MacIntyre’s classic comes home

Tonight is the last night for Townhall show.

A s the old saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover. Maybe it’s also advisable to not judge a play by its title.

The Celt wonders what percentage of audiences watching ‘The Gallant John Joe’ sigh in disappointment after five minutes as the realisation dawns that it’s not about Cavan’s greatest footballing hero.

“I noticed when the Townhall first started publicising it on social media, somebody commented: ‘I hope those fellas in Cavan know this play is not about football!’” says Director Geoff O’Keeffe who is bringing Tom MacIntyre’s masterpiece back on home turf this week. “Yes there is certainly football references throughout it, but no it’s not about John Joe O’Reilly the footballer.”

With broad brushstrokes Geoff skilfully sets the scene of what the play is actually about.

“It’s a one man show about a Cavan widower, he’s grappling with some sort of physical/mental infirmity. He tells us a story about his young daughter who has become pregnant, and he makes it his mission to find out who the father is and she won’t reveal. As the story progresses he becomes more and more unhinged and disorientated, and we start to wonder: what is actually true and what is false? What has happened and what hasn’t happened? And how much of this is going on in his head?

“In some ways it’s an exploration of mental illness - MacIntyre talks about ‘the hurt mind’.”

The play won immediate critical acclaim with its debut production in 2002 and the great Tom Hickey’s masterful performance. An Irish Theatre Award for Best New Play followed.

Geoff is relieved that neither he nor Malcolm Adams, who takes on the challenging soliloquy, saw the original production.

“Had we,” Geoff surmises, “we might not have taken the play on. However, we’re both so aware of the legend of Tom Hickey and this production which toured all over Ireland until 2015. Because we hadn’t seen the production it was more freeing for us - we had nothing to compare ourselves to. We just went and did our show.”

Geoff explains they decided early on not to have Cork native Malcolm Adams labour the Cavan accent.

“Because it really then becomes all about the accent, and it becomes a distraction, so Malcolm is using ‘a rural accent’ but there’s hints of Cavan in there for sure.”

Having already staged the show at Dundrum’s Mill Theatre, Geoff reports that the audience greatly enjoyed Malcolm’s performance.

“I have worked with Malcolm before, he’s a fantastic actor - five times nominated for Irish times Theatre Awards, and in fact the last time he was nominated was when he played Polonius in a production of Hamlet I directed in the Mill Theatre. Working with him has been really rewarding.”

The Celt notes that O’Keeffe’s recent credits include a clutch of Roald Dahl plays and five works by William Shakespeare. Where does MacIntyre fit between these two extremes?

“He sits really well - it’s the eccentricity of Roald Dahl and the big theatricality of Shakespeare - he has elements of them all. For me this has been without a doubt the most enjoyable and fulfilling process I’ve gone through as a director - a career highlight I would call it.”

A fellow Cavan man, O’Keeffe only met MacIntyre once and recalls him as “a really really interesting man”.

“When I was doing my MA in Theatre Studies I looked at the development of physical theatre in Ireland. Any theatre practitioners I spoke to mentioned his name, and how throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the Peacock Theatre he was doing all this experimental work which was totally at odds with the rest of Irish Theatre. He was ahead of his time - he was influenced by European practitioners and he was influenced by the body, by dance. He talked about Irish theatre being ‘Daddy theatre’ and he didn’t want to be a part of ‘Daddy theatre’.

Geoff concedes that The Gallant John Joe is “not your typical audience fare”and contends: “Theatre’s not just to entertain us, it’s to make us think, to make us look at ourselves, it’s to make us question. And I think MacIntyre does this in spades. I think the man was a genius.”