Kildare > Arts > Tom Hickey in The Gallant John-Joe By Tom MacIntyre

Friday 19th and Saturday 20th July, 8pm at The Riverbank

The Gallant John-Joe, a play for one actor, a play for Tom Hickey by Tom MacIntyre. The Hickey/ MacIntyre collaborations are a celebrated part of Irish theatrical history, particularly since The Great Hunger (1986), which took the Edinburgh Festival by storm, winning a Fringe First Award, and then touring to London, Paris, Leningrad, Moscow and New York.

Such collaborations cannot be arranged. They happen or they don't. And they defy explanation. All you can say is that working together these two, actor and writer, catch a searing note that has little to do with convention, and a great deal to do with the tide-rip of the unconscious.

The Gallant John-Joe gives us John-Joe Concannon's soliloquy on his tattered existence. It is a tour-de-force of story-telling, swinging from the tragic to the richly comic. A Lear-like figure, John-Joe, too, is circled by phantoms. With the relish of the afflicted he brings them before us, beguiles them, and us, by sheer word-magic. By gesture. By silences that seethe.

His melodic ramblings are both instantly recognisable and marvellously strange. John-Joe may be broken, indomitable, silent, noisy and articulate, but what keeps him on his feet is his capacity to make a story of anything that occurs, to find the word, the phrase, the sentence. He uses language as crutch, ointment, talisman. Stories, they say, only happen to those who are able to tell them.

Tom MacIntyre is one of the most daring and excitingly original Irish writers working to-day. He is widely published as playwright, poet and writer of fiction. His work - whatever the genre - is marked by a willingness to experiment formally, focusing consistently on the rigours, excitement and elusive magic of the journey. In the creak of the door between our mundane world and "the other side" lies the note that haunts him. In 2001 he received the American Ireland Literary Fund Award.

Tom Hickey is one of the leading Irish actors of his generation. He has worked extensively at the Abbey Theatre, creating leading roles in new Irish drama, written by the foremost Irish playwrights, including Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, and as actor, collaborator and director with Tom MacIntyre.

His films include: My Left Foot, Cal, Fools of Fortune, Circle of Friends, Butcher Boy and Ken Loach's Raining Stones, in which he gave a notable performance as Father Barry. He also appears in the soon to be released Possession (dir. Neal Labute) starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Ekhart.

** Further information from Carmel White, Media Reach pr tel. (01) 4961494
e-mail: carmelwhite@eircom.net

What the Press Said:

Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, November 2001

"What is it about Tom Hickey that makes him such a unique presence on the Irish stage? There's his courage, of course. Hickey is one of the few established actors who will go into the uncharted realms beyond embarrassment, glamour and convention. There's also his physical energy, that extraordinary repertoire of gestures and expressions through which his whole body speaks to an audience. ……
The play…gives full rein to the exuberance of MacIntyre's prose. John-Joe's baroque monologue is a torrent of mumblings and malapropisms, of mediaeval dialect and pop slang…It is a performance of rare virtuosity, in which there is not a hair's breath between author, actor and text. Though the play is an act of mourning for the individuality lost in a blander Ireland, it is itself a fierce vindication of a lingering uniqueness."

Emer O'Kelly, Sunday Independent, March, 2001
"The writing is prose poetry, lyrical, expressionistic, and a mournfully delicate elegy for a simpler world…..

This is complex, satisfying theatre, played by Tom Hickey with intense emotion, superb technique, and apparently deep understanding of both thesis and text".

Rattlebag Arts Programme, RTE Radio One
"Riveting"

Mick Heaney, The Sunday Times, July 2001
"…a vivid portrait of a man at odds with his daughter, his country and himself. Hickey delivers a bravura performance as John-Joe Concannon, a physically decrepit but verbally dextrous widower whose obsession with his teenage daughter's supposed pregnancy highlights his alienation from the discombobulating facets of modern Ireland. Grotesquely funny and occasionally harrowing….

Patrick Brennan, The Irish Examiner, July 2001
Hickey is mesmerising in his playing of a way of being the is wildly anarchic, flawed and yet infused with the vigour of the life force… An Unmissable masterpiece"

Andrew McKimm, Evening Herald, July 2001
"The Gallant John-Joe is an essay on an unravelling mind brilliantly performed by Tom Hickey"

Patrick Brennan, The Irish Examiner, July 2001
Hickey is mesmerising in his playing of a way of being the is wildly anarchic, flawed and yet infused with the vigour of the life force… An Unmissable masterpiece"

Andrew McKimm, Evening Herald, July 2001
"The Gallant John-Joe is an essay on an unravelling mind brilliantly performed by Tom Hickey"

For further information, please contact Catriona Fallon on (045) 448314

Tickets can be booked in person at the Riverbank, by calling (045) 448333, or by e-mail at boxoffice@riverbank.ie