Tarry Flynn

Town Hall Theatre

The power of a church, the struggle for land, the fear of a voice that questions some of the accepted values of a community – such issues may seem a little tame for Galway Youth Theatre, which has built a reputation through director Andrew Flynn for tackling challenging work by writers such as Enda Walsh, Neil La Bute and Mark O’Rowe.

However, Patrick Kavanagh's 1948 novel, Tarry Flynn, was banned briefly; its semi- autobiographical tale of a young farmer and poet who has, as scriptwriter Conall Morrison, observes, "a deep sense of place" but is also "out of place", has enduring resonance.

Andrew Flynn has admitted that he found Morrison’s 1996 stage adaptation for the Abbey somewhat daunting.

That’s partly due to the need for a large cast, large enough to reflect the poet’s sense of isolation, as he reads voraciously, dreams of young unattainable women and copes with an overbearing mother who knows her son has a “kink” that she cannot “fathom” and frets about “the shocking things that he sometimes said about religion and the priests”.

The director’s response was to recruit from the amateur acting community, moulding a professional production with music by Seán Moloney and with Owen Mac Carthaigh’s sparse but striking crossroads set.

The play opens with a series of vignettes – thatching, rowing, haymaking – and Barry Hopkins’s anxious Tarry is a perfect foil for Mary McHugh’s mother, his resentful sisters (Patricia Bohan, Beau Holland, Seona Tully), the fearsome Fr Daly (Gerry Ferguson) and the chorus, played by the entire cast.

Conor Geoghegan’s contortions as a crucifix, as a chicken, as a hormonal heifer and a horse would surely have the original author laughing back in his Co Monaghan resting place of Inniskeen.

Ends tomorrow