In Jimmy McAleavey's new play Static, a veteran astronaut in space and a lonely amateur radio operator in Donegal find each other by chance in the most unusual way.
Coming to the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre this June, Jimmy introduces Static below...
As far as I remember – it was more than 30 years ago and drink had been taken – I was on holiday outside Clonbur on the Mayo-Galway border. I picked up the paper in Burke's pub and read a brief story on how a man in Donegal had contacted a lone cosmonaut on the Mir space station. This was pre-internet, pre-mobile phones, and that kind of communication seemed miraculous at the time.
If I've got this right, the guy in Donegal had to break the news to the cosmonaut that the Soviet Union had collapsed. And I think the cosmonaut was stranded up there and there was the prospect that he might die.
There was something about the story that lodged in my mind — something about the huge distance between them yet the intimacy of radio communication, something about them being very different people but being similarly isolated, something about things being both very far away and very intimate. The story has been orbiting my brain for years, occasionally breaking through all the static.
In the end the play is about communication. It takes the whole of the play for these men to really speak. And that's all they really needed.
I'm hazy on the true details because that was all I wanted to know. I avoided the true story subsequently (there was a short film made about the story, Mir Friends, which I deliberately didn't watch even though everyone said it was great), and wrote a play based on the idea (I made the cosmonaut an astronaut for a start), then a radio play, then re-wrote the stage play during the Covid pandemic.
It wasn’t that I was unusually isolated at the time; it was that a lot of people were experiencing isolation for the first time and talking about it. I live in a reasonably remote place and I have a job where I spend most of my time on my own. Like most writers, most of your emails go unanswered and the world doesn’t have much use for you except now and then. I’m not complaining (I am a bit); I chose this life (sort of). And everyone was bemoaning the situation and I was going: welcome to my world. And they were saying how tragic it all was and I was saying to myself: 'is it? Oh God, maybe it is.’
I suppose that’s why I was drawn back to these two isolated characters. And the astronaut is retiring. I think a lot about retirement, even though it’s years away and my job will probably retire from me rather than the right way round. What I think about when I think about retirement is how people, particularly men, cope with the loss of meaning and purpose and their rejection by a world that has no further use for them. I hate stereotyping but I don’t see this in women friends who have retired: they have mystical experiences wild swimming then have lunch with their friends and plan their next city break. Their husbands are at home bouncing off the walls in rage and despair.
But in the end the play is about communication. It takes the whole of the play for these men to really speak. And that’s all they really needed. To get back to writing plays unfortunately, that’s what it’s about, maybe. To be heard. For someone in the audience to say inside themselves, as the playwright David Edgar put it, ‘you too?’. Yet this is the answer you can never hear. Maybe in the end, perversely, it’s about having the last word.
Static is on the Peacock Stage at the Abbey Theatre from 20th June – 18th July - find out more here
