IN WHAT promises to be one of the highlights of this year’s Cúirt, singer-songwriter Sean Tyrrell will premiere his new show Who Killed James Joyce, inspired by the poems and life-stories of some of Ireland’s foremost poets, both past and present.
The show features Tyrrell’s musical settings of works by poets such as Louis McNiece, Seamus Heaney, Oliver St John Gogarty, Michael Hartnett, Mairtin Ó Direain, Oscar Wilde, and WB Yeats interwoven with anecdotes about their lives.
“I’ve been setting poetry to music for a few years now,” Tyrrell observes over an afternoon phone call. “I decided I would like to do a whole night dedicated to that and as something more than just a concert. I wanted to try and show the person behind the poet.”
The show’s title comes from a poem of Patrick Kavanagh’s which includes the lines: “What weapon was used/To slay mighty Ulysses?/The weapon that was used/Was a Harvard thesis.”
“I like Kavanagh as a poet but I don’t think I would have liked to have met him,” Tyrrell muses. “He was a difficult man. Oliver St John Gogarty, on the other hand, is someone I would have enjoyed meeting.
“He was so witty. He said that de Valera looked like ‘a laugh in mourning’. During the Civil War he was abducted by Republicans at gunpoint and bundled into a car whereupon he enquired ‘Should I tip the driver?’”
The show features Galway poets like Mary O’Malley and Rita Ann Higgins and Tyrrell reveals there is also a Galway connection in the poem he chose from Louis McNiece.
“I do his poem Prognosis which he wrote in Galway after being on a three-week binge. He wrote it in the spring of 1939 and the form is like a children’s rhyme but it’s full of these dark forebodings.”
How did Tyrrell find the challenge of setting the poems he chose to music?
Some of them were very difficult” he acknowledges. “I had to break out of every pre-conception of songmaking. They’re not all written in forms that lend themselves readily to song.”
Tyrrell also reveals a particular, and growing passion, for poems in Irish.
“It upsets me when I travel around the place and you see these posters in Irish bars featuring Joyce, Wilde, and Yeats, etc, and none of them ever mention the likes of Mairtin Ó Cadhain, Mairtin Ó Direan or Sean Ó Riordain. It was very important to me therefore to include Irish poems in the show. I’ve actually been reading more of it in the past few years.”
Mention of Joyce, who also features in the show, prompts Tyrrell’s observation that “Joyce was an extrovert. He was a clever mimic and a star turn at charades. He famously came second in a singing contest behind John McCormack. It’s possible that Joyce only lost because he had to sight-read the piece he was singing and of course he had weak eyesight. He had to pawn his books to raise the entrance fee for the contest.”
Of all the writers whose work he has included, does Tyrrell have a personal favourite?
“Michael Hartnett,” he replies without hesitation. “He was a remarkable poet and person. I remember the first time I met him, I was in the Orchard Bar in Dublin. I looked out the window and this eccentric looking character was walking past, and it was Michael Hartnett.
“He stopped and waved and came into the bar; he leant over to me and whispered ‘I met some folk who said I was a dreamer’ which is a line from one of my songs. I liked him, he had a devilish sense of humour.”
Sean Tyrrell performs Who Killed James Joyce at Druid on Friday April 15 at 10pm. Tickets are €16/14 and are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
