Coming to the Galway stage 40 years after its first production, LORNA SIGGINSgoes behind the scenes of an ambitious new production of Kavanagh's 'Tarry Flynn'

‘BIG shoes,” muses actor Barry Hopkins, thinking of how he is going to match the late great actor Donal McCann in Galway tonight. And big shoes they were; though it

was back in the late 1960s that McCann played the title role in PJ O'Connor's first stage version of Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn, in Dublin's Abbey Theatre and Dundalk.

More than four decades later, Hopkins is repeating the experience in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway – and loving every minute.

The difference is that he is playing with a much larger and essentially community-based cast, and Galway doesn’t have the Abbey’s budget, or revolving stage for that matter. It does have something else though – the combined talents of a team of more than 60, under the watchful eye of Galway Youth Theatre (GYT) director Andrew Flynn.

“This week is our first time on the set, and so everyone has been virtually living here since Monday,” Flynn (no relation to Tarry) explains. There were no quick visits to Ballybrit for the race meet, and both he and most of his production team were heavily involved for the past while in the Galway Arts Festival.

The actors are volunteers and that’s a sign of the times, he says. “When I was first taking interest in the theatre in the 1980s, a lot of people were not working. It’s the same this time, and this production has provided an invaluable outlet.”

Flynn first read Conall Morrison’s adaptation of Kavanagh’s novel five years ago, and was intrigued by the “epic nature” and “fusion of performance styles” in the tale of the young poet and farmer, searching for “big fields, young women and the meaning of life”. However, he also felt daunted and put the script away in a drawer.

He had no reason to feel so. Since coming to Galway, the Tipperary man has worked as assistant stage manager with Garry Hynes’s Druid theatre, moving on to GYT, where he has directed a series of challenging productions in equally challenging locations.

When Morrison’s script emerged from the drawer again, Flynn hadn’t seen the 1990s Abbey production – “I seldom do see a show before I tackle it, because this way you can be much freer,” he says. He auditioned 150 people and selected a cast of 65 – none of them professional actors.

Hopkins was delighted to secure the title role. “It’s a wonderful play based on a wonderful book that has resonance now, in that Tarry is a complex character, a sort of prophet in his own land who was ostracised, and yet was always struggling to live up to expectations.”

Mary McHugh, who plays Tarry's mother, hasn't missed her family too much during the rehearsals, because both her son Myles (17) and husband John are also in the cast. McHugh is one of the most experienced in the troupe, having played opposite Anna Manahan in the Pegasus production of John B Keane's Sive in Headford, Co Galway. She has also played Pegeen Mike in Synge's Playboy of the Western Worldin the Abbey.

McHugh returns to stage after a six-year break, rearing two kids, and says she has “forgotten how terrifying it is”. “You don’t get an opportunity to work with the likes of Jane Talbot (stage manager), Eoin MacCarthaigh (set design), Andrew, Niall Cleary (co-director) and Craig Flaherty (production manager) too often,“she says. “We are from all walks of life here and many generations, and it is only someone with Andrew’s temperament that could take it on and pull it off. He has unbelievable energy, so calm and so reasoning, and he has the entire script in his head when we need a prompt.”

The cast play multiple roles, both animal and human, requiring speedy costume change and the ability to walk and talk like a hen. High Nelly bicycles have to be ridden across Eoin MacCarthaigh’s elliptical crossroads set, painted by artist Ger Sweeney, with road signs pointing to Muff (68 and a half miles) and Shercock (half a mile).

Music has been specially composed by Sean Moloney, and is played live on stage by Moloney, family and friends, while Adam Fitzsimons – who has worked with Flynn for the past decade at GYT and is technical manager for the Galway Arts Festival – has designed the lighting.

Like Flynn, Fitzsimons hasn’t seen Morrison’s interpretation, and for the same reasons. “I prefer to start with a blank canvas,” the NUI Galway graduate explains.

Morrison in turn says he is delighted that Flynn secured such a substantial assembly.

As he writes in the programme, “at last Tarry would have his full-sized community to live amongst and rail against; a large body of actors of, yes, all ages, shapes and sizes who will bring to bear their own experience and skills and spirit; a large community who will enter into and – all importantly – invite their audience to share in the energy of the imagination.” As Kavanagh himself might not say, go see...

Tarry Flynnopens at the Town Hall Theatre tonight and runs nightly (8.30pm) until August 8th. Tickets €16 /€12, 091-569777, thtsales@galwaycity.ie