The King's Jester

f the many stand-ups spawned by the great flowering of Irish comedic talent in the 1990s, Ed Byrne was perhaps the most palatable to mainstream tastes. Unburdened by Dylan Moran’s misanthropic streak and seemingly uninterested in raising the hackles of the establishment a-la Tommy Tiernan, Byrne’s amiable, bloke-next-door persona seemed equally as suited to the homely environs of Des O’Connor Tonight as it did to the dog-eat-dog world of the London comedy circuit.

These days, Byrne seems intent on following the career trajectory favoured by many of his peers, as he proceeds to gradually phase out stand-up in preference for TV and film work. After successfully negotiating his entrée into the world of theatre with his 1997 Edinburgh show The Act (co-written and performed with fellow comedian Brendan Burns), Byrne’s latest bid to further boost his thespian credentials arrives in the shape Kings Of The Road, an acclaimed comedy-drama currently enjoying a successful run in the Ambassador Theatre.
Kings Of The Road follows the fortunes of three successive generations of busmen from the same Belfast family, all of whom experience love and loss against – inevitably – the fraught backdrop of the Troubles. Did Ed have any reservations about tackling such well-thumbed subject matter?
“Well, in fairness there isn’t that much ‘fraught backdrop of the Troubles’ type stuff in the show,” he argues. “I mean, aside from the fact that my Dad is in a coma for much of the play, we don’t really touch on the conflict that much. To be honest, it’s not really about the Troubles at all, that was probably just a good starting point for the story Brian (McAvera, Kings Of The Road playwright) wanted to tell. It’s more to do with the fact that my dad’s not around anymore, it doesn’t at any stage lapse into the hysteria of ‘Oh, the horrible injustice of it all! When will the fighting stop!” It’s more about how shit things can happen to good people, y’know?”
Does the repetition necessarily involved in performing a long-running theatrical show ever get to be wearying?
“To be honest, in Edinburgh I did find it quite draining because we were doing it every night for three weeks. It’s not really comparable to stand-up, because with stand-up you can feel a bit tired before you go on, but then the adrenaline kicks in when you’re performing and you walk off feeling totally elated. Whereas with theatre, you’re calling on a lot of different emotions throughout the show, and you can end up feeling a bit fucked by the end. So it’s a little bit harder, I suppose.”
While Byrne harbours ambitions to definitively break from type and essay an entirely straight, non-comedic role, hotpress will play devil’s advocate and suggest he already achieved this goal in The Cassidys, a sitcom which regrettably took its place in RTE’s ever expanding comedy hall of shame. Although the undeniably talented cast and production crew gave of their best, the show was crippled by the perennial Montrose failings on resources (somewhere below meagre) and scheduling (The Cassidys was left to die on its arse in the half-hour between Friends and Bachelor’s Walk).
How does Ed look back on the experience these days?
“You see, the thing is that you work with all these people for three months,” he begins, with consummate diplomacy, “and everybody becomes good friends, and to start pointing out where things went wrong involves apportioning blame, and you feel bad trying to do that. But all I will say – and this is the weird thing – is that the laughter you hear when you watch the show is all real, it’s not canned laughter. I mean, the audience in the studio were really into it! But obviously something happened when it went down the camera and got beamed into people’s homes, because they just didn’t find it funny.”
On a more positive note, Byrne has made serious inroads into the comedy scene Stateside, where he retains an open invitation to appear on The Conan O’Brien Show whenever he’s in New York.
“Well, that’s kind of a weird one – it’s a huge deal to appear on it and it causes a lot of fuss, and yet it’s on at one in the morning and not actually watched by that many people. It’s strange, everyone knows who he is, and appearing on the show has huge cachet within the industry, and yet it’s only really this cult programme with minority appeal. I mean, it used to be that if you appeared on the Tonight show that was you famous, whereas nowadays you can go and do it ten times and get next to no recognition.
“And the odd thing is that if I go on and do a great ten-minute set, it’s not gonna make me famous, whereas if I go on and die on my arse and they have to cut me from the show, news of that will spread like wildfire throughout the industry. So there’s everything to lose and not a lot to gain.”
In truth, Byrne shouldn’t agonise so much. At this stage, Hoot Press would confidently back him to be value for money in just about any circumstance. b

Kings Of The Road continues its run at the Ambassador Theatre until October 24