Play Details
Context
Artistic Director
Max Stafford-Clark
Part Of
Young Writers’ Festival
Dates Performed
Tuesday 13th March 1984
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Play Details
Synopsis
A rural Irish farmhouse and its surrounding landscape, where past and present collide.
Margaret, a young English student, arrives in rural Ireland to work on a farm for the summer before starting university. As she adjusts to farm life, she forms an unexpected bond with Hugh, an Englishman who runs the local creamery. Their relationship develops against the backdrop of life on the farm, run by Jim and Nora, and their interactions with their daughter Maureen and a local young man named Micheal.
The Hitch-Hiker explores themes of cultural differences, personal history, and the search for belonging. Through a series of scenes spanning Margaret’s summer stay, the play examines rural Irish life and the impact of an outsider entering a close-knit community. As Margaret and Hugh’s relationship deepens, hidden aspects of Hugh’s past emerge, forcing both characters to confront their identities and life choices.
What our readers said
What’s it like reading this play now? Hows it aged? What does it speak to etc?
We are immersed, with Margaret, in another place and time, the rural Ireland of some forty years ago. The ebullient home life of Margaret’s host family contrasts with the more brooding atmosphere at Hugh’s house. Mourning the loss of a former love, injured in an accident and now taking a shine to Margaret, he is filled with struggles. Margaret, meanwhile, is a confident young woman who from the get-go faces these new environments with confidence and curiosity. At the farm, we touch on some challenging subjects: the contrasting abortion laws of Ireland and England; unemployment; gender roles, and the restrictions on women’s aspirations. But all of these are explored with lightness. In the end, Margaret leaves it behind, just as she’d planned. Her host family continues with their life, perhaps touched by her having been present, while Hugh, heartbroken, himself considers whether it’s also time to return to England. The play is filled with subtext in a way that later plays may have perhaps been more direct. The result is a seemingly gentle play that takes us into a world generally filled with warmth, humanity, and genuine interest in the lives of others.
What did is it tell us about the past and present?
Set in 1984, this is an Ireland of the past, deeply rural and, as Margaret herself notes, featuring elements that we have come to see as clichés: potatoes, an outside privy, fiddles, Irish jigs, and general joviality and verbal sharp-wittedness. Seen from today, it is hard to know to what extent, even then, this would have been an accurate description of rural life throughout the country. And we see nothing of Dublin or Cork City that the characters allude to.
What films or music does it make you think of?
In one scene, Margaret is reading Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, set in rural England in the late 1800s, and later made into a film a number of times, most recently in 2015. She describes the novel as being about ‘a woman’s relationship with three men, and their feelings, I suppose’, perhaps hinting at the underlying themes of Dillon’s play.
