The year at BAM draws to an aptly titled close this week with
All That Fall,
a darkly comic radio piece from legendary Irish playwright Samuel
Beckett. This production from Dublin group Pan Pan Theatre Company seats
audience members in their own personal rocking chairs—a staging that
seemed to call for some context. And lucky for you, dear blogophiles, we
traipsed the rolling hills of eastern Ireland to find you just the man
for the job.
Charles Shackleton hails from Dublin, and is a master craftsman of
handmade furniture—not to mention a champion crumpeteer, a devotee of
Irish oats, a fountain pen enthusiast, and a descendant of Antarctic
explorer Ernest Shackleton. He currently resides in Woodstock, Vermont,
where he and his master-potter wife Miranda Thomas own and operate
ShackletonThomas fine handmade furniture and pottery (visit their
website
here for more
info and to ogle some gorgeous goods). We managed to pin Charlie down in
between crumpet competitions to ask his expert opinion on the
significance of the rocking chair. Here, for your enjoyment and
erudition, his musings.
IRISH SIGNIFICANCE
In Ireland, the rocking chair is most often associated with babies and
grandparents—often the latter knitting for the former, keeping an eye
out whilst the parents were out working and doing chores. The rocking
chair makes one think of the
settle* and the open fire, perhaps with bread in the
bastible* in the background.
Perhaps the rocking chair itself was the soothing device that allowed
the young and old, at the entrance and exit doors of life, to feel some
sense of peace and comfort—an ease that was not afforded to the younger
and middle hard-working stages of life.
The slow rocking beat resonating with the pulse of the human heart makes
the rocking chair one of the most anthropomorphic of objects. There is
always a sense of timelessness and serenity associated with it, a
feeling which belies the hard life and strife of the beautiful but raw
Irish west, and the harsh economic and physical conditions associated
with that region in particular.