Drama on tap!

There are easier ways to stage a Pat McCabe play. Consider a respectable theatre: dimmed lights, obedient seating and a hushed audience assuredly settled for an evening of cultural consumption.

Livin’ Dred has instead decided to bravely take Poguemahone on a pub crawl.

Not metaphorically either.

The Cavan theatre company’s new production will be performed in six traditional pub settings across the county this autumn, beginning at F.W. Traynor’s in Shercock on September 24 before travelling to Redhills, Mountnugent, Canningstown, Swanlinbar and, finally, Jenny’s in Mullagh on October 3.

In its own subversive way, these are exactly the sort of places that McCabe’s feverish novel maybe belongs.

Presented as an intimate, free-flowing monologue by multi-award-winning actor Aaron Monaghan (The Cripple of Inishmaan, Waiting for Godot, The Cherry Orchard), the result is less a conventional adaptation than an act of controlled possession.

McCabe’s original prose sprawls, sings and mutates across more than 600 pages. It tells the tale of a family driven from Ireland to England and into the peculiar, brutal, druggy, musical and occasionally supernatural world of 1970s immigrant London.

Some critics describe it as the Clones writer’s ‘Ulysses’. There are priests, ghosts, sex workers, squatters, hippies, family curses and the detritus of memory. There are the filthy bright lights of Soho, Killiburn Brae, the yearning for identity, the losses of dementia - and then there is Ireland, ‘home’, which refuses to be left behind.

For director Padraic McIntyre (The Dead School, There Came a Gypsy Riding), the problem was never whether the material had “enough theatricality”. It was more about stopping themselves from “putting too much of it on stage”.

Livin’ Dred had already produced The Bridge Below the Town, The Dead School and The Emerald Germs of Ireland when the idea of exploring Poguemahone “came up in conversation”.

They workshopped the material at the Ramor Arts Centre, where the Celt met McIntyre and Monaghan last week, but the more elaborate the process became, the “less useful” it seemed to both men.

“We just went back to the way it’s written,” McIntyre says, reflecting on revisiting the material years later.

Crucially, that meant following the voice at the centre of McCabe’s book.

“We were only complicating it by doing all these other things,” McIntyre concedes.

Monaghan plays Dan Fogarty, and to some extent, everybody else in this snapshot adaptation, leaping between characters, voices and various states of mind.

Driving from Dublin to Cavan that morning, Monaghan had gone through the lines twice already. For a seasoned actor like him, the book gets carried into the gaps of ordinary life. A word overheard in a shop or on the radio is enough to usher an internal flow of text.

“It becomes all immersive,” headmits.

The more interesting gamble, though, is not just the one-man structure but the decision to perform the piece in pubs. Yet that speaks volumes to the founding principles of Livin’ Dred: making professional theatre available in Cavan rather than assuming that audiences should have to travel elsewhere to find it.

The venues vary considerably in size and character. Some hold around 40 people; others closer to 100. There is no pretending every performance will be identical and McIntyre is quick to suggest, this is part of the point.

“We were always told in drama school to live in the moment.”

For Monaghan, the unerring intimacy changes the fundamental relationship between performer and audience. In a conventional theatre, actors stare into blackness and pretend not to know there are 300 pairs of eyes blinking back. In a pub, that pretence is rendered impossible.

“You’ll be able to smell their breath,” this interviewer jokes.

“And maybe more,” Monaghan replies with a laugh.

Performatively, the audience loses its anonymity as an abstract mass. Someone smiles. Others might laugh unexpectedly. A shift in a seat over there coincides with someone else looking appalled near the back. And accordingly, the actor can respond.

“That’s storytelling,” a grining McIntyre suggests.

Both McIntyre and Monaghan are frank about what they see as a wider problem facing regional theatre. Once supported by a more substantial touring ecology, they argue, companies regularly brought professional work around the country. Funding cuts, rising costs, accommodation and administration, compounded by the disruption of Covid, have laid waste to that model.

Audiences have changed too. Altered habits and the cost-of-living crisis mean people are more cautious about spending money to see productions they know little about.

There was once more room, McIntyre suggests, for audiences to “take a punt” on a play, dislike it and regard the disappointment as “part of the experience”.

The danger is that theatre audiences fall out of the practice of attending. Venues struggle. Companies flounder. Artists work project to project.

The Arts Council, both men say, knows there are “issues” with the current touring and funding structures. But reform is not straightforward.

Livin’ Dred itself is attempting three productions this year: Poguemahone, followed by Good Girls, written by Clare Monnnelly, and A Christmas Carol. Next year, McIntyre says, they might have “none”.

Such is the absurd arithmetic of cultural life. Which makes choosing a pub tour feel like more than a clever venue strategy. “We want to make theatre more accessible,” says McIntyre, conscious that the word itself can be off-putting. “We’re not saying it’ll never play in theatres, but we wanted to start small, rather than putting that pressure on ourselves. There is something about bringing people into the dark that can make theatre feel a little highbrow, as if it’s become owned by the middle class. People can immediately think, ‘Oh, that’s not for me.’

“And there’s also this idea that theatre has to be very meaningful, very intellectual. Just because this is set in a pub doesn’t mean it isn’t- it’s still very literary. I suppose that’s what we’re doing: challenging the image of what theatre is.”

Monaghan has performed one-man shows before, most recently Superbogger, written by his wife Clare Monnelly, so knows first-hand the terror of having nobody else to help cue the next line in a moment of on-stage mind fog.

The trick, he says, is “trust”: Trust the writing, trust the rehearsal, trust in himself.

McCabe, best known for his novels The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto, both Booker-shortlisted works later adapted for film by Neil Jordan, has always had a deep relationship with voice.

For Monaghan, that itself provides “the route in”.

“You’ll hear their voice,” he says. “In my head, all I hear is Pat doing it.”

He also sees the pub as one of Ireland’s oldest unofficial theatres, where people have for generations stood as storytellers, singers, the man with the impossible memory or the woman who wryly remembers what actually happened.

“It’s unapologetic,” he says.

“And I mean, with a one-man show as well, I’ll always remember going through it that first time, saying to myself, ‘Jesus, how am I going to get through this?’ I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

“…but you do it,” interjects McIntyre. “…and in that moment, you know you’re alive.”

Livin’ Dred’s Poguemahone tour begins at F.W. Traynor’s Bar in Shercock on September 24, followed by McCaffrey’s Bar in Redhills on September 25, The Bridge Inn in Mountnugent on September 26, The Bridge Tavern in Canningstown on October 1, The Stables in Swanlinbar on October 2, and Jenny’s Bar & Lounge in Mullagh on October 3.