A flight of fancy made real

Cootehill man John Blakey's latest work has its world premiére in Maudabawn next month.

A bonkers love-story charting the adventures of a truly unique character will have its world premiére in Maudabawn next month.

The somewhat unusual location for the musical’s first outing is the least implausible aspect of the production titled ‘The Legend of Icarus O’Toole - The Incredible Naked Flying Man of Achill’. Involving a mostly professional cast, scores of characters, a pipe band and out-sized multi-media backdrops - it all sounds so ambitious as to be almost impossible.

Impossible that is until you meet the creator, John Blakey - a fizzing mind of zany ideas that by sheer force of will he brings to life.

Upon being greeted at John’s Maudabawn house - hence the choice of Gallonray House for its debut outing - the first thing that strikes you is the life-size and pretty life-like goat John’s created for the play, that dominates the porch.

“I’ve got to put the legs on it yet,” John says, his native Yorkshire accent as prominent as the goat.

He walks us into his diningroom where the walls are adorned with his artworks - some portraying scenes and figures from the Icarus tale, others include a portrait of his pal, Irish actor Brian Cox - all exquisitely executed in watercolours. A successful professional artist for over 30 years, John’s painted portraits of people across the world using a technique that recreates the effect of oil paints.

“It is very unforgiving and you have to paint at lightning speed because it dries on you, and you can’t really blend it the same.

“I represented Ireland in the European Watercolour Society - not bad for a Yorkshire man,” says John who was awarded the President’s award and Perpetual Cup by the Watercolour Society of Ireland. He’s put his day job to use by illustrating his own novel, ‘The Legend of Icarus O’Toole’. While its style and subject won’t be to everyone’s taste, it still showcases the easy confidence of a professional. Featuring a naked Icarus flying above the Mayo coast he sports a leather pilot’s cap adapted with a mini propeller, navigator goggles, white scarf and gloves, and home-made wings. The plainly daft figure is completed with a white tail feather poking from his derrière. It brings to mind the work of novelist Tom Sharpe, of whom John readily admits being a fan.

The comedic adventure focuses on an open hearted Icarus whose wide-eyed view of the world is distorted by brutal authority figures. His childhood soulmate Daisy Maisie is treated similarly cruelly.

“These two dears, who absolutely love each other as kids are torn apart.”

Institutionalised, Icarus immerses himself in art. He takes the lesson of how far you can get in the art world with a scatological approach. Icarus’s passion for ‘feculent art’ gives voice to John’s assertion that some contemporary artists prioritise the drive to be different or shocking over artistic creativity.

An audio version of the novel running to some seven and a half hours followed the hardback edition. On a roll, John enlisted the help of musical pals who he got to know while holidaying in Westport, including Matt Molloy and Clew Bay Pipe Band, to create a lavish double vinyl album of 20 tracks as a soundtrack to Icarus’s tale.

Armed with a story and music, it was only natural for John to make a musical. While the rest of us create bucket lists of things we’ll never do, John set about making his dreams a reality - editing the text, restructuring the narrative, recruiting professional actors, musicians and stage hands. With Westport Townhall Theatre booked for a three performance run, Covid melted Icarus’s wings.

“We’ve got all of these musical files and worked so hard on it and no one’s heard it,” says John, the frustration audible.

“The double-vinyl hasn’t been released. This hasn’t been released,” he says lifting a CD version the plastic wrap still sealed, “and the book hasn’t been launched either.

“It’s all going to happen here!”

When he says here, he means Maudabawn’s community hub, Gallonray House. Surprisingly the venue seats 300, but given the scale of the project, John anticipates the production will be a “loss leader”. He’ll happily take the hit in order to have the fledgling show reach an audience, and from there, who knows?

“It needs to go on tour,” John enthuses, and to that end he has invited some folk he knows from London’s theatre scene to come and see it.

To give a flavour of the music, John fumbles about with his stereo system; meanwhile the Celt notes a rather fetching Spanish guitar.

“I used to be a classical guitarist,” John says laughing at how that sounds on top of everything else. “It’s hard to believe.”

The stereo kicks into life and on comes an accomplished flamenco piece recorded when he was only 19.

“I can’t play any more because of that finger,” he says raising a hand to display a little finger seized at a right angle. ‘It’s called trigger finger - it happens to people who come from a Viking background. So anyway, I couldn’t do that any more.”

A second song comes on, this time from the Icarus vinyl to show what he can still do on guitar: a gentle folk number with John finger-picking his own composition as Peter Carney of Clew Bay Pipe Band sings Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ both in English and Irish. It’s beautifully tender.

It’s clear John’s something of a polymath. The Celt wonders how he’s managed to do so much, and to such a high level.

“Artistic people are often very difficult,” he observes. “You ask them to do something - and they mean to, they tell you [they’ll do it], three weeks later they still haven’t quite got around to do it. My father was a sergeant major in the army and he drilled it into me about discipline: ‘John, discipline sets you free! Get it done.’ That was my motivation.”

John volunteers how he was “influenced very strongly” by his father, Joseph, whose presence glides in and out of the conversation like Daedalus.

“He was one of the first soldiers on the beaches at D-Day, and somehow he survived. I’ve got a photograph of him with all the sergeants before they set off. Only six of them came back out of this great big photograph of them all.

“And then he was one of the soldiers who liberated Belsen, the concentration camp. When he got there, there was a pile of 10,000 bodies - 10,000 bodies all rotting.”

At Joseph’s funeral one of his soldier buddies told John that his father had driven a bulldozer at Belsen - “Clearing bodies and shovelling them into pits.”

This all fed into a theme of the musical: “He had this fantastic view of life of how precious it was, and how dark it can be.”

It’s a view that informs John’s outlook too. In painterly terms he recalls life in the grim industrial streets of his native Leeds of the late 1950s - poisonous fogs and polluted rivers. “River Aire was filthy, full of shit and prams.”

A trip to the Yorkshire Dales with some school pals “on a perfect day in June” brought him his first taste of nature. He was smitten.

“I saw a clean river for the first time - it was absolutely amazing, it really changed my life. The crystal clear river, which was filled with trout was all bubbling like champagne. It was just a piece of spiritual magic.

“So I’ve always had this pursuit of beauty. I think it’s important - beauty will save the world: on a beautiful lovely day you don’t really feel like kicking the dog.

“That’s why I do all of this work - the pursuit of beauty, friendship and harmony. I’m like an eco-warrior with my art,” he quips.