The ghost with the most

Well, we’ve already had a book, movie and rock band called The Revenants. So get ready for the world premiere of the play where the plural of ‘revenants’ is reduced to its singular status in a work penned by Patrick McCabe.

But before we discuss McCabe’s latest play, The Revenant, a monologue written specifically for actor Peter Trant, what exactly does the word mean? According to the Galway Arts Festival press release it means a ‘person who has returned, especially, supposedly from the dead.’
But what is meant by ‘especially, supposedly’? Actually, the literary definition is ‘a dead person believed to have come back as a ghost.’
Either way, that press release then goes on to say, ‘the character is arguing a case, pleading it even, and is waiting to be judged, and that judgement seems like a foregone conclusion. The text is littered with echoes of the past, the past of the character, the past of a drama. A monologue, but a monologue haunted by a past dialogue. There is no apparent other, except for the shadowy figure behind.’
All of which, let’s face it, is pretty abstract. But the person given the responsibility of literally bringing this ghost of a play down to earth is director/playwright Joe O’ Byrne who has previously collaborated with McCabe on Frank Pig Says Hello and The Dead School.
And he believes that Patrick’s most recent novel Winterwood, which was published last year, marks a change of tone and direction for the writer and that this, too, is a defining feature of The Revenant.
“Pat’s work is always in evolution and Winterwood is quite different from what books he’s written before in that it is a change in style, a development and in some ways this play, at a theatre level, is a mirror image of that,” he says.
“It is the story of Francie Brady, (hero of McCabe’s The Butcher Boy) 30, 40 years on. But, also, stylistically, it’s quite different to The Butcher Boy or even Frank Pig Says Hello, in terms of how its presented, the tone of it; the nature of it, everything.”
But, for those readers of hotpress who may be more familiar with, say The Butcher Boy, could Joe be a little more specific?
“The earlier work is very rooted is a small town world that existed whereas in 2007, there is that phenomenon of change and growth in Ireland which has led to the sense that the small town is being eroded, or disappearing. That’s reflected in The Revenant. This is a character who has lived through that transformation from having been a small town character to now being someone who exists in this town but people, maybe, don’t know him, don’t even remember him. Because the folk memory is disappearing given that Ireland is in this time of transition.’
O’ Byrne also suggests that “as with Francie Brady” the world the revenant occupies “exists largely in his own head” and he lives “with one foot in the real world and one foot in the nether world.” That duality, again, sums up the quintessential McCabe literary creation doesn’t it?
“Yeah, his work always had that imaginative quality,” Joe agrees. “But in Winterwood and play this there definitely is the sense of an other world, even a ghost world, or a ghost/spiritual world where the characters now live. They are still the repository of the folk memory of the small town.”
Peter Trant, who plays the lead role in The Revenant also lived through many of the small town changes experienced by his character in this play – and indeed, McCabe – has gone through and that explains, says O’ Byrne, why the author wrote the play particularly for this actor.
“In fact, Pat has worked with him a number of times and wanted him to perform this piece for a number of reasons,” Joe elaborates. “Like Pat, he’s from Clones, Pat’s known him a long time and Peter himself has seen the transition in Clones so there are all those links that make him just right for this.”
The same clearly is true of the fact that Joe O’ Byrne is directing the piece. However, when I spoke to him he was in the middle of rehearsals, clearly exhausted and admitted “the real joy came – it usually does – when I first read Pat’s script, whereas rehearsals, for a director are mostly repetitive and a slog, just endlessly trying to get it right”. Will they get it right? Go see and decide for yourself.