The broad stage of London's Barbican Theatre is no stranger to extraordinary events. The backstage area is hung with photographs of particularly stellar names in music and the place itself is run with a precision that, rightly, expects the very best from its performers. That said, when 2,000 people stood and applauded the piper Liam O'Flynn and the poet Seamus Heaney, there was that deep and steadying feeling that two real masters had just been at work - and everybody knew it.
The reason for this recent on-stage association between Heaney and O'Flynn, was the recording of a CD and the subsequent making of the film Keeping Time to be screened on BBC 2 tomorrow night. Set in a huge 18th-century house in Henrietta Street in Dublin, the film aims to "keep time" in a complementary sense to the words and music of poet and piper, and sets itself the challenge of achieving a rhythm, a metre and a cadence all of its own. It is therefore a unique collaboration between poet, musician, cinematographer, and, it has to be said, the house itself.
Directed by Philip King and Declan Quinn (whose next assignment is with Robert de Niro), the film is informed by a rare regard for words and music - an approach certainly appreciated by Heaney and O'Flynn. Heaney is keen to describe the finished product as a work between the different participants.
"I am very aware of the problems in putting poetry or a speaker of poetry on television," he says. "I think the entrancement there is definitely for the eye. And it has been a perennial problem of whether to have the viewer's eye trained up-close or trained on a page or whatever. I think that this is going to be an experiment in matching the words, and the daydream that the word and the music sets out, with the daydream that the image sets out. I understand this to be a piece of camera work that is, in itself, designed to beguile the viewer."
At the heart of the Heaney/O'Flynn collaborations is the fact that they work so well together. Their respective voices, musical and poetic, seem somehow similarly pitched and their personal ease together is also apparent. While collaborations of this nature are often disastrous, there is an evident solidity to this one. Each, without histrionics, matches the other in performance and tone - a big poem is followed by a big tune and the audience is left in little doubt that if there were a Nobel prize for piping, the name of Liam O'Flynn would be on it.
For O'Flynn, deeply conscious of tradition and his position within it, the association with Heaney is a natural one. Indeed he has often gone to Heaney's poetry for particular inspiration, notably on his albums The Given Note and Out To Another Side, indicating a shared interest in ideas of gift, craft and creativity. Heaney and he may be working in separate disciplines, but he is very aware that they are nevertheless quite close in their respective activities.
"Myself and Heaney have a very comfortable relationship," he says. "There's an awareness going on there between us - without one side ever putting any pressure on the other. And it's a very natural alliance. I always feel that poetry and music are two methods of expression which are very intimate and there's a lot of intuition and instinct involved. For myself and a poet like Seamus Heaney, there is also that very acute awareness of the past. I've heard Seamus talking about a responsibility towards the past - not in any heavy way - but it's there. And what we're about is a parallel expression of powerful and living traditions."
In the film, the past is further represented by the setting. The 18th century house in Henrietta Street loads the atmosphere with reminders of tradition and physical history. Once a very grand Dublin house of extraordinary splendour, it fell into decline around the time of the Act of Union and further declined throughout the 19th century. Earlier this century it was converted into tenements and, at one stage, almost 100 people lived in it. It is, as Philip King puts it, "a house which can hold the bigness of the work". Heaney too talks of tradition and history but adds that any romantic notion about the historic cultural significance of poet and piper is perhaps only "at the back of the mind". That said, he is very conscious both of O'Flynn's valued lineage and of the real power of pipes themselves.
"I have to say that I have a strong sense of pleasure and pride in sitting beside a piper of Liam's mystery. We tend to think of pipers as individuals. Leo Rowsome and Seamus Ennis and Willie Clancy are names to conjure with and Liam O'Flynn's is also a name to conjure with. To sit beside that singularity, and share in it, is a pleasure. In terms of the actual performance on the stage, the pipes themselves call and raise up the spirit and also quieten and open up the daydream part of people. Television changes that again of course and so it's a big challenge for the camera to bind it all together. But I trust the conception that Philip King and Declan Quinn have. They have worked at it and in the course of the four days' filming I became increasingly impressed with the kind of preparation and forethought they had put into it. `Impressed' is a mild word! They conceived of it in terms of the setting of the house and in terms of the textures and imagery and so on. To some extent I think Liam and myself are subject matter in this."
There is, however, an inevitable sense of "the document" about the film, even though both men have been well-documented before. O'Flynn has been the subject of an hour-long documentary called The Piper's Call - also made by Philip King - and several quite wonderful films have been made on Heaney, notably by David Hammond and Bill Miskelly - all of which have explored the poet and his locality. Keeping Time however is a different kind of film. It is, in all things, performance-led and covers the expanse of each artist's repertoire and career. Heaney's contribution includes everything from Digging to a section of his translation of Beowulf. O'Flynn is there with the likes of Port na bPucai and Aisling Gheall. Above all it is a celebration of the work itself - and this, according to O'Flynn, is at the centre of the whole project.
"When Philip King set about this, he set himself an enormous challenge. He's not just inspecting the thing from outside - he has gone within. He's trying to bring the viewer inside. He wants people to experience the inner working of the music and the poetry for themselves. And while there's no effort being made at being precious about what either of us do, I think it is an important document. It's important because the musical and literary landscape is changing so fast, and this should give people some idea about their own roots and a notion of the importance of a tradition. The important thing here is that Philip King himself is also so conscious of the tradition and the ever-changing musical and literary landscape around him."
O'Flynn has spoken before of a time in Ireland when poetry and music were the only available forms of expression. He looks back to when his extraordinarily complex instrument was invented and the parallel development of the aisling, and it is here that he finds a strong link between his own art and that of the poet. For Heaney too there is a powerful link and, relishing it, he describes himself as extremely comfortable within O'Flynn's "field of force".
"Music was always something I was susceptible to myself. One of the things I regret in my life is not having made enough time and space for it - not having gone to concerts. I'm not just talking about traditional music but classical music as well. I think to be in the physical presence of the music-makers is a very salubrious and enlarging experience. What links music and poetry is an undersound or an under-song. There is definitely, in every poet's voice , a register to which it's tuned. That's about the real equivalent, a sense of everything tuned to a certain musical register. If you take Shakespeare's sonnets they are pitched at a certain level. If you take Milton he's pitched at another level. Milton is an organ. Emily Dickinson is a violin. Yeats is trumpets I suppose!"
Keeping Time is on BBC 2, tomorrow at 7.55 p.m.