Long after this year's Dublin Theatre Festival ends, the best-remembered performance seems likely to be one which was not part of it. For three nights last week, one of Dublin's most singular outsiders, Mannix Flynn entertained, beguiled and moved audiences with Talking To The Wall, an unusually lyric one-man show of energy and passion; humour and pain which parades his extraordinary, instinctive talents. Even in the context of the Irish artistic world with its share of hard-drinking, self-destructive anti-heroes, Flynn has long been larger than life. And that life has embraced the entire range of Irish as well as human contradictions; poverty, pain, anger, self-destruction, imprisonment and ridicule. He found almost instant success as a professional actor in his early 20s, playing Puck in the Crucible in Sheffield and Gar Private in Friel's Philadelphia! Here I Come in Glasgow as well as numerous productions in Dublin with the Sheridan brothers, only to experience decline, while his desire for respect was often foiled by a flair for violence.
Having triumphed at this year's Edinburgh Festival with the show which had been rejected by Dublin Theatre Festival organisers last May - "the Festival did not reject the show, it rejected me and my company" - it would be understandable if Flynn's mood now were to be situated somewhere between defiance and glee. "No I'm not defiant, I'm just pleased it's gone well. I knew it was good, I believed in it. I was trying to do it for years, looking for money, asking for money. Writing and stopping; writing and stopping. Now I'm just hoping that maybe sometime I can stop worrying about financing it and concentrate on other things."
The man of whom the late Siobhan McKenna once said, "he's a bit of a genius, an original, although he reminds me of Jimmy Cagney" features at the heart of so many crazy stories, his life has always overshadowed his work. "Everywhere I go there's someone who'll say `oh Mannix, he's wild, he's mad, he's done this, he's done that. He just writes about his life, he's not really a writer.' You get dismissed as a lunatic, a laugh, a hardman, a spacer, a fool. People will decide who I am, what I am and I've never even met them." Flynn has certainly been damaged by gossip and invention although his early career complete with reform school and prison sentences, plus a list of subsequent court appearances have also contributed to the myths, some more real than mythic.
Years of hard living and alcoholism have left him with a battered, expressive face. It is also the ideal actor's instrument; mobile, cunning, candid, humorous, even vulnerable. He is 40, looks a lot older. It could be argued that Flynn was born old. Despite, or possibly because of his many, often surreal downs, he has survived.
His own son is now 19 and helped stage the show. Behind the tough talk, the exasperation, the colourful rhetoric and the logic, Flynn who at the moment despairs of his country, "I think Ireland is intent on turning itself into a suburb of England" - remains an optimist. "I know what it's like to be stalked by failure, to be seen as a social failure, to be expected to be a prison-drinking failure. I've been hunched up in that egg. If I did well they would always be ready to say "good old Mannix, he survived" or "good boy, he's learnt his lesson well." I've been patronised and harassed and harangued. But I'm still here because I discovered how to find myself, to save me from me, well, from my illness."
In person, he seems less jaunty than he sounds. Flynn is a small, compact, quick-moving man with fretful hair and steady mid-blue eyes. Dressed in a dark suit with a royal blue shirt and vaguely subversive tie, he is polite and friendly, initially edgy, a bit nervous - like someone waiting for a train that only might be on its way. Nothing is certain. "Did you like the show?" he asks not for the first time. He is drinking coffee and smoking, smoking, smoking. Isn't he worried about his voice. "No, it gives it resonance." As he lights one he offers me the pack and is disappointed on meeting a non-smoker. "Aw go on" he says as if daring a younger playmate to leap on the back of a passing truck.
He has had less than 36 hours to recover from four performances in two days, two shows performed back to back with only an hour's recovery. Still coming down from one, he was back on stage. How could he face a second show on each of those nights considering the physical demands of the work? "In the end of the day, the baby is crying, there's nothing you can do about it. . . " pause, "the thing about a show like this it that it feeds off your own energy".
Talking to the Wall is a revelation on many fronts. The language and voice are authentic Dublin, but the text is far more literary, poetic without being forced, while the voice alternates between report, lament, protest and casual memoir. The mood shifts but the delivery never falters. Above all even at its most explicit, it is a subtle work. Flynn catches the disappointment of the child, "Happy, happy birthday, where's me present? I am seven. "One, two, three, four, five, six , seven all good children go to Heaven, or is it Hell." Fear is also central to the memories. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven all bold boys go to the Christian Brothers and that's where you're going you little gurrier."
Its opening sequence which describes his birth has echoes of Beckett crossed with Sterne, "For nine months I eclipsed in my watery cave, evolving non-stop, growing cell by cell, forming in unity within the walls of my universe . . . The faint sound of something in the far-off distance, but ever so near. Bum-bum, bum-bum. Signals, coded messages, my first friend. The heart. Strong, pumping, never fading, calling me out to play . . . I turned ever so gracefully in my mother's womb. Head first, nose down. I began my descent."
The show draws on Flynn's Dublin childhood already well chronicled in his novel Nothing To Say. Published in 1983 the book earned Flynn recognition as one of Ireland's 12 best living writers. The selection was additionally interesting because the list of 12 included 13. "I was gutted over that book" says Flynn quoting a dismissive review which he says missed the point of the book. "I deliberately didn't write it as a novel, I didn't want it to be a diatribe, so I fictionalised it. People objected to what I wrote about the treatment of children in it. They said it wasn't so. Nobody in Ireland abused children. Ha, that's a laugh. It's funny now how everyone knows I was right."
Currently out of print, Nothing To Say, should be re-issued and probably will be, considering the harsh truths it contains. There are also passages hinting at the lyricism of the one-man show which was to come. The book was successful, Flynn says "it may have sold, I don't know, 5,000 copies; 10,000, I don't know, I forget. But no, in answer to your question. I didn't make any money out of it. But that's not that unusual in Ireland. I think here people are more concerned with publishing a book, seeing it on the shelf and saying `there it is, that's my book.' He remembers writing it in snatches. Mainly in churches, in Dublin and London. "I liked the atmosphere, churches are quiet places."
When he speaks about Irish writing, he praises John McGahern, Kate O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, Brian Friel. I love the Russians, 19th and 20th century." If he has to select a personal text, it would be Homer's Odyssey. "It's a great story, the ultimate adventure. It's about humanity. I read it in Lawrence of Arabia's translation - T.E. Lawrence's. It's my favourite version, it must have taken his mad spirit to catch the full magic of it. Reading the Odyssey helped me understand what Joyce was doing. Oh and I love Beckett."
For all the intensity of his conversation and Flynn is a fast, fluent talker, he is also funny, can break off a monologue about the corruption in arts politics to tell a story. Policemen are not among his favourite people. "I think when they see me they expect me to be doing something wrong. For a while I was scared to even run down the street if I was in a hurry, for fear they'd arrest me for something I hadn't done." Most of the time the Garda were justified. As criminals go, Flynn was not particularly adroit and was usually caught. "It doesn't make me unique. That kind of crime, petty street crime is expected of you where I come from." Working class kids get caught up in it, it's the situation. It's part of the life." All described with an almost impersonal matter of factness. But he also knows what it is like to be innocent.
In Talking To The Wall he reminds God of the experience. "One night, walking home, happy, feeling easy, no real care in the world. It happened. God, do you hear me? You're a weird one, you, you set me up that night, framed me, stitched me, done me in wrong. Why? Why? Do you remember I was 15 and a half, you were ancient and sussed with experience . . . I was walking home . . . There was nothing on my mind except sleep, . . . Fire. And I'm in that street, the wrong street at the wrong time . . . Do you remember, God, do you remember? Five years in that dirty, filthy prison, for nothing." Mention being stopped for cycling through a red light, Flynn takes charge. "Don't worry. The next time that happens, tell them you know me."
His work has been dominated by his life yet he sees them as separate. "My life has only inspired the work, it's not the work. I'm not writing a social history. I suppose I'm trying to show people that this can happen and that life goes on and at some stage you do make choices." For most of his life, he didn't. "There really isn't time if you in a house with 13 other kids and there's no money."
Born in May 1957, he is the seventh child in a family of 15 children. "There was six girls and then a boy but he died at a year and then there was me. It was mad, we were an army" he laughs. But the reality was less funny. "My mother and father rowed all the time. Even when they spilt up, they were still together if you know what I mean. They knew what was going on in each other's life. They had to, Dublin is a small place and we're a big family." The young Flynn quickly made enough mistakes to find himself a regular in the juvenile courts.
Quick to criticise the Dublin of today, he smiles at the memory of the Dublin of the 1960s. "You'd never think it now, but Grafton Street was splendid, very elegant. Now it's just another Oxford Street, English shop fronts here, Marks and Spencer's all over the place. But it was different. It was also a kinder place. People cared about children. Of course there were poor children then as now, but it was more caring. It makes me sick when I see more building, another shop or a big glass something, while Focus Point is in bits and there's no fucking playgrounds. I live in the Liberties. It's a community. But no Government official is falling over himself to provide a playground. No one takes any responsibility for anything. It's a disempowered society. No, it's a non-society. Build another motorway, but there's no halting site. The people are never consulted."
Politics in Ireland is dead, he says. "There's no socialist, no Labour Party. Anyone who has anything is out for himself. The writers don't care about anything except their own world and quick, grab another grant and we'll keep our mouths closed. I wonder do Irish people ever look at themselves?" More bewildered than angry, although there is anger as well, he questions the fairness of bringing in outside shows for the theatre festival, "Great bring in foreigners, but what about all the unemployed actors here?" Irish art does not depict Irish society. Irish theatre seems to be devised for a night out for society people who couldn't give a damn about plays or actors."
Still he seems happy enough. And he believes in the arts, "All of it, and I'm interested in all aspects of it from body piercing to piercing a white page with words." Talking about the mess Ireland is in is easier for Flynn than speaking about himself. Is he angry? "Yes, every one is. If you weren't there would have to be a mystery. Miracle - doctors would come from the moon. People have anger, it's how they control it, or don't, that causes the trouble. Violence is not just widespread, its part of the commodity, of the culture, of the buy-in. Everything hangs by a thread. The problem in society is that everyone uses their will instead of their choice."
At 20, Flynn appeared to have beaten his past. His years in Letterfrack in Connemara were hard, "a billion miles from Tara . . . Where the Christian Brother with his leather and rubber straps, slaps down from on high the law from the sky, ranting and raving in tormented craving, the words he did utter, you're a child of the gutter, O Lord on high, give me this boy and I will make him a man . . . oh Connemara, Connemara, Connemara, forever winter and I curse those Christians who called themselves Brothers, whose loving embrace was a slap in the face and the kiss of a leather strap." Not even those memories spoil his love of the place. "I'm fond of the West, I've spent a lot of time there and in Monaghan. I spent six months writing in Doohat, the place of the Black Cat."
Looking back over his own near-disaster he says, "I could blame it all on drink, but the situation I was born into meant it was there all along. Drinking was only a symptom. I had to recognise it and drag myself through all the parts of my personality." It took 10 years. At 20 he had seemed saved, `yeah, but I was wary of the theatre world, a lot of actors were interested in Hollywood, RTE, their careers." His novel promised another leap forward. But at 30, he seemed "broken, finished, my guts sprawling all over the streets of Dublin." It has taken 10 years to recover, "I've been off drink for a year. The past is the past. Things speak for themselves."
Is he bitter about his childhood? "I don't feel bitter. It vanished so quickly. But I see it going on around me all the time. Other kids living the same life. I see Ireland like an open till. People keep taking from it and put nothing back. It is a society in which no one really gives a damn about anyone else." He returns to the theme which dominates his conversation. Flynn invariably moves away from his own experience to look at things in a more general context. How about the young boy, he once was. How does he feel about him? Flynn stops, looks down and slides his hands slowly across the surface of the table before him. "I see him as someone who never had a chance, who never really made a choice. And I see him all around me still. That kid is walking the streets of Dublin now and he'll do the same things, he did, I did, all those years ago."
