CPI Archive 2008: Courting controversy: From a frozen night in Carron back in ‘82 to the great stages of Ireland, Europe and America, Sean Tyrrell’s musical adaptation of The Midnight Court has endured for a generation. As he prepares to hit the road once again, Andrew Hamilton chats to one of north Clare’s favourite adopted sons.
PAIN burned in his chest. The gasps, which only a moment earlier had seemed almost deafening, now slowly turned to silence as the audience held tight to one collective breath. Their disbelief could no longer be suspended. Yet there it stood, the offending missile - thrown over at least 16 rows of cushioned seat - lying motionless (yet somehow deeply alive) on the dark boards of the old Druid Theatre. You have to be angry to react in a theatre, but for a woman to remove a high-heel and launch it at a principle character of the hit show of that year’s Galway Arts Festival, well, the compulsion must have been almost unbearable. Yet in that moment, as he waited for the wind to return to his stinging lungs, Sean Tyrrell knew he had found something special. You see, for theatre to work it must inform as well as entertain. The best theatre however, must do all of this and more. It must excite an audience, shake them from their collective lethargy and impel them to action. Brian Merriman’s Cúirt an Mhean Oíche had been doing exactly that for decades uncounted, and when Tyrrell’s musical version became one of the shows of 1992, that tradition was sure to live on. “We had wanted to segregate the audience - to put the men on one side and the women on the other - so that it would develop into a bit of a confrontation. Somehow our director Maelíosa Stafford managed to pull it off and from there we were set,” remembers Sean.
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