, transgender Travellers. Divorce is a bit more prevalent; marriage into non-members of the Traveller community is becoming more the reality.” But while younger Travellers, especially, mix outside their community, in school and at work, “Travellers are still very much socialised within their own extended family: weddings, funerals, christenings.”

“Both of the central women face decisions that perhaps wouldn’t be common in the Traveller community. The play looks at the choices they make and at women’s rights,” Fielding says.

“This challenges Traveller women. A strong woman who has her wall up, it will challenge her femininity and her strength, to be themselves regardless of their culture or identity,” Collins says.

But there’s a universality, too, Fielding says: “We all have our judgments and expectations of the way we should behave, and when we don’t, there’s consequences. It’s about us all. And when we face a decision about going off with a fella we’ve just met, to change our lives, it’s a big choice.”

The Rose Tattoo opens at the Complex, Dublin 7, on Thursday, May 11th, with previews on May 9th and 10th; it runs until Saturday, May 20th