Country and Irish to grace Longford's Backstage Theatre
Sometimes when people review the works of Pat McCabe they can overlook his first gig in front of a typewriter, The Adventures of Shay Mouse: The Mouse from Longford.
It's an easy oversight, as a children's book it doesn't fit seamlessly into the canon of the Monaghan scribes work.
Inspired partly by his time as a teacher in Longford Shay Mouse's adventures does bear some of the hallmarks of McCabe's later writing, but in a totally different manner. Twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, his books have been adapted for the screen and stage with great success.
This Thursday is somewhat of a Longford return as his absurd dark-comedy, Country and Irish, comes to Backstage Theatre. Featuring a man, a banana, a tape recorder and a bomb the Fight2Flight Theatre Company translates the words on paper to the stage.
If you saw the 2005 adaptation of McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto you may have observed Peter Gowen who played Brother Barnabas. In Country and Irish Gowen stars as a man who escapes life’s dissatisfactions, that is an overbearing mother and a treacherous girlfriend, by immersing himself in his own fantasy world, that of an imagined gangster movie.
Donie Burris has a whole heap of troubles facing him: with his girlfriend, her son, Albanian gangsters, the Midford mafia and the aforementioned mammy.
Described as an “hilarious, but savage portrait of a man at the end of his rope” the production pays homage to film noir and the Teletubbies.
Like much of the Monaghan writer's work it smudges the lines between reality and imagination in a startling, provocative fever dream.
MaCabe's love of music filters through the play which features a soundtrack of terrific music worthy of the title, Country and Irish. The play promises to be like nothing else you’ll see this year.
Country & Irish comes to Backstage Thursday 27th April at 8pm. Tickets available on 043 3347888 or backstage.ie