It is truly an honour for me to have my play The Seafarer produced in Japan. Ireland and Japan are both island nations on the edge of a wide ocean. Perhaps, because of this, we have both lived with a sense of the ‘beyond’ for thousands of years and it explains why both countries are very spiritual.

For as long as I can remember I’ve always had an interest in Irish folklore. When I was a small child my grandfather would tell us wondrous stories about the fairies that populated the countryside. He lived down a little lane beside fields and a river in Co Leitrim, just outside the picturesque village of Jamestown. Beside his little house was an overgrown wood full of Hawthorn trees. This was a fairy fort. No-one would cut into it or chop it down. A roadway had been proposed to run through there one time but the plans had been changed. To this day that fairy fort stands peacefully at the banks of the Shannon which I always think of as such a dark, cold river.

My Grandad told me about the hunchback, McFadden, who had been walking along by the fairy fort in the dead of night. He heard beautiful music and decided to investigate. He poked his head into the fort and witnessed a party at the court of the fairy king and queen. He was invited to join them and he danced and enjoyed himself until morning. When he woke the next day his hump was gone. He took the fairies good nature for granted however. When McFadden went back to ask for more favours, the fairies grew enraged and threw him out – with two humps to labour under.

The countryside was alive with fairy lore for me as a child. The fairies had a fickleness reminiscent of the most irrational human jealousies and grudges. There was a darkness in their heart that we could never understand – in the heart of nature itself.

One old story suggests that the fairies are fallen angels, cast out with the devil after the fall of man. I think this interpretation is an echo from a time when Christianity struggled with paganism in Ireland. Pagan Ireland bore a sophistication it receives little credit for nowadays. Our Neolithic monuments, such as Newgrange, Nowth and Dowth, are proof that Irish stone-age farmers sought to locate our place in the cosmos. Scholars still argue about their exact significance. Some say they are burial chambers – portals to another world – others that they are part of a giant celestial calendar etched into the very terrain. What is undeniable is that the people who built them were mathematicians and astronomers. What is jaw dropping is that Newgrange dates from 3,300 BC – centuries before the Egyptian pyramids which are similarly astronomically aligned.

That we know so little about our Irish Neolithic ancestors indicates that the vast bulk of our history has been lost. So much experience and wisdom seems bound up in the beautiful symbolism of the winter solstice dawn lighting the tomb at Newgrange. For Irish people it feels like something we already know yet can never quite remember fully.

I think that Christianity (and particularly Catholicism) took root so well in Ireland because we are a superstitious race. Our superstition is embedded in ancient knowledge and rituals which echo dimly through time but always catch our ear. The old gods of nature slipped behind the landscape to become the fairies of lore. The Winter Solstice, a time of hope, renewal and the end of the dark winter, became Christmas. And an element of nature itself, with its non-negotiable relentless cycle of change, became Satan, the son of the morning.

I first heard the story of the Hellfire Club as a young boy. This story concerns an eighteenth century ruin in the Wicklow mountains where young landowning aristocrats would carouse and gamble. One stormy night, the Hellfire members were having a game of poker at their remote den when a stranger arrived at the door seeking shelter. The stranger was brought inside and invited to join the card-players. One of the players dropped a card on the floor and when they bent to retrieve it they noticed with horror that the stranger had cloven hoofs instead of feet. With this discovery, the stranger disappeared in a thunderclap – for he was really the devil. While this is an intriguing story, I always found it mildly disappointing as it seemed to end just as the scene was set.

When I was writing The Seafarer, one of the things I wanted to do was bring this story to a satisfying conclusion. And of course, that’s the great thing about folk stories. Each teller makes the story their own through their peculiar embellishments and omissions. Yet somewhere at the core of the folk story lives a deeper truth that can never change. It may be articulated in many ways, but usually we are reminded that to be human and alive in the world is to yearn for understanding and comfort. We struggle through our lives encountering confusion and conflict, but sometimes, perhaps when we’re not even thinking about it, we intuit that we are part of everything that exists.

This feeling of being alive and conscious in an unknowable universe is something we can’t even put into words. We can only represent it through art. This is the human dialogue with Nature. At the ancient standing stones out on the Renvyle Peninsula, at the passage tombs of Fourknocks, Dowth, Knowth and Newgrange – at hundreds of Neolithic sites all over Ireland – the struggle to articulate this feeling is preserved.

The struggle continues.

Conor McPherson