Enda Walsh's new play for Corcadorca is quietly ambitious - it opens with the Creation. But Misterman, which previews at the Granary Theatre in Cork from April 22nd, is perhaps less concerned with God than it is with godliness. This dark tale of a bright-eyed zealot had its genesis a couple of years ago, when Walsh and Corcadorca had just scored an international hit with Disco Pigs.
"It was the time all the paedophile stuff was in the papers," says Walsh, "and I wanted to do something really horrible centred around that. So I wrote this piece called Love Underneath in a couple of days, just belted it out and I tell you, if anyone had broken into the flat when I was writing it, they'd have been horrified - there were all these cuttings tacked to the wall and post-it notes of religious philosophy, chunks of Thomas Aquinas . . . "
Corcadorca finally looked at the piece a couple of months ago and decided to bring it back to life. "It had to change a lot. I wanted the idea of this really innocent character who's obsessed with religion but there's something wrong, there's a streak in him. And after Disco Pigs, which was very urban, I wanted to write something that was really rural Irish, getting in the idea of the mammy-son relationship that's so traditional to Irish theatre."
And thus was born Misterman. It tells of thirty-something Thomas, self-appointed moral guardian of the town of Inishfree, living with his mammy and dreaming of the glory days when his father, now dead, ran the town shop. While Inishfree might be a sly allusion to the lake isle of Yeats's romantic Ireland, the play's tension is charged by the shock of the contemporary.
Mammy, serene in her invalidity, is awed by the romantic hubbub of Australian soaps, and nurses a savage Jammy Dodgers habit. She says things like: "You have the grave looking lovely!" Thomas is a perky little varmint, fired with the red hot zeal of the righteous, and he banters merrily with the neighbours. But you don't want to be there when the banter stops.
It's a one-man show and after much arm-twisting from Corcadorca director Pat Kiernan, and prompting from Tom Murphy among others, Walsh agreed to play the role of Thomas himself. He'll work from an array of tape feeds, the usual selection of Corcadorca effects and with what you mightn't be thanked for calling dream sequences.
"It became completely different when I started performing it myself, completely. Whatever was on the page has been transformed, it has been tightened and honed to a huge degree. The whole thing has developed so much over the past few weeks."
This is the norm for Corcadorca. Walsh doesn't present his work as a fait accompli, just as a loose draft to be ripped apart by the pack. With just a couple of weeks to the opening, new scenes, and even new characters, are being added with abandon.
"We've all worked together for so long now and there's a real trust there. That's so great for a writer, to have people like that around. Like the other day we came up with this completely new scene and it was so easy, I went off for a while, came back with three pages of script and we all basically sat around and said `yeah, that line's good, cut that, that's good' and so on."
The story of much contemporary theatre is the story of descent - into madness, gall, murderousness - and while Misterman continues this line, the hints here are sparingly sprinkled, the signals subtle.
"There is the sense throughout that Thomas's hero, his father, was an animal. It's always alluded to that Da was a bastard. Someone stole a paper from the shop and he beat him senseless and to Thomas, this is hilarious - oh wasn't that brilliant out of Daddy! He's always switching, from this innocent little boy type to something much darker."
The godliness in Misterman is malevolent and the tone-shifts, when they filter through, are eerily jarring, sour with the spite of the hard-chaw believer. Thomas believes he is being let down by those he lives among, by those who are venal, and he screeches that they must "stop the rot, stop the rot!" He feels God "piercing me with His goodness".
"It's so strange really," says Walsh. "It's such an odd little play and it's incredibly difficult to perform. But I'm mad about the character, I love him, he's adorable! You could just keep him going and going and going."
Last Monday night, Pat Kiernan might have been inclined to disagree. "We had a terrible day today," he said. "Really, really terrible, we were banging our heads off the wall. But we've been through it all before and we've developed a sort of confidence and that usually sees us through."
Kiernan, along with designer Aideen Cosgrove, long-time collaborator Mick Heffernan and musical guru Cormac O'Connor, has been working long hours knocking the play into shape. Each of them, he says, can send the work spinning in new directions. Take the music.
"Cormac will be there as we're rehearsing a scene and he'll get something down on a keyboard or a sampler or whatever and he'll start working off that. Initially with Misterman, the plan was for a boys' choir with a lot of Irish stuff thrown in, but that's been done so much before, and when Cormac came up with his take on things, it seemed right."
Sneak-previewed at a reading of the play at the Triskel Arts Centre last week, the music is jazzy and snazzy, almost a cocktail score, and set against Walsh's hyper-expressive delivery, it sent the piece down a strange and eerie road, like a music box playing at a murder scene.
For now, the toil continues and between here and opening night, there will doubtlessly be more days of hand-wringing and head-banging. Afterwards, there'll be little respite, but it's shaping up to be a viciously busy year for the group.
After Misterman, they shoot a short film in Cork, thanks to a £7,000 award from Cavern film group and RTE. Then, there's a production of The Merchant Of Venice in the summer, possibly at the Opera House and also slated for the Galway Arts Festival. Misterman, meanwhile, will play the Traverse Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival and hits Dublin in the autumn. By then, Corcadorca will have completed a 60-minute radio play for RTE, Four Big Days In The Life Of Dessie Banks, and will have staged a new play, So It Goes, by Cork writer Neil O'Sullivan. Then it's off to the Bush Theatre in London to produce another new Walsh play, Bedbound.
Walsh hopes to have completed a full-length film script by then, about an eight-year-old who falls in love with his grandmother, and oh, action finally seems imminent on his film draft of Disco Pigs.
"It was brilliant to go around to Berlin and Toronto and Melbourne with Disco Pigs," says Pat Kiernan, "but we knew we had to get back and have a really active year in Cork. Our commitment is to the city above all."
What's healthy about Corcadorca at the moment is that it lacks decorum, and the weight of its ambition has been gaining steadily and in significant increments. Misterman seems an advance on Disco Pigs; the writer has grown more comfortable with the lyric sweep of the language. "I wanted it to be beautiful," Walsh says. "I was really conscious of that; I tried to make it really gorgeous. If you achieve that, it frees the character, you can send him up to heaven or whatever, you can do anything with him." And, in this case, you can startle Thomas with pin-pricks of truth. "And then I feel a sadness scoop me out," he says at one point. "I'm just so shocked to be reminded how beautiful the world can be." Misterman opens at the Granary Theatre, Cork on April 26th with previews from April 22nd
