ADMONITORY fingers have been wagging at Conall Morrisson in pubs and on street corners. "Tarry Flynn, eh? Mind what you do with my favourite novel." Set among the fields and lanes of his native Monaghan in the 1930s, Patrick Kavanagh's anti pastoral, autobiographical novel occupies a special place in the hearts of many readers.
It's clear that the director of the new stage version at The Abbey is also a fan. Conall Morrison has adapted it himself for a cast of 29, which includes a scattering of dancers from the Coisceim company. These tackle a range of roles, from hens to horses to heifers, as well as forming the congregation of the parish of Dargan from whom Tarry, the poet and small farmer, feels estranged.
Morrison's favourite quote from Tarry has been printed in huge type for each member of the cast: "Any incident can carry within it the energy of the imagination ...
"This is what I've tried to present, visually, on stage. Tarry is the locus, of course everything is filtered through his way of seeing things, his fertile mind." It is Kavanagh's celebration and revelation of the ordinary of "the spirit shocking/Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill" that is the impetus for this production, rather than the emotional spiritual and intellectual impoverishment of his world, circumscribed by poverty, convention and authoritarian religion.
Snatches of the novel's third person narrative are spoken by all of the characters in the ensemble, from Tarry's resentful sisters to passers by on bicycles, who form a shifting minichorus. "I have tried to remain true to the spirit of the novel, to the comedy the lyricism and the great pain that's there. We're getting underneath it," Morrisson says, with a huge scooping gesture.
The cast listened to archive recordings of Cavan accents, to get those "remarkable sounds" right. The spirit of Tom MacIntyre's memorable adaptation of Kavanagh's poem, The Great Hunger, over a decade ago, whispers through these stretched vowels and fluid movements; not because Morrisson is paying explicit homage to MacIntyre, but because that explosion of visual and physical exuberance is an inevitable influence in this territory.
The unliterary directness and candour of the novel, which Kavanagh later described as "the only authentic account of life as it was lived in Ireland this century", is ripe for stage adaptation, Morrisson believes, because the cadences of the lines lend themselves to being, spoken. "It stinks of glorious authenticity, he says. "I'm very excited about this - I just hope that Kavanagh is nodding down at us from the great big McDaids in the sky."