LEANING AGAINST the counter of the sparsely populated Tivoli Theatre bar, it seems that I m the only person who has spotted them. The reason I know they re there, is that they told me where to look.
The 30-odd pre-show tipplers are utterly oblivious to their presence. The two men are barely visible from their position within the dimly-lit confines of a secluded corner. Standing there, bolt upright, their jaws set in grim determination, they resemble waxwork figures, looking for all the world like long-forgotten attractions from some grotesque Chamber Of Officious Gits.
Shortly before showtime, having lurked with aplomb for several minutes, they make their move. Paddy Laoire is first out of the blocks, closely followed by his trusty sidekick, Tadhg. It seems that Paddy is a butcher by trade. You can tell by his appearance; the grimly-pursed chops and meaty jowls, the bureaucratically-girded loins, not to mention the skinned and gutted porcine carcass slung casually over the shoulder of his blood-drenched butcher s coat.
His crown, generously plastered with lard, sports a judiciously sculpted centre-parting. His bug-eyed stare is not so much eerie as . . . totally ridiculous.
Tadhg s ensemble is similarly inelegant. Sporting a manure-brown work coat of the style favoured by rural veterinary surgeons, he strides purposefully through the bar, pausing occasionally to glare sullenly from the beady eyes set a few inches beneath the peak of his checked tweed cap. A fluorescent yellow sash, bearing the lurid CIVIL DEFENCE motif, is his crowning glory. Never fear, it implies lamely. D Unbelievables are here.
Indeed they are. Paddy and Tadhg are just a couple of the uproariously insane characters who star in I Doubt It , Says Pauline, the brainchild of Jon Kenny and Pat Shortt, which is currently packing them in down on Francis Street.
There are other eejits of course, plenty of them, each one a bastion of Glengooley society, each one crazier than the last.
Timmy Ryan, the village hurling coach, is blessed with monstrous hands, which are put to constant use scratching his ever-itchy genitals. Let every blow be a funeral, he exhorts to his players, one hand waving aggressively, the other buried between his legs. And when you re insulting your marker s sister, make sure the referee doesn t hear you. Then, when your man hits you, drop like a stone; you ll get the free and he ll get the line.
And lads, he implores, lads, lads, lads, when you come in here at half time, I don t want to see dirty jerseys. I want to see bloodstained jerseys! But most of all, lads . . . enjoyyyyyy yourselves. Because I ll tell you now, it ll be much harder for you next year when you re hurling Under-14.
Pat Conway is little better. A middle aged teacher with a voracious appetite for snot (yes, snot), he is unimpressed with a portrait found pinned to the school notice board. Producing the offending miniature a busty matchstick woman from his tatty school satchel, he glares disdainfully around the theatre.
We have an artist in the class, he announces matter-of-factly. A right funnyman! But I m telling you, boys, it s all very well having the laugh and the skit now, but I won t be in there when you re sitting the exam next year. Then we ll see who s having the laugh and the skit.
Every parish has its padre and Glengooley is no exception. Father B. Lee is the village curate, an absolver of sins, ninja-style. His lightning-fast blessings resemble a flurry of speedily administered karate chops, with accompanying FX to ensure maximum piety.
Ciznas in the hall please, he implores, gurning smarmily at his audience. You re all (long pause) verywelcometothehallhere to-niiiighhhhttt, is his barely coherent greeting, mangled as it is by his sly smirk and firmly gritted teeth. Yes, you reallverywelcometothehall, but can we have some ciznas in the hall, as the sandwich-making competition (even longer pause), is about to begin?
Strictly speaking, D Unbelievables show is not a play. It s an experience, an engaging rollercoaster ride which begins upon entry to the theatre, and continues uninterrupted even throughout the interval until patrons are either forcefully removed or leave their seats to go home. (One or the other, eh? Ed.)
The premise is at once simple and yet incredibly convoluted. Props are kept to a minimum; the Tivoli is Glengooley parish hall, the audience are unwelcome strangers who have arrived unannounced and far too early for the village variety show. That is, of course, unless they happen to be the charges of a demented GAA mentor, or a classroom of students looking on as their balding teacher ravenously devours the contents of his nasal passages.
Tadhg and Paddy are members of the Glengooley Hall Committee, creating unbridled chaos from their constant attempts to keep order. Father B. Lee, meanwhile, makes his appearance in the second act , when he arrives to compire the variety show. And while each of these characters is important, they remain peripheral. The central theme of the show is the hilarious, and occasionally disturbing, relationship between village idiot Joey and his overbearing mother Pauline.
More hen-pecked than Old MacDonald s farmyard, Joey, a seemingly bewildered thirtysomething who, it will become apparent, is actually the show s only voice of reason is the janitor in the hall. Anxious to leave his mother, he seeks advice from the strangers around him, while simultaneously keeping us abreast of village affairs.
Oh, you ve really stuck it into them, ha, he laughs, while vigorously sweeping the stage. No-one knows what to do with you at all, you ve caused splits in the committee, ha. There s three meetings going on. Some of the committee is meeting in the butcher s shop, a few are in the back of the hall, while the auxiliary committee of the main committee of the Hall Committee is meeting in the phonebox down the town. Oh yes, you ve really stuck it into them, ha.
Paddy Laoire, Timmy Ryan and Pat Conway are not exclusive to Glengooley. You find them in every town and village in Ireland. I know, I m from Birr. The obvious question, therefore, centres around whether or not the inspiration for . . . Pauline is rooted in a love or a loathing for smalltown Ireland.
It s power, that s what it s all about, power, explains Pat Shortt in answer to the query.
Exactly, it s about a bit of control, that s where we re coming from, continues Jon Kenny. What we had in mind when we were creating these characters was the level of insanity which seems to be accepted in society. I mean, when we stand back in the cold light of day and look at these characters and the way they behave, it s pretty much bordering on insanity and yet, it s accepted. We don t caricature anything, it s more like us taking a real idea and then just stretching it different ways so that it becomes exaggerated. It s not just dialogue, there s also the physical aspect of the characters. All of them have a different way of walking, they ve all got a different look about them, they re all just different.
We don t have a love/hate relationship with small-town Ireland; we just decided to pick out things like the paranoia, the craziness, the relationship between Joey and his mother as part of the village thing. No.1, though, was the paranoia of Glengooley, the place where they are. The other thing is that a lot of the guys you see in the show are people that are in control and in charge of a situation. They all have their own little patch of authority in the village. You sort of get a feel for the place through those characters.
For craziness and paranoia, read Paddy and Tadhg. The former, a member of no less than half a dozen committees and proprietor of a similar number of businesses, is head honcho. While he is far more pompous than his bullish sidekick, he is, if anything, dimmer.
When they emerge from their corner of the bar, they move briskly upstairs to usher patrons to their seats. Move along now lively, roars Tadhg, herding a group of unwitting stragglers down an aisle as you might drive calves into a byre. No running in the hall, please! , he continues, oblivious to the ambiguity of it all.
Up at the front, his colleague is equally busy, supervising the expulsion from the theatre of the entire front row.
De show is aboot to begin and you are blocking dis exit. I don t know where you came from but you will have to leave. No, missus, bring your coat and bag with you, you won t be coming back and anyway, like yourself dey re a fire hazard.
Paddy means business. Hands on bloodstained hips, he purses his lips and shakes his greasy head disapprovingly before sprinting off to help Tadhg eject one defiant guest who looks far too comfortable in his allotted seat. Between them, they frog-march their hapless victim to the end of the hall and promptly show him the door.
At the interval, it gets worse. They appear in the bar, Paddy brandishing a megaphone, Tadhg armed with a torch. We know you re in there! roars Paddy, positioning himself outside the Ladies toilets. Come on out, it s no use, we know you re in there, please vacate the lavatories.
Needless to say, the response from the packed loo is less than overwhelming.
Okay, they re playing hardball Tadhg, seal it up! orders Paddy, looking fit to burst from the strain of his responsibilities. From deep within his coat, Tadhg produces a roll of industrial strength masking tape. Within seconds, the unfortunate ladies are trapped. Several contradictory instructions, much ado about nothing and two impenetrably secured toilets later, what s left of the audience are back in their seats for the second half of the show.
The profile currently enjoyed by D Unbelievables is truly awesome. They ve always been popular, but until recently, never truly managed to capture the imagination of urban twenty/ thirtysomethings, who seemed to perceive Kenny and Shortt as being on their own particular version of what the late comedian Bill Hicks called his Flying Saucer Tour i.e. appearing down south in front of small groups of hillbillies, all the time becoming increasingly unsure of their own existence.
However, their surprising victory over Ardal O Hanlon in the Best Comedian category of the Hot Press Readers Poll is just one indication that D Unbelievables currently enjoy a far broader appeal than any other live comedy act. Why?
Well, not to knock what you re saying, we ve had the whole spectrum all the time, expounds Pat, contriving to knock what I m saying. There is an element of truth there, in that there has been a turnaround in recent times and we re not sure what has prompted it. What I mean by turnaround is that we re selling out more than ever before. At the moment, the Tivoli is sold out weeks in advance, whereas before, we used to do a sell-out business there, but it was steady.
I m not joking you, it s phenomenal at the moment. We were sitting in the office with the press people the other day and they re at a loss to know why the whole fucking thing has suddenly exploded.
Jon agrees. A lot of people seemed to take it into their heads that because it s probably very rural, it s going to be inferior. I mean, Jeremy Kingston gave us a great review in The Times. He saw it for what it was, Irish theatre, as opposed to Limerick theatre or part-of-Tipperary theatre. Like, if I go to see Passion Machine, I don t say I m not going to enjoy this because it s about Dublin . I go to see it with an open mind, to judge it for what it is.
Our main commitment, you see, is to touring and playing in front of live audiences. When we re putting something together it s with that in mind. It s clowning, slapstick, music and a bit of stand-up. I think it was summed up best by one guy who approached us one night and said there s awful entertainment in what the pair of you do .
It s true, most of . . . Pauline is side-splittingly chucklesome, and while Joey s constant struggle to rid himself of the shackles of maternal domination is laughable, it is often genuinely bleak, particularly near the end when he packs his suitcase and . . . well, that would be telling, you ll have to see the show.
Yeah, some nights we get a huge reaction, muses Jon. The audience start shouting up at Joey to Go on, go for it, get the fuck out of there! We tried to arrange the show so that it doesn t keep moving along at the same pitch but instead changes and has moods and stuff.
The relationship between Joey and his mother, avers Pat, is something that I ve seen and you ve seen and everybody has seen. People are trapped at home, stuck on the farm down in Limerick or Offaly or wherever, and they can t get away. That happens and people know that. That s where the sympathy comes in. They feel sorry for this poor fucker because they know that there are actually people like that out there.
This would suggest that the dialogue between Joey and his mother was quite difficult to write. Was that the case?
It was, very, is Jon s prompt reply. We had awful problems putting it together because it was so dark, so much so that at times it wasn t funny. It was like This fellow is so dominated by his mother that there couldn t possibly be any dialogue between them . He s in his 30s, you know, but he acts much younger. In a sense it s almost like a form of child abuse.
It can be gas too, laughs Pat. This guy came up to Jon one night and said to him (adopts low, conspiratorial bogger growl), Jaysus, I understand exactly howya feel. I ve a mudder at home the same meself . I swear, we nearly pissed ourselves laughing.
There are other disturbed fans out there. A surreal missive, posted from The Curragh, was greeted with considerable bemusement when it emerged from the Tivoli mailbag on the day of our interview.
Its gist was as follows: This is to let you know that 4 very impotent persons are (is) coming to see yous (sic)on Wednesday 15th and that yer (sic) show will be given the thumbs up or thumbs down accordingly and that yous (sic) better be mindful of that and behave accordingly and furthermore that them 4 very big wigs have no interest in making the sandwiches as has been heard by friends of theres (sic)
Granted, there s a lot of sic (sic) people out there, and true, not everyone appreciates being hauled out of their seats, escorted to the stage and forced to participate in a sandwich slalom for 45 minutes a nightly ritual in I Doubt It , Says Pauline. But audience participation is nonetheless central to D Unbelievables experience. Is recruiting the necessary volunteers difficult?
It can be, alright, admits Pat. But we re sort of used to it at this stage. One night, though, this lad took a swipe at me. Himself and his wife were in their seats and I did the usual Tadhg thing of telling them to Get up out of that now lively, or I ll have to come over.
They didn t move, so off I went. She jumped out of her seat and when I went to grab him he jumped up and hit me. He seemed a fairly placid fella, but you could see he was as nervous as hell. His reaction was just Fuck off! . I got an awful shock, but I just had to swing it around again by harassing someone else instead.
We had a Dublin councillor in one day who lost the rag as well but for a different reason, Jon smiles. He had bought seats to the side of the stage and as soon as he realised where they were he didn t want them anymore. He wanted to sit in the more expensive seats. The show was sold out, though, so he couldn t be moved. He d already bought the seats so it was his own fuckin fault, but no, he was a councillor, he couldn t be seen sitting in the cheap seats. He was going to give out stink.
It s kind of ironic, really, Pat observes wryly, given the theme of paranoia and craziness in the show.
There have been hiccups abroad as well, not least the debut performance of their last show, One Hell Of A Do, in Minneapolis which, according to Pat, bombed rightly .
That was awful, confirms Jon. The first time we did the show there the audience were just looking at us saying What the fuck is going on here? They couldn t handle it. They d come to see this grand formal show in The Great History Theatre of America . . . and they got us.
We had our own problems with that as well, Pat chuckles. Our visas had got fucked up and were late. We were supposed to be out there two days earlier getting set up and getting the vibe of how we should treat the show, but we ended up landing in Minneapolis after flying for 18 hours. We d been up for 28 hours by the time the show was over, we were fucked. It turned out grand in the end, though, because we d given ourselves three days preview and we were able to chop and change, but the first night was a fuckin disaster.
Tonight's show in the Tivoli is anything but a shambles and the spectacular finish is greeted with the customary standing ovation. As the crowd leave, several people look anxiously over their shoulders, half expecting no doubt earnestly hoping to see Tadhg or Paddy running towards them one last time in order to re-route them towards a less convenient exit. They don't appear.
No sooner has the theatre emptied than Pat and Jon emerge in their civvies. Another show finished, another few pounds in the bank. Backstage, Tadhg's Civil Defence sash hangs on a rail adjacent to Paddy Laoire's coat, Fr. B. Lee's soutane and Pat Conway's jacket. Lying on the floor nearby are Timmy Leary's enormous hands, the fingers drumming in anticipation of the next night's show.
We're hallucinating now, it's time to hit d'pub and get the stouts in lively. n
I Doubt It Says Pauline runs at the Tivoli Theatre until January 31st.