A clown going through a mid-life crisis . . . sounds like fun but Raymond Keane has darker things in mind, writes Belinda McKeon
How Raymond Keane, founding member and joint artistic director of Barabbas Theatre Company, wishes that he had been the class clown as a schoolboy. "But I wasn't," he admits, somewhat wistfully.
Schooled, first by the nuns and then by the Christian Brothers in his native town of Dungarvan, Co Waterford, he was always, he says, "up for the messin'", but in Keane's world, where the title of clown is a worthy one, messin' just doesn't cut the mustard.
Clowning, for Keane and those he has worked with at Barabbas and elsewhere, is an art form, its manners particular and precise. "It's the most difficult discipline," he says, during the third week of rehearsals for . . . tanks a lot!, the new Barabbas show which he has written and in which he will be the sole performer. "I still find it the most difficult and the most intriguing of all the things I've done. Because it is such a different thing to what we know as acting, or playing . . . because it's the core of me. It's where you've really reached something. Because you rely on yourself as the clown."
In . . . tanks a lot! Keane returns to the clown that he knows to be his own - the clown who is so much a part of himself, in fact, that he is simply called Raymond Clown.
Raymond Clown first made an appearance in the 1993 debut from Barabbas, Come Down from the Mountain, John Clown, John Clown, along with his red-nosed companions Veronica Clown and Mikel Clown, played by the company's co-founders, Veronica Coburn and Mikel Murfi. In that show, Raymond Clown was young and unemployed, sharing his highs and lows with a failed entrepreneur and a politics-hungry newshound; . . . tanks a lot!, however, sees him alone with his own hopes and anxieties as he faces into middle age.
"It's me at 47," laughs Keane. "I am, yes, I'm 47, and it intrigues me in a way, that sometimes in this business, or any life, you look back and you say, was I good at anything? And what's ahead of me? At this age you start thinking about those things, and I thought, that's nice territory for a clown."
But isn't it clowns with red Porsches, rather than red noses, who typically exhibit the symptoms of mid-life crisis? Does Keane risk bringing his character into a realm of dreary cliché and easy laughter? Not this clown.
For Keane, the chance to clown his way through questions of aging and mortality - and, for this character, the shadow of the afterlife, if a clown afterlife exists - is a chance to take on, with greater intensity, the challenge with which clowning has always presented him: to reach, within himself, what is quietly, helplessly human.
One thing is for certain as you watch Raymond Clown rehearse his moves, as he slips between shrewdness and self-doubt, clad in his sharp blue suit and his wildly patterned shirt, his rubber red nose bobbing - this is no circus, and Keane is no slapstick artist. In his clown there is humour, but humour that is stark, affecting, strangely unnerving at moments; simply in his walk, in his gestures, a life of striving and of failing is contained.
"I think that's what clown is, actually, the way it taps into something. And that's why, I think, people respond to it, because it is about humanity at that level."
An exercise popular in clowning workshops, he says, sums up that peculiar balance of verve and vulnerability that the professional clown can take years to strike. "You come into the workshop, and you're told to get up there and be funny," he shakes his head. "And it's the hardest thing. And the lesson in it, of course, is that you learn about failure, and accept it as failure. If you don't accept that in the clown world, I suspect you won't get anywhere. To know it, and actually to enjoy it. Now, you can't be going out there and failing all the time. But you can turn it into a virtue, which reflects humanity. How often do we fail in our lives? Where we think we're on the ball, and we go into a place, and we say something wrong?"
It's odd, in a sense, that Keane should find himself compelled to think about failure and ridicule, given he has enjoyed a career marked by achievement and acclaim. He may have left school as soon as was possible, and somewhat discomfited his father, a businessman and politician, by taking off to London and Amsterdam to become a hairdresser - "hairdressing then was 'pansy world', as my dad would have called it" - but he made a success of that first vocation, devoting himself to what he calls "natural hair-care" and winning a huge number of clients when he moved back to Dublin, where he set up a studio at the Grapevine Arts Centre on North Frederick Street. "It was going really well," he remembers. "I used to be booked out six weeks in advance." And, he says almost casually, he used to cut the U2 barnets - "after much pleading by their stylist", he laughs. "I'd demand that they'd come in to me and be treated like everyone else."
BUT KEANE WAS moving towards a new way of expressing himself; a few years earlier, while in Paris for a couple of days, he had seen a pair of silent street performers, and a voracious interest had been born. "They were doing mime, and I was going, 'wow'," he remembers. "I had never seen anything like that. And I thought, I want to do that. So I got myself a book on mime, and literally started teaching myself. Back in Amsterdam, with a mime book and a mirror. Learning all the exercises, all the moves. Because I just thought it was so natural."
Keane found himself falling in with a bunch of artists who shared his enthusiasm for mime; Thom McGinty, better known as The Diceman, came to Amsterdam for a weekend, crashed (along with eight other members of the Grapevine company) on Keane's floor, and demanded he come out on the street with him and improvise a performance.
"He painted me face up, "gave me an imaginary bugle - an imaginary bugle, mind - and said, you play that, you're coming with us. Dam Square in Amsterdam, I'd never done anything like it. And I'm buzzin'. That was the first kick into it for me."
After that came a period studying mime at the Oscar Theatre in Dublin's Sandymount, with Vincent O'Neill and Conal Kearney, both of whom had studied at the Marcel Marceau School in Paris, and treks to arts festivals around the country, "making up shows on the spot, and getting out on the street".
The response from audiences unfamiliar with the like of improvised robots, clown chimps or human marionettes was hugely positive. "We used to make a fortune," he laughs. "Because it had never been seen in Ireland before. I had my little hat and I'd leave it there for the money, and everyone, even the junkies would come up to you afterwards." And people were generous, even in the tightest of times? "Yeah, the junkies might even put a little piece of dope in your hand," he whispers.
Almost by accident, Keane found himself, in the mid-1980s, auditioning for a part in an RTE children's television programme. He didn't get the part, but three days later a phone call came; had he said he could do puppetry? Would he be interested playing the lead character? And so Pajo's Junkbox was born, with Keane as Pajo, the Dublin rat who talked straight to appreciative children long before Dustin's egg had even been hatched.
Directed by Art O'Brian, Pajo's Junkbox was the smartest show I can remember from my childhood - acerbic and outlandish, it treated its viewers as intelligent beings, encouraging them to laugh at themselves, and at the country they lived in, rather than numbing them with imported cartoons and game contestants covered in sludge. "We got a brilliant response to it," says Keane "Thousands of letters a week."
Down the hall, meanwhile, the young Coburn and Murfi were making another sharply funny television series, Gerard Stembridge's Nothing To It!, a satire on the then almost hopeless challenge of getting a job. Paths crossed, and in the early 1990s, after many long discussions over cups oftea, Barabbas came into being.
"At the end of this fantastic three-week workshop that they did in Pearse Street, inviting all the actors they knew who were interested in physical theatre or devising, Veronica and Mikel asked me would I do a show with them," says Keane. "And I said no, but I wouldn't mind starting a company. I wanted something new."
WHAT BOUND ALL three was a deep interest in clowning as an art form, strengthened and given shape by Murfi's training in Paris at the mecca of European clown art, the École Jacques Le Coq. "But really, we set about finding our own particular level of clown," explains Keane. "An Irish version of clown, an Irish version of physical theatre; we are Irish, so what else are we going to do but the Irish psyche. Because for years it had mostly been presented only as part of the literary tradition."
To do so, they had to go out on a limb. "Even though I had two young kids, and so did Veronica - Mikel didn't but he had two dogs - we just put ourselves out of work and, when I think of it, it was loopy. But it had to be done."
It worked; 12 years on, Barabbas is one of the most acclaimed companies working in Ireland, with a commitment to training and workshop facilitation that has produced many fine young actors of impressive range; from Half Eight Mass of a Tuesday to Hurl, from God's Gift to the hugely successful The Whiteheaded Boy, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to last year's Macbeth, Barabbas productions have been consistently inventive and intelligent. Murfi has gone on to a freelance acting and directing career (he directed last year's hit show, Trad, by Mark Doherty) though his links with the company remain strong, and Coburn and Keane have plans - if they can only get the funding - for a dedicated company building incorporating a training space. But looking to the future is only part of the philosophy that informs the Barabbas aesthetic - and the understanding of the middle-aged Raymond Clown.
"The new show is all about the now," says Keane. "And this is what clown teaches me, that it's about the moment, the now. Because that's where it's ringing, that's when clown rings true, when you're in the moment, so that you can respond to the now. To you. To me. To this. That's where heaven is at, perhaps, I'm saying."
. . . tanks a lot!, by Raymond Keane, and directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, opens at at Project, Dublin, on Jun 2 followed by a national tour. www.barabbas.ie