((Putting out the money on the table.)) It’s a bad night, and a wild night, Micheal Dara, and isn’t it a great while I am at the foot of the back hills, sitting up here boiling food for himself, and food for the brood sow, and baking a cake when the night falls? (She puts up the money, listlessly, in little piles on the table.) Isn’t it a long while I am sitting here in the winter and the summer, and the fine spring, with the young growing behind me and the old passing, saying to myself one time, to look on Mary Brien who wasn’t that height (holding out her hand), and I a fine girl growing up, and there she is now with two children, and another coming on her in three months or four. (She pauses.) (MICHEAL: That’s three pounds we have now, Nora Burke.) (Continuing in the same voice.) And saying to myself another time, to look on Peggy Cavanagh, who had the lightest hand at milking a cow that wouldn’t be easy, or turning a cake, and there she is now walking round on the roads, or sitting in a dirty old house, with no teeth in her mouth, and no sense and no more hair than you’ld see on a bit of a hill and they after burning the furze from it.

Nora Monologue from In the Shadow of the Glen

Rehearse Nora's monologue