No two shows the same - in fact there are a billion possibilities in one-man play The Race of the Ark Tattoo, David Heap tells Peter Crawley.
David Heap makes for lively and engaging company; unhesitant and considered in his speech and unfailingly polite in his manners. So it comes as some small surprise when, without warning, he throws two quick punches in my face. The hard thwack that accompanies each blow causes conversation near us to subside momentarily. But, as anyone in this quiet Dublin bar can see, the punches have fallen short, and those sound effects were of his own making.
"Sorry," he grins, his eyes brightening. "I always do that! Stage fighting."
The Gloucestershire-born actor may have just been underscoring a point, but audiences along the southwest and west of Ireland would be well advised to stay on their guard around David Heap. Familiar to many as charming businessman Donal Maher on RTÉ's Fair City, Heap has since embraced a new persona - two in fact - and though the characters he plays in the forthcoming tour of his one-man show, The Race of The Ark Tattoo, beckon you into their confidence with entrancing storytelling, who knows where nasty surprises might lurk.
It is both a truth and a cliché of the theatre that no two performances are ever the same, but David Hancock's play takes this to extremes. Set, and sometimes performed, in an American flea market, the show begins when a man named Mr Foster gathers a series of unpromising objects - a rusty pipe, a child's sock, tubes of oil paint - into a toy Winnebago car named the "Story Ark".
Each item comes with a story and each story reveals a little more about the characters of the flea market. Asked to pluck the significant junk from the Story Ark at random, it is the audience that determines the narrative shape of The Race of the Ark Tattoo, participating directly in its construction.
"It's like jumping off a cliff each time," says Heap. "You just don't know what's going to happen."
The intimacy and randomness of the show appeal most to Heap, who first performed the play, for director David Horan, as a staged reading during the Abbey's Americana season in 2003. For one spring evening, following two weeks of rehearsals, Heap negotiated with the objects, the audience, a text which sprawled between neon page separators and various loose cards. On a technical level, it was surprising that the reading worked at all. On a dramatic level, it was surprising that it worked so well.
"After just one performance we thought: 'Ah, c'mon it would be such a shame to let this thing go,' " recalls Heap. "It's unique. I used to do a lot of work in the old Project in the 1980s and we used to be as close to the audience as I am to you. But you weren't talking directly to them, or looking in their eyes. It didn't have that incredible communication. That combined with the randomness" - there are, literally, more than a billion possible ways the show can progress, making each performance essentially unrepeatable - "it just seemed ridiculous to let it go."
Horan and Heap brought the Abbey production to the Dublin Fringe Festival later that year - making it the first off-site production of the National Theatre's history - where it garnered considerable acclaim and ultimately secured Heap a nomination for best actor in the Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards.
"Even after that, there was a certain sense of deflation," says Heap. "As far as plays go . . . I've done Faith Healer and I've planned my own suicide while doing it. We get so deeply into people like this, disturbed people like this, tragic people like this, dead people like this, that there's an inevitable sense of deflation afterwards."
With a cast of one, no particular demands for either set or lighting and a format that actually benefits from non-theatre spaces, the show is ideal for touring. But even then, touring is a risky business.
Usually a company will arrange to visit subsidised theatre venues which can entice them with a financial guarantee, regardless of box-office sales. But a unique piece of theatre demands a unique tour, and so for the month of May The Race of the Ark Tattoo will be given 28 performances in 19 different venues along the southwest and west of Ireland, including - at Heap's insistence - all 10 of the islands he encounters. Produced by Paul Hayes, of Galway's Catastrophe Productions, the tour will necessitate 16 ferry crossings and about 2,000 kilometres of driving.
"The '96 Astra is going to do a lot of miles," smiles Heap "And none of the ferries are car ferries, so literally every prop will have to fit in a suitcase."
But why was he keen to visit so many islands?
"Because nobody had ever done it," he replies, matter-of-fact. "Druid took Playboy in the 1980s to, I think, seven islands altogether. But I don't think anybody has ever done 10."
He is neither daunted by the task, nor worried about how Hancock's eccentric Americana will go down from Cape Clear to Achill Island.
"Well, as they say in Cleggan," replies Heap. "America's the next parish."
LATER ON, WE return to the subject of the islands. "Well, I love the journey to them and journeying back," he says. "And on all of the islands that I've been to, I've found the people were very different, very special . . ."
Heap then neatly sidesteps into a discussion on the nature of unsubsidised professional touring, but his attraction to islands begins to nag. However, when he speaks of his career, it becomes clear that he rather enjoys being a stranger in a community.
"If I'd have been given a choice way back, I'd probably have played outsiders all the time," he says. "I don't know if it's just the appeal of the outsider. Actors are always kind of outsiders. I only spent a year as a professional actor in England, but I've always felt very comfortable as a professional actor in Ireland, partly because of that double-outsider thing, because I'm a blow-in as well - you know, 'you're a blow-in and you're an actor'. You're very much on your own."
Heap began to hone his outsider status from the age of 27, when he abandoned a career in advertising for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, undergoing a "second adolescence", as he calls it, alongside contemporaries such as Daniel Day-Lewis and Miranda Richardson.
"I come from a working-class background where I never imagined that people like me became actors - it just never entered my mind until my 20s," he says.
Almost accidentally, Heap won the role of Captain Lancey in Field Day's original production of Brian Friel's Translations and settled in Ireland in 1980, later marrying the actress and performance artist, Olwen Fouéré.
It's hard to conceive of a more curious outsider than The Race of The Ark Tattoo's Mr Foster, a foster-child who suffers from memory blackouts which he fills with dark urban fables; an unreliable narrator whose medication "makes the mind forget how to feel certain emotions".
Stranger still is the character of his deceased custodian, Homer Phinney, who sporadically creeps into Foster's skin. They seem bound together in a world outside of time, and of mortality too. At one point, Phinney leans in to an audience member and explains: "We're both dead, you know - my foster and me. He's just too stupid to realise it."
Heap savours the line now.
"I mean, as an actor you'd give an arm and a leg to play that," he says. "But the reason I'm doing it - the macro one - is because I believe that theatre is important. I think it's important to give people the opportunity to see theatre. And it is only shows like Inis Theatre's Tick My Box!, Donal O'Kelly's Catalpa and shows like this that can tour, because they leave a very light footprint.
"Why am I going to these places? Because nobody else is going there. I hope most people will enjoy it, but also it might stimulate a 16-year-old's artistic imagination and make them think differently about the way the world is going to be for them. And that's what the arts are for, aren't they?"
• The Race of The Ark Tattoo begins touring on May 1 on Cape Clear Island, Co Cork, and performs in various venues until May 30.