Patrick McCabe's number is up with new showband-era play

A rehearsed reading of the Monaghan writer’s new play intrigues Mary Leland

WHO WOULD HAVE thought it? Here we are, halfway through Cork Midsummer Festival, and the author and playwright Patrick McCabe is admitting that he could sing every Big Tom number ever recorded while a member of his audience at Triskel Arts Centre is reminding us that Brendan Bowyer had a hit with the song Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Yes, it’s showband time.

The rehearsed reading of McCabe’s new play, The Stars of Bel Air, has been included as Corcadorca Theatre Company’s contribution to the festival, with Thomas Conway of Druid leading the postshow discussion. And, like a lot of us, getting it wrong.

With considerable justification, and not having seen the 45-minute segment before, Conway has picked up on the showband element only to be told by the director Pat Kiernan that the as yet embryonic play is not about showbands. “It’s more about trying to hang on to where you are,” Kernan says.

A cast including Barbara Brennan and Brendan Conroy has just given a vigorous reading of a script set in a midlands town where a priest, who if not defrocked is certainly unlaced, insists that there was such a time as the old days and that they were better.

Those days included Butch Moore and Walking the Streets in the Rain, and the text we hear seems to offer songs as the vehicle of memory and of dreams, as if paraphrasing Noel Coward’s remark about the power of cheap music.

Audience engagement develops into something more than a conversation. This is the purpose – and popularity – of the Theatre Development Centre operated by Corcadorca at Triskel, providing week-long residencies culminating in a public reading (and, in this case, a company production next year with music by Maurice Seezer).

By no means the finished play, what we have heard is the outcome of draft and redraft until Kiernan told McCabe to stop writing and instead to assemble what was there into “some kind of theatrical arc”.

While Kiernan is right to insist there’s a lot more than music going on (for example, matriarchy, infantilism), McCabe sees something both innocent and tragic in the operatic sweep of Walking the Streets.

“I’m not very articulate, actually,” he says, “but I think that the people who danced to that song had an innocence which is almost breathtaking; it’s a song that went so deep, offering these orphans of the earth the release of the soul through showband music.”

McCabe sees something both innocent and tragic in ‘Walking the Streets’. ‘The people who danced to it had an innocence which is almost breathtaking’