REHEARSALS ARE currently well advanced for a new production of Conal Morrison’s award-winning adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s classic novel, Tarry Flynn, which will be staged at the Town Hall Theatre from Tuesday August 3 to Sunday 8.
The play is a moving evocation of 1930s’ rural Irish life - a time when life and the land went hand in hand but told with the wry observation and acerbic wit of Ireland’s best loved poet.
The production is extraordinarily ambitious in scale and content – it will be the biggest ever staged drama presented in Galway. Scenes merge into each other, characters transform themselves into animals, and the whole seething tumult of a riotous imagination is on display.
Larger than life
Set in Cavan in the 1930s, Tarry Flynn tells the story of Tarry, a farmer poet, and his quest for big fields, young women, and the meaning of life. His sensibility is torn between two impulses: The poetic and the preoccupations of all young men!
We follow his adventures as he uncovers the beauty in every aspect of nature and farm life, while keeping up his desperate campaign to get a kiss.
This adaptation by Conal Morrison incorporating choreography and movement was a huge hit at the Abbey in the 1990s. Due to the size of the production and the cast, it was not presented outside Dublin. However the Town Hall Theatre will now produce Tarry Flynn using Morrison’s adaptation - the first since the celebrated Abbey production.
Directed by Andrew Flynn and designed by Owen MacCarthaigh, everything about the production is larger than life - there is a cast of more than 40 as well as live musicians and choreographed animals -- all dedicated to capturing the cadences of Kavanagh’s enduring portrayal of a rural community and the landscape they inhabit.
The community cast are drawn from a wide cross section of Galway life including some leading actors from the amateur drama societies, present and former members of Galway Youth Theatre, and a range of people new to the world of theatre.
The production will also feature live music led by Sean Moloney of the famous Galway traditional music family.
“I first read it about seven years ago,” reveals director Andrew Flynn as he discusses the play. “I got the script from Conall and had the idea of doing it as a youth theatre show, but when I read it I realised I wouldn’t have enough people or the skills-base to take it on as a GYT project so I put it away.
“Then this year I read it again and I saw myself doing it in a different way. As I was mulling over how to do it Mike Diskin was coming back to the Town Hall and asked me if I had any ideas about a show and I told him about Tarry Flynn. It went from there.
“So we have a large community cast, ranging from a lot of ex-GYT people and people who have been very active in the amateur circuit to people who have never been onstage before. And the age range is broad as well, ranging from 87 to 15.
“The whole sense of community really hit me when we started rehearsal, there are people who are recently unemployed in the show and their main thing was to do something just to keep busy.
“The dedication and the giving-up of their time the actors have shown has been extraordinary. We’ve been rehearsing for seven weeks so there’s been a lot of demands on people but they’ve been turning up and their enthusiasm has been infectious.”
A cast from all walks of life
Productions of this kind often feature professional actors in the principal roles, but Flynn has opted not to do this.
“We thought it could be divisive if you have someone in a company who is getting paid while others are putting in loads of work but not being paid,” Flynn explains. “We decided to go with a full community cast and I think it’s worked. For instance Mary Monaghan McHugh, who plays Tarry’s mother, is as good as any professional I have seen.”
How has Flynn found the challenge of working with such a large cast?
“Fantastic!” he declares. “It was frightening too to begin with because for the first four weeks you wouldn’t be getting the same people showing up from one week to next, but I have just done Tusk Tusk with GYT and I found that just as difficult even though there are only five or six in it.
“What was different with this production is that I would be very used to reading and discussing the play and then after a while getting it on the floor; with this play we spent a lot of time workshopping scenes and getting the actors to improvise pictures and scenes and then honing those ideas. From that creative flux we found images and scenes.
“There is a lot of movement and mime and music. There is a line Kavanagh uses, ‘Any incident or act can carry within it the energy of the imagination,’ and this is what Conall brought brilliantly to his adaptation; actors become farm animals for instance, and they aren’t costumed as such so it’s all from their own physicality.”
Flynn is full of praise for the merits of Morrison’s adaptation.
“When I read it I thought it was very good but putting it on the floor I’ve learned he’s done a remarkable job,” he says. “He creates a social history of the time but that’s the background to this young man’s struggle.
“Part of Tarry just wants to fit in even though he has yearnings to leave and to write poetry. He knows he’s different from the other lads who just want to play football and go to dances, and so he’s isolated. The main storyline of the play is his struggle with that.
“Conall is a skilled director as well as writer so he’s created a very theatrical adaptation. It’s a visual feast. When he originally did it it was with the idea of it being done by a large company of 50 or so but even the Abbey couldn’t afford that so they did it with 26 actors.
“So Conall is excited about our staging because it permits the play to live in that realm of a complete community.”
Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
