Could Shay Healy's new musical about rural electrification in the 1950s become as big as Riverdance? It has the same producer and a story with universal themes, its creator tells Brian Boyd.
Imagine the internet, the mobile phone and the iPod coming to a town in Ireland overnight. It's the only modern equivalent you can reach for when considering the massive socio-cultural changes that took place overnight in this country during the rural electrification scheme. Entertainment polymath Shay Healy uses the "turning on of the lights" period as the backdrop for an ambitious new musical, The Wiremen, that opens in the Gaiety, Dublin, next month.
"There were two reasons for doing it," says Healy. "First, I had worked on an RTÉ documentary about the rural electrification scheme a few years ago. As part of the research I talked to the people who travelled around the country bringing electricity to all these towns and some of the stories were fascinating. It was even stuff such as people having to clean the corners of their house because there were no dark corners any more.
"Second, my own parents came from the country - my father from north Mayo, where the musical is set - and I grew up with all these stories about what life was like in Ireland before electricity. It's still only a generation ago - we all take electricity for granted now - but it really was viewed as an extraordinary thing when it arrived."
Healy wrote the show two years ago and workshopped it in Dublin's SFX Theatre in October 2003. In the audience were John McColgan and Moya Doherty, the producers of Riverdance. At the end of the short workshop, McColgan was so enthused by what he had seen that he decided he wanted to produce the show. Also on board as producers are the promoter/manager Maurice Cassidy and Denis Desmond of MCD.
"It's a big production, a big cast and live band on stage every night," says Healy. "We've got some great actors - Rory Nolan, who comes from Improbable Frequency; Simon Delaney (Bachelors Walk); Alex Sharpe (Les Misérables); and Abbie Spallen, who will be a revelation.
"It's all set in a fictional town in north Mayo. A group of people who used to be known as 'the wiremen' come to town to put up the poles and string the wires that will at last bring electricity to this remote community. There's tension there because all the crew are from Dublin and there is some hostility from the local young men, especially as the local young women are quite taken by the wiremen. It's also touches on the new-world-versus-the-old-world and the notion of progress."
THE SHOW FOCUSES on a local farmer, Páidí Foley (Rory Nolan) who believes electricity is unnecessary and too expensive.
"Páidí's field is crucial, as it's a location for one of the electricity poles, and he's refusing to allow the pole to go up, so stopping the whole town from getting electricity," says Healy. "There are further complications in that Páidí's sister has fallen for one of the Dublin wiremen and his fiancée, Máirín (Abbie Spallen), runs the boarding house in which the wiremen are staying. There's also the fact that Páidí's father died in the particular field where they want to put up the pole, so all of these things combine to complicate matters."
As the town gets increasingly frustrated by Páidí's refusal to allow electricity to arrive, the local priest goes so far as to denounce him at a local meeting ("Being denounced by a priest was a big, big deal in those days," says Healy).
Although there were places in Ireland still without electricity in the 1960s and 1970s, Healy set his musical in the mid-1950s for a reason.
"I wanted it set before rock'n'roll, before showbands, just to highlight the contrast between these two Irelands," he says. "What electricity coming to a town back then meant was, for the first time, hot and cold running water, electric kettles and irons and electric radios. Its arrival also led to a big difference in working the land.
"Talking to some of the original wiremen I got a real feel for what their job involved - they had to put up the poles, sling the wire and then get the wire taut. But I also got a feel for the other changes. The wiremen used to talk about 'backsliders' - and these were people who initially thought electricity would be a great thing but when it was actually made available to them, they wouldn't avail of it, for their own reasons.
"It was also a coincidence that one of the people involved in the show, Moya Doherty, told me that two of her aunties from Donegal married wiremen."
Given his background as a songwriter - he wrote Johnny Logan's Eurovision winner, What's Another Year - Healy composed all the songs himself.
"There's 18 songs in there, and they're all used to move the story along, to tell us something more about the characters," he says. "Even though some of the songs are big musical numbers, they are all played acoustically. The style of music is meant to broadly represent the style of music that would have been popular in the 1950s. On stage every night there will be a live band with fiddle, accordion, whistle and guitar. A lot of the songs are narrative ballads."
The Wiremen is Healy's first musical. Over a varied career, the 62-year-old has been a cameraman, a journalist, a press officer (the job he was doing at RTÉ in 1980 when he wrote the Eurovision winner, which meant he had to organise his own press conference), and a novelist. For many people, though, he is best remembered as the presenter of the Nighthawks programme on RTÉ2 (or whatever it was calling itself back then).
Enthused by this new medium he finds himself in, and with a pretty heavy-hitting bunch of producers behind him, Healy would like The Wiremen to travel around the country after its limited Gaiety run.
"I'd also like to bring it abroad," he says. "The themes in there are universal - the old ways versus the new ways, and people anxious about change - and there are only four or five words in the entire musical that would need changing if it travelled abroad. It would be nice to bring it to some of the Irish centres in Britain - and to get to that audience who would have very clear memories of the drama caused by the arrival of electricity in their town."
The Wiremen opens at the Gaiety on May 4 (previews from Apr 29)