Why the show tunes must go on

The perceived wisdom says it isn't possible to produce a musical in Ireland. I ignored all that and now 'Improbably Frequency' would beg to differ, says ARTHUR RIORDAN

SOME YEARS AGO, I wrote a musical, and it was a hit. A surprise hit, you'd have to say, because Improbable Frequencydoesn't conform to any of the tried-and-tested present-day templates for a successful musical. It doesn't exhume and stitch together the hits of a much-loved 1970s/1980s band; it doesn't address itself solely to the arcane tribal demands of a girls' (or boys') night out; and it doesn't feature tunes by that celebrated electronic composer, Android Webber.

In many ways, though, Improbable Frequencyis very much a traditional musical comedy. It's a boy-meets-girl story, with original songs, set in a picturesque and exotic location. So far, so South Pacific.It also includes political satire, code-breaking, and, er . . . amorous encounters conducted in jigtime amid numerous threats to Ireland's neutrality. It's also threaded through with crossword clues and a science-fiction element. (Its picturesque, exotic location, by the way, is Dublin in 1941 – bear with me, I'll come back to that.)

Creating a musical, even a relatively low-budget one, involves a large investment of time and resources, and is always a big gamble. Lynne Parker, the artistic director of Rough Magic, must have been aware of this when she approached myself and the musical duo Bell Helicopter with an offer of a commission.

As potential collaborators, we were what you might call a brave choice. None of us had had any experience in putting a musical together. In the past, I’d made a few forays into rap, and I’d written occasional songs and pieces of verse for plays. Conor Kelly and Sam Park of Bell Helicopter had written theatre and film soundtracks, and sound design and installations for plays and galleries, but this was a quantum leap for both sides.

Another potential handicap: by and large, musicals are based on existing stories, from novels, from the works of Shakespeare, from films. This makes sense: a musical can often be a balancing act between song and narrative, and if you have a familiar story, it means you needn’t over-burden your songs with the chore of exposition.

The story in Improbable Frequency, though, is not only original, it's quite intricate.

Waft of Woodbine, pints of porter,

Pubs fill up and come alive,

Could I? Would I?

Should I ought to

Send some names to MI5?

– Special agent Betjeman, in Improbable Frequency

The germ of the story suggested itself to me when I encountered a couple of strange little nuggets.

One was that the popular English poet John Betjeman, a jolly, gregarious character who would one day become poet laureate, was stationed in Dublin in 1941 as the British press attache, and was widely reputed to have been a spy.

The other nugget was that in the same year, according to files released decades later, MI5 was scrupulously monitoring an Irish radio requests programme: apparently it suspected that the national broadcaster was sending covert messages to the Nazis.

The story I eventually came up with involved a bewildered British codebreaker, despatched to Dublin to investigate suspicious radio requests. In the course of his mission, he encounters the aforementioned Betjeman; he also meets the novelist and Irish Timescolumnist Myles na gCopaleen, and the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. All three men were living in neutral Dublin in 1941, and all three would be crucial in shaping the world of the play.

It's important for a musical to exist in a world of its own – a heightened world where, for instance, bursting spontaneously and frequently into song might somehow seem a plausible way of going about your business. The Dublin of Improbable Frequencyis such a world, and its citizenry are behaving very strangely indeed. It's a Dublin I tried to imbue with the surreal and anarchic spirit of na gCopaleen, a place where human behaviour is influenced directly by quantum physics, courtesy of Schrödinger, and where much of the dialogue emerges in Betjemanesque rhyme.

It’s also a place, not so unlike the real wartime Dublin, where Irish nationalism and Nazi-ism sometimes get along a little too comfortably for comfort:

With a song and a smile,

And a “sieg!” and a “heil!”

And a tooral-aye-ay for the IRA,

The Brits are at war

So we’ll give them what for

While they’re looking the opposite way!

– Muldoon, in Improbable Frequency

Before the play opened, I discovered that there was yet another hurdle to overcome, the biggest one of all, an obstacle I hadn’t been aware of, or I’d surely never have attempted to write the show.

Apparently, it simply isn’t practical, or even possible, to mount a new musical in Ireland. There isn’t a sufficient audience, we don’t have the performers, the expertise or the resources, it’s not part of our tradition. This was the widely held conventional wisdom, and one which stubbornly clings on in some quarters even today, now that we’re up to our oxters in Irish musicals.

Before the show opened, there were already grim predictions that it was bound to fail. To be fair, one prophetess of doom subsequently had the good grace to retract her prediction in the course of a rave review.

We are all in the gutter

But some of us have an ear to the ground.

– Myles, in Improbable Frequency

The show opened to strong reviews, and has been regularly revived since. But its success still always comes as a surprise and a relief. After the first production, several people intimated that, much as they loved it, they wondered whether it would travel outside Dublin.

Then, after a performance in Edinburgh, I overheard a plummy-voiced lady as she made her way out, proclaiming the show to be, "wonderful, but I wonder if anyone outside Britain would get it?". In December 2008, Improbable Frequencyopened off-Broadway. I stood on East 59th Street, watching the audience file in, many of them wealthy New York Jewish matrons, surely the most tuner-savvy class of people on the planet. Would they get it? Would it measure up? I began to wonder whether I might have been wiser to excise a few lines sung by the IRA man Muldoon.

To hell with the Jews

We’ll light up a fuse

While the British are looking away.

– Muldoon, in Improbable Frequency

Curtain call. Whooping, cheers, and a proper New York standing ovation.

And now we’re opening in the Gaiety. No language or culture barrier here: we know this audience will get it; and our cast, a mix of newcomers and old hands, are wonderful, as is the band.

Of course it’s a big venue, the biggest this show has played yet, so there’s some risk involved. But then, this isn’t a small show, and I think Alan Farquharson’s mind-boggling set, Sinéad McKenna’s 1940/Futurist lighting, and Kathy Strachan’s Weimar-inspired costumes will find their perfect complement in all that lush, old-style gilt-and-velvet opulence.

And risk? Well, when it comes to creating an Irish musical, that’s nothing new.

Improbable Frequencyis at the Gaiety Theatre until March 24th