A Night At The Peacock

Joseph O’Connor is a best-selling and critically acclaimed author known not just for his historical novels (Star Of the Sea, Redemption Falls, Ghost Light), but also his non-fiction work and RTÉ Drivetime podcasts, the CD version of which topped the Irish indie charts just last week. Philip King is a broadcaster, musicologist and musician best known for his work with Scullion, the award-winning Bringing It All Back Home series and the annual Other Voices. These two forces of nature will take to the stage in the Peacock Theatre next month for a week-long all-singing, all-talking exploration of the influence of Irish-American ballads on O’Connor’s fiction.

So was this grand plan hatched at a boozy all-night session in the wilds of Kerry?
“I wish!” O’Connor chuckles. “No, we did this at Cúirt last year and it went quite well. Philip was running it, and since he knows everything about music, we tried to include a musical dimension to it, so he played some songs and recordings and I read from some of the books and the Drivetime stuff and talked about the influence of music on my stuff and on other writers. We’ve done it eight or 10 times now around the country, and then the Peacock asked us to do it. And y’know, when Mother Abbey Theatre calls, you have to!”
Perhaps they want their pound of flesh as recompense for Joe’s scandalous portraits of Yeats and Lady Gregory in Ghost Light.
“They probably deserve it after the abuse I heaped on some of their founding fathers! Though I must say they’ve been extremely supportive about the book. And one of the nice things was there was a portrait of Molly Allgood in the Abbey for years and years, upstairs off the bar, and you had to go out and turn left and then turn right at the men’s jacks and eventually you would happen upon it. And since the book has come out I’ve noticed Molly has been moved into the foyer where she belongs – so if I’ve achieved nothing else, I’ve achieved that!”
Among the special guests appearing at the Peacock extravaganza will be Joe’s sister Sinéad, Paul Brady, Scullion, and fiddler Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, who, according to Joe, “does all sorts of strange things with traditional Irish music, and he gets into the beauty of it and the strangeness of it. We’ll be talking and reading and there’ll be poetry and singing. The feeling of it is a celebration. In these shitty times we’re in, culture might bob up at the end of it. One of the things we might have at the other side of the tsunami is the notion that our culture and our songs and storymaking and language might be more important than NAMA, and might even play some role in helping us to get out of the mess. That’s making it sound very serious, but it should be fun.”
One thinks of the line from ‘Springhill Mining Disaster’: “There’s no more water, or light, or bread/So we’re living on songs and hope instead.”
“I suppose people feel a sense of loss and hopelessness at the moment,” Joe concedes, “and even embarrassment about people being Irish at all. When you see how some of the politicians go on, there’s a kind of a shame about it. It’s been a very painful process coming out of 10 or 15 years where it became very seductive to believe that we were so happening and cool and the colour supplements of Europe were full of stories about us, and even the most sceptical among us would have been taken in by it.
“But I noticed teaching last year in New York, in Baruch College, 18-year-old kids, a lot of them from immigrant families, fluent Russian and Hispanic and Korean speakers, the thing they know about Ireland isn’t this dungeon of child abuse and corrupt bankers, it is our music and our novelists and poets. That area of culture still is what makes Ireland considerable around the world, and I think it has a value. It meant an awful lot to me as a kid, and means a lot to every writer and musician I know. In the late ‘70s when everything was desolate, and you just had this sense that you lived in this place where the rain came down and the purpose of education was to prepare you to emigrate, it really was music that saved Dublin, it detonated something, and did far more for Dublin than any politician. It really did give people a sense of belief. So our little evening is about trying to treasure those things. It’s like Heaney’s poem ‘The Given Note’, which is about things that have been given to us by the past, and like everything given to you, sometimes you don’t value it. But as the downturn has kicked in, the numbers of people coming back to the arts has increased. It’s like the last days of the Weimar Republic!”

Joseph O’Connor and Philip King will be on the Peacock stage from November 15 to 20. Tickets €18 – €22.