WE WERE reminiscing, about the 1995 production of Catalpa, Donal O'Kelly's epic one-man show, which seems to people the stage with a huge cast of characters. "I remember," my friend said, "seeing the woman standing at the top of the stairs - God, how did he do that?"
How, indeed? Donal O'Kelly, a terrific writer of a handful of polemical dramas and now - after The Van - an admired actor on screen as well as stage was doing what, arguably, he does best of all: exhilarating audiences with breathtaking theatrical transformations, based on his own words and born of awesome physical control and presence.
O'Kelly's Catalpa, the story of the daring seaborne rescue of Fenian prisoners from Western Australia in 1875 as Hollywood might tell it (but probably wouldn't), was originally a Red Kettle production. While the relationship between the show and that Waterford-based company "finished amicably after a year", its author and star is keen to point out that the play is a team effort, and the team has stayed constant: Bairbre Ni Chaoimh directs, Giles Cadle designs, Trevor Giles provides the music.
The role of these collaborators, who shared in Catalpa's Fringe First success in Edinburgh last year, is, if anything, more important now that it's moving into its biggest venue, the Gate. Its last Dublin audience, at the Project, was never more than about 10 yards from him, but O'Kelly shrugs off worries about reaching the back rows: "I love that about theatre - it's so adaptable."
And adapt the piece has. Catalpa starts with a frustrated screenwriter cursing himself for underselling his story; this time around, the stage is framed by the walls and scant furnishings of a Dublin bedsit, which fade away once we enter the writer's imagination and the film reels before us.
Adjustments have been made to the text, as well. "Act Two used to have a lot of burlesque, throwing myself around. Now that part of the play is more `cinematic'." O'Kelly credits the Gate's artistic director Michael Colgan with helping to tone the show down where it was important to do so; the play's climactic storm, O'Kelly says, "is not really about a storm - it's about the character's internal questioning - `have I done the right thing?'"
That questioning, during which the captain of the Catalpa is besieged by images of the women he has wronged in the course of his odyssey, is at the play's dramatic centre. "The motor of the play is `what is a hero?' It's a question that has always fascinated me," says O'Kelly.
"From the Greeks, the hero has always been going off on quests, then eventually returning to his womenfolk to try and patch things up. I want to challenge that, to introduce an element of complexity and self-doubt. The Greeks had a lot of great things, but they also had slavery - and a lot of macho behaviour, I think, is rooted in those stories."
In catalpa, O'Kelly also returns to the history of Irish nationalism, a feature of some of his best work and the Fenians (most wonderfully, memorably, John Devoy) don't get off lightly. "It's a comment on a certain kind of political determinism that seems to consume people," says O'Kelly, who is, nonetheless, a busy political activist himself as his work for Calypso Theatre company shows.
As for the concerns with history, he says that probing for a situation's complexities generally involves looking to the past. He quotes his own Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son: "You can't go forward unless you look back."
