Dublin, 2001, an icy January evening. A first-floor room which looks out - glamorously - on to the silky glass facades of Curved Street. Inside, the space is comfortable, informal and recognisably the offices of an opera company (the posters of previous productions on the walls are a bit of a giveaway). Behind an enormous desk - not his - on which is perched, like a swan about to take off, the turquoise bulk of a computer, sits Sean O Tarpaigh, actor, star of an Irish-language TV soap and director of Opera Theatre Company's touring show The Beggar's Opera. So, Sean, how did you get interested in theatre in the first place? "At 19," he answers, without missing a beat, "I was going to be a priest so I went to Africa with the missions . . ."
Startled and a little suspicious - is this a wind-up? - The Irish Times looks up from its notes. It's not a wind-up. "I was also doing quantity surveying - quantity surveying! Counting slates for the rest of my life; I don't think so." He travelled to Zambia under the auspices of the White Fathers of Africa and worked in a school in the middle of nowhere. "There was a Finnish factory out there - in the middle of the bush - making batteries. I don't think a working battery ever came out of that factory, but the guys who ran it lived a life of absolute luxury. "I used to ask the kids at the school - what does your father do? And they'd look at you like, what do you mean? They literally didn't know what you were on about. Finally they came up with `he sits'. Of course they were very poor - though when you see what's going on in our `rich' society, you wonder. But anyway. It wasn't for me, that life. There were some very good people with very good intentions devoting their lives to it, but to me the Catholic Church was just another arm of the colonial process."
The answer may have been unexpected, but it reveals a number of things about O Tarpaigh, not least that he is in possession of a very finely-tuned sense of the absurd - a useful tool for a director about to make his operatic debut with John Gay's madcap musical satire. Meanwhile, back at his acting debut., "I drifted into a variety of things; youth hostel work, picking maggots out of plums in fruit factories in Germany, working for the American government at NATO, a travel agency. Then I saved up enough to do a university course in London. I wanted to do English with a view to, maybe, journalism and a bit of writing - and it all went according to plan, except I got English and drama.
"On my first day at drama class somebody heard my accent and said `oh, good, you're Irish - we need you on stage', so I thought I might as well give it a go. And not for the first time in front of an audience, I forgot my lines - and I put my hand in my mouth. The director told me afterwards: `I think if you forget your lines in future, you'd better keep your hand down'. That was my first acting lesson." Now he finds himself directing singers in a tricksy piece which lies somewhere between a musical and a series of comedy sketches. "It can be a bit bitty," he says of The Beggar's Opera. "But we're working on making the action flow continuously." He sees the piece - in which he will also play the eponymous beggar - as a complex mixture of carefree romp and disturbing satire, the latter emphasised by Benjamin Britten's nervy 1948 arrangement of the score. "I like the edge Britten has given it. One opera guide said he missed the point, but I don't agree - it has that whole Falstaffian idea of living for the moment, carpe diem and all that, but there's also something else going on underneath, something sinister." On the face of it, The Beggar's Opera is the most quintessentially English of shows, but O Tarpaigh has been struck by the parallels between London at the time of the opera's composition and Celtic Tiger Ireland. "I don't want to overwork those parallels, but there will be some passing of brown envelopes, for instance - and there's a mention of shirts in the score. I don't know if we'll get away with Charvet shirts; we might. But there's also the whole theme of transition to a mercantile society. In the 1720s, London suddenly became big enough to have gangs, and Jonathan Wild was the first personality criminal - like the General. "In Shakespeare's day, paranoia centred around treachery, espionage and betrayal, which had a lot to do with the Spanish invasions and so on. For the Victorians, it was sex. And for the Augustines, it was possessions, or rather loss of possessions - that was what they were afraid of." Which is a dead ringer for Celtic Tiger Ireland, with its designer trappings and refrain of: "Are you ready for the drop?" Thus the production will be in modern dress - or modern-ish. "I don't want the time to be exact, but we're going for a contemporary down-at-heel urban look, somewhere between 1970 and 2001. It will be like . . . A Clockwork Orange is too futuristic, I suppose, but there's that feel of urban decay." He thinks for a minute. "Something between Bernard Farrell's plays and Mad Max."
As for his own career, he has enjoyed playing the part of Tom in TG4's Ros na Run, but has decided theatre is his first love. However, if - as he has so far - he can combine his love of theatre with his love of the Irish language, he'll consider himself a happy man. "I was in London before Christmas and I went down to the Globe Theatre, and I suddenly thought how privileged I am to be involved in this profession - this tradition. I sneaked up on the stage - though you're not supposed to, and I was called off again - but I'd done a little translation of Hamlet's soliloquy into Irish and I said it quietly to myself.
"I presume that's the first time it's been done in Irish on the stage of the Globe. "They have a policy to invite a foreign production every year. Last year they had Romeo and Juliet from Brazil on stilts - yes, well, somebody had to think of it - and I thought that'd be a nice ambition. To bring Macbeth in Irish to the Globe. I'd love to have a go. And if God spares me, I will."