The Revenant is a play by Patrick McCabe, for which Gavin and Niall ‘Herbie’ Macken wrote the main theme, entitled ‘Dreamland’. The premiere of the play took place at the Arts Festival in Galway on July 16th, 2007.

By PATRICK MCCABE
Directed by Joe O’Byrne
Music by Gavin Friday & Herbie Macken
With Peter Trant

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word as: a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.
Life’s but a walking shadow: if there is a world which defines him it is this one-of penumbra. Once he had a name: but its outline has blurred, belonging as it did to a world of sumptuous and saturated colour. He might have been a character bestriding John Hinde’s sixties photographic heaven. But now he moves cautiously – as if pursued, hunted. As he probes his way across the heart’s moorland landscape. Haunted by a monochrome vision of the past. Which, as Faulkner has written, being far from irrelevant, is not even past. In this supernova of darkness, The Revenant continues, nightly, to plead his case.

He might be lost in a Rembrandt etching. Only one thing remains constant: the grey colour of the tombstone they’ve erected over his name. And over those whose voices once lit up the little town. Which no longer exists. For the grey of this play is that which borders a memoriam card. Which this time, now reads: the small town, the end of history.