Martha Knight grew up in Dublin, but spent much of her childhood in the Irish countryside, where her whole extended family is from. And there’s a very rural-Ireland thing that’s always fascinated her. All the houses she remembers visiting had the same type of photo on display: a bird’s eye view of the building itself.
“So, you walk into somebody’s home and there’s an aerial photograph of the house in the house, on the mantelpiece or in the hallway,” she said. “And it’s a real pride-of-place object.”
Who took these photos? And why did people show them off? These questions are where The King of All Birds all started for Knight, who’s the writer and sole performer of the multidisciplinary theatre piece playing April 25 to 27 for intimate audiences at the Ontario Heritage Centre.
“It spurred on this whole fascination for me of Ireland from the sky and this aerial view of ourselves,” she said. Then, an even bigger question emerged: “Why, when we start to fly, is our first impulse to look down?”
The King of All Birds is a melange of traditional and contemporary storytelling that unpacks humanity’s enduring obsession with the sky. It premiered at the 2023 Dublin Fringe Festival and is one of four shows travelling from Ireland to Toronto to form the lineup of the inaugural Bealtaine Theatre Festival. Bealtaine (pronounced “byal-tin-uh”) is an ancient Gaelic and Celtic festival with Pagan roots, marking the height of spring and arrival of summer. It’s been observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man for hundreds of years and is traditionally held on or around May 1, midway between the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox and summer solstice.
For Knight, Bealtaine is the beginning of a “reaping-what-you’ve-sown time of year.” It’s about crawling out of the gruelling winter months and ringing in the warm and bountiful summertime — something she knows Canadians understand viscerally.
Performing this piece for a seasonal festival makes a lot of sense to Knight, because things that are cyclical in nature have been a prevalent part of her script’s structure and dramaturgy from the very beginning. “I always think about the swallows in my granny’s cowsheds that come back year after year… and how those birds that were there when I was born, it’s their ancestors that are there now,” she said.
Knight asked Joy Nesbitt, whom the Irish Times and Sunday Times listed as “one to watch in 2024,” to direct her piece after the two met teaching at a theatre camp for young people and just clicked. Knight said she’d heard “whispers in Dublin” that Nesbitt was a musician as well as a director, and since she felt the show needed someone who knew how to communicate through music, she invited Nesbitt on board.
Unlike Knight, Ireland is far away from home for Nesbitt, who’s originally from Dallas, Texas. She said being a part of the creation process for The King of All Birds helped her feel “warm and included in a lovely way.
“It was something I really needed at a time when I was feeling so far,” she added.
On the surface, Nesbitt says the show is a woman telling stories about the aerial history of Ireland; it’s a quest to try and find a new king of all birds, after Mad King Sweeney came along and took the wren’s crown; it’s “Martha [performing] Wild Mountain Thyme over and over again in different styles and different instrumentation.”
But it’s so much deeper than all that. “Undercurrent-wise, it’s about our relationship with technology and where technology brings us in terms of our perception of ourselves,” said Knight.
The piece has two levels it communicates on, and two very distinct performance modes Knight taps into. First, there’s the text, improvisation, direct engagement with the audience, and storytelling. And then there’s the music, which is more “feeling-based” and “abstract.” The music tells a story of its own by moving from an acoustic world to a heavy-electronic world — something Knight said Nesbitt understood and connected to right away.
When Knight first asked her to direct the piece, Nesbitt said she was excited but also wanted to make sure she could approach the subject matter truthfully, as someone who didn’t speak Irish or have all of the context.
Turns out Nesbitt was able to elevate the work by bringing her own cultural heritage and ancestral lineage to it. “Having come from an African American community, we talk a lot about ancestors and what that means in terms of resilience,” she said. “The piece in a lot of ways speaks cross-culturally because [it’s] talking about what it means for us to have these things, these photos in our houses, that we have no context for. And yet, those things make us who we are.”
Nesbitt hopes The King of All Birds allows the audience to reflect on the things and people they care about, and to think about what touchstones they can hold onto as the world around them continues to change.
And Knight’s wish is that the show encourages people to think about their relationship to their own history and how it overlaps with so many other histories. “We are all coming from somewhere, and we all have ancestors, and we all have this profound connection with not just where we come from but who we come from,” she said. “That’s really connected me to the piece and connected me with everybody I’ve worked with on this show.”
Something else that’s been really fulfilling for Knight is how funny and silly the entire process has been. She said even though the show is quite serious, ritualistic, and experimental, it’s also “totally irreverent” and “a little bit cheeky,” adding “[there’s] a little bit of ‘devilment’ — an Irish colloquialism.”
Nesbitt chimed in: “We call it ‘weird girl shit.’”
The King of All Birds runs at the Ontario Hertiage Centre from April 25 to 27. Tickets are available here.
The Canada Ireland Foundation is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Magan Carty
Magan Carty is an actor turned journalist whose passion for the arts runs deep. They spent over a decade performing in theatre productions across Canada and are now working as a writer and producer for CBC Radio’s flagship national program, The Current. Magan lives in Toronto with their twin black cats, Juno and Lenny.
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