by Saoirse Anton

As I sit bundled up in several woolly layers at my desk, looking out over the snowy landscape, I have to admit that my mind is completely blank. Perhaps the vast expanse of uniformly white snow in front of me has exacerbated the blank-page syndrome that had begun to set in earlier this week. Perhaps my brain is too cold to think. Perhaps I should just get on with it and write this column…

Whatever the reason for my spending too long staring out at the blank page of snow before me, the flurries of white drifting past the window as I looked out instead of writing set me thinking about the final lines of James Joyce’s story The Dead.

“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

How many people in the hundred an ten years since those lines were written have thought of them as winter blankets the world around them in snow? How many times have they been quoted with puffs of frosty dragon breaths on snowy walks?

There’s something about snow that brings a timeless quality, more so than any other weather, snow brings a sense of the past closer to the present. So in searching for something to write about, I turned to the past in my shelves of old theatre books, perusing collections of journals and writings of Bernard Shaw, Tyrone Guthrie, Lady Gregory and more. In doing so, I found an entry in Lady Gregory’s diary that made me realise I had already had the idea for this column, I just needed the key to unlock it. In an entry from the 25th of November 1928, Gregory wrote about “Poor old Frank (Dalton, an attendant) shivering in the hall” at the Abbey Theatre. She writes that she “he is to sit in the dressing-room upstairs where there is a fire or we’ll have a fire lighted in the hall […] we mustn’t let the old man freeze.” Thinking of someone sitting in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre on a chilly November evening ninety-six years ago I realised that theatre, much like snow, also brings the past closer to the present.

In her diaries, Lady Gregory writes about a 1928 production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, saying “It struck me as wonderful that a play Queen Elizabeth had seen should still be so alive, so emotional,” and in a few months the same play will grace the stage of the Gate Theatre almost a hundred years on again. As you sit in your seat watching Ballet Ireland’s Nutcracker Sweeties, think of how many people have, just like you, wrapped up in their coats and braved the chilly winter weather for a festive evening at the ballet since The Nutcracker premiered in 1892. And while you shiver at the ghostly tale of A Christmas Carol at the Viking Theatre Clontarf, cast your mind back to all of the many adaptations that have been made of Dickens’ classic novel, from silliness of the The Muppets to the worthiness of a reading of the novel by the actor Seth Bancroft in 1896 to raise money for hostpitals, about which George Bernard Shaw writes an unflinchingly scathing column, Mr. Bancroft’s Pilgrimage, on the 19th December 1896. Not only have people watched theatre across the generations, but columnists have written about it too!

Look out at the snow, look upon the stage, page or screen, and think of all the stories that have gone before yours, all the stories that have survived and been revived, and the stories that will still be held in flurries of snow and pages of plays decades and centuries from now.