Stage - Divine Comedy

IT’S PROBABLY a little too blatant to run a line of comparison between the newer, younger breed of comedians, like Sean Hughes, and comic-actors like Eamon Morrissey. However, one distinct difference is that Sean has a TV series and Eamon hasn’t.

Not that Morrissey is necessarily longing for a TV show. Having just completed his stint in the Abbey’s production of Famine he’s patently quite content to be presenting his own one-man show, Just The One, at Dublin’s Andrews Lane Theatre. Yet he is aware that if he, or any of his fellow Irish comedians, do dream of having their own TV series they’d probably have to go to Britain, and most likely Channel Four, to realise that dream – as indeed Sean Hughes had to.

“Everybody knows that RTE doesn’t back comedy as much as it should,” he says. “All you have to do is think of the number of shows that are on either Channel 4 or ITV or the BBC. They will put on, say, ten sitcoms to get just one winner, which we then all hear about. So it’s not a question of RTE doing one sitcom and thinking they’re going to get a hit out of that. They haven’t done nearly enough. They just haven’t got the interest. I even doubt if they have the technical ability to do it.”

Is that a veiled attack on RTE’s latest, and critically-mauled sitcom, Extra, Extra?

“Not really,” says Eamon. “I saw the first episode and didn’t think it was quite as bad as the critics made it out to be. I was amazed at the negative reaction to it and it made me feel if they had Jesus Christ appearing in The Life Of Brian it would still be hammered to hell. But RTE did, at least, take a chance on it and my fear would be that if the response remains so negative it will make them shy away from similar experiments. I think they should do lots more, work on a steady stream of stuff until they do get it right.”

“This is not, says Eamon, a coded plug for RTE to also try recording his own one-man show at Andrews Lane, which is a wonderfully witty, and incisive history of drink, and of drinkers in Ireland.

This is where I differ from people like Sean Hughes, apart from the generational thing,” he says. “I don’t particularly warm to his work on television because it is very much the product of the video age, whereas my roots are basically theatre. The live theatre context is still the essence of it all, for me. And despite all the high tech, audiences still love to just sit in a theatre and be told stories, which is what I do. Tell stories and act out the characters.

“So there’s no real point in covering that with a camera, because you’d get none of the feeling of that live setting, that rapport. But the spin-off from the success of TV shows like Sean’s is that live comedy is thriving, maybe even healthier than it’s ever been.”

Does Eamon Morrissey still get that essential buzz from performing, particularly from presenting a one-man show?

“Absolutely. I love doing something like Just The One, though obviously it can be a downer at times. For me the audience is the other half of the equation, they are the other characters when you’re working on your own. And it’s an intricate relationship you’re trying to build up from the beginning of the evening. It can go wrong! And it sure can be dispiriting when you go out there and see just a few faces in the audience. Especially when they don’t laugh – even though most of them are your family!”

• Joe Jackson

Also recommended: Two unusual fringe theatre events coming up over the next fortnight are Oscar And Jim and Hughie On The Wires. The Oscar and Jim referred to in the title of the Pink Panda theatre company’s production are Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison and the play has both discussing fame and infamy from their respective spaces in a Paris cemetery. Written by Fergal O’Byrne, the play premiers on December 15th at Andrews Lane.

Donal O’Kelly’s play Hughie On The Wires opens at Dublin’s City Arts Centre on December 6th and focuses on the ill-fated destiny of Hughie Farrell, a young man “unwittingly transformed into a living legend by the magic of the media” in war-torn El Salvador in the mid-1980s.