Could Banagher be a new Ballykissangel? Caroline Allen visits the Co Offaly town for the final day's filming of Eugene O'Brien's six-part drama about midlands life
Eugene O'Brien was on a street in his native Edenderry a few years ago when a car pulled up beside him. "Pure mule," said one of the occupants. "We're not f***ing working until Monday." The phrase, which can mean brilliant or awful, depending on intonation, gave the playwright an idea for a story about a booze-fuelled weekend in a midlands town. The results are a six-part drama, which RTÉ plans to show later in the year, and a boon for another Co Offaly town, Banagher, whose charms persuaded Pure Mule's producers to film the series there.
The injection of cash into the town's economy over the quiet winter months - filming took place from the end of November until the middle of last month - was much appreciated. "There has been fierce excitement," says Seán Corrigan, a local publican, as he photographs the last day of filming for the parish review. "The financial impact has been considerable, with houses being rented and hotel rooms filled. People have got a great turn out of filming during the off season, and in fairness everything was sourced as locally as possible. We're hoping to be the next Ballykay," he grins.
Across the road, Tommy Guinan's former greengrocer's was turned into a barber's where the men of Pure Mule hang out on Saturday afternoons. "Since filming started, a lad rang me from Tullamore, asking if I'd rent out the place for a barber's," says Guinan. "Another time, a local on the way home after a few drinks demanded a haircut."
At Corrigan's Bar, the extras drink coffee, read newspapers and wait. "It gives you a great insight into how things work, but the worst thing is the waiting," says Maura McHugh, who is retired and has lived in Banagher for 38 years. Mandy Flynn, who went to drama school in Tullamore for nine years, says: "It's not all it's cracked up to be, but it's good experience."
Conor, her brother, who is also a drama enthusiast, adds: "You really have to concentrate when you're in a scene. And you have to mime: you can't even whisper. But it's good to see the actors. They are so professional."
Maura Flannery, who runs a B&B, is enjoying the buzz, too. "You don't look at a soap in the same way after being involved," she says. Simon Lyons, a publican, who plays the father of Pure Mule's main characters, Scobie and Shamie, is laughing: "I'm dead and I get paid for it. It's great."
Garrett Lombard, who plays Scobie, is bleary-eyed after all the late nights and early starts. "The people are brilliant - nearly too nice - and the hospitality is brilliant. I never get to bed on time," he says as he emerges after a mid-morning nap.
His character passes his time dossing on a building site, conserving his energy for wild weekends. "I am a sort of tearaway, a lunatic about town and good with women - a bit of a player. It's a bit of a stretch to play," he says, jokingly. Being in Banagher has enriched Lombard's vocabulary with a few local sayings, such as "You gnoch!", which he defines as "an eejit" and "gomie", a soft eejit.
Coming from another small town - Gorey in Co Wexford - Lombard has identified with the expression of the frailty and longing at the heart of each drunken weekend in the series. "I used to work in a pub in Gorey, a smaller town than Banagher, and everyone knows everyone else's business, which can be good but can be bad as well."
Lombard spent six months in Morocco, London and Thailand, playing a general in Alexander, so it's a change to find himself in the midlands, but he's not complaining. "Alexander was mighty crack, but in something that big you are just a small part, whereas in Pure Mule you have a bit of a say as to what you want to do with your part. I've been allowed to get away with changing Eugene's script slightly in a few places," he says.
Tom Murphy, fresh from the films Adam & Paul and Man about Dog, as well as Conor McPherson's play Shining City, also enjoyed the change of his role as Shamie, Scobie's shy elder brother. "It's always nice to be offered something different. I'm kind of lucky that my career goes that way and that I get a variety of roles, because it's so easy to get typecast."
Murphy says his character goes about looking for fulfilment in completely the wrong way. "That aching longing for freedom and completeness which most of the time results in sex and hangovers, coupled with life in a small town, causes a pressure-cooker feeling of frustration, with undercurrents of violence."
Like Lombard, Murphy understands the small-town mentality. "I grew up in Lucan [ in Co Dublin] and used to hang around Lucan and Celbridge. It's part of growing up and finding a place in the world."
Although he did not know Banagher before making Pure Mule, it is now a place close to his heart. "It is relatively cut off, and in a way that's a good thing. It's one of the hidden secrets of Ireland. I've travelled quite a bit, but Hough's bar there is one of my favourite places in the world. It's absolutely beautiful," he says.
Each hour-long episode of Pure Mule is a self-contained story about one of the characters' weekends, with snippets of the goings-on in other characters' lives. The weekend kicks off in McKeon's, a derelict pub refurbished for the series.
The central role of the pub in Irish life is a recurring theme in O'Brien's work. In his play Eden, which has been translated into German, Italian, Dutch and Romanian, the emphasis was on living for the "holy trinity" of Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights as a way of surviving joblessness in the bleak 1980s. O'Brien likes to quote Homer Simpson's summary of alcohol as "the cause and solution of so many of life's problems".
The pub is where the series' characters seek solace from their personal crises. Deirdre, played by Dawn Bradfield, is a former Offaly Rose who looks for consolation and escapism there. Deirdre, who married too young, has three children and has been caring for her mother (played by Stella McCusker), who has Alzheimer's disease. "Deirdre has a 10-year itch and is scratching it," says Bradfield.
The improved economy hasn't tamed our drinking habits, according to O'Brien. "It's worse. People have more money, and we're binge drinking, and there are more drugs around," he says. Examples of people living in quiet despair are plentiful, he believes. "Someone might have married the wrong person, and they might be driving a BMW, but they are very unhappy. Lots of people have a kind of regret about missed opportunities and thinking there's more."
New housing and shopping centres have transformed towns such as Edenderry. Yet the building boom - and the number of Dublin couples out drinking in midland pubs on Saturday nights, after a week of commuting to the capital - raise new issues. As the old barber puts it in Pure Mule: "Loss of identity, boys." That clash between the old and new Irelands is explored in the series. "I don't think there is one mention of religion apart from a glimpse of the church, whereas if it was 10 years ago the lads would be hanging around outside the church," says O'Brien.
Although Pure Mule gets progressively darker, it never loses its humour, according to Charlie McCarthy, who directed the series with Offaly man Declan Recks. "It's just real life, and you get a sense of contemporary rural Ireland. As William Trevor would have written in the 1960s, Eugene O'Brien has captured the qualities of Ireland now with a great heart and a cool head," says McCarthy. "Working on Pure Mule was a unique experience, despite the hard work and low budget, because of the quality of the script and the atmosphere among the cast and crew and in the town. There was a sense of doing something that had not been done before," he says.
Murphy, too, is excited. "It is a very brave thing for RTÉ to do, because it is TV that has never been seen before, and the calibre of writing hasn't been seen before in TV drama. It is definitely not audience-led,which is great, because if you're trying to please your audience you end up with Desperate Housewives. It is good that RTÉ is taking risks with edgy drama. We are getting more confident about how we do TV drama in this country, and we have amazing writers and film-makers."
O'Brien's approach has been to write about ordinary life rather than try to mirror all the changes taking place in society. "If I was to do that, the series would have become very issues-based. I wanted to look at affairs of the heart. The series is about ordinary life but was obviously written for television. Mad things happen in it, but then mad things are going to happen on boozy weekends."
Pure Mule will be on RTÉ later in the year