Millennium and event are two words that haven't sat very comfortably together of late. It has to be said, the whole punterisation of the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ has spawned a few rough beasts in the name of marking the occasion. But not in Cork, it seems, where novelist and playwright, Conal Creedon has teamed up with the award-winning Corcadorca theatre company to stage The Trial of Jesus.
Scheduled as a once-off event during Easter 2000, The Trial will take place on "the Calvary of Cork", Patrick's Hill, a famous city landmark. Creedon is busy scripting the production, which will involve community groups and professional actors.
"The production will involve a number of stages along the route that will climax on the summit of the hill," and the panoramic views of the city, Creedon hopes, "will be complemented with a simultaneous illuminating of the city's church crucifixes."
Pat Kiernan, who will direct, is no stranger to theatre beyond the fourth wall. In 1994 he staged Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the former Women's Gaol in Cork. In 1995, Kiernan directed a production of Burgess's Clockwork Orange in the Sir Henry's nightclub and two years on from that, Phaedra's Love, a walk-about piece along the bowels of Cork's inner city.
With a gilded, anarchic reputation for his cult radio-soap Under the Goldie Fish, this is perhaps Creedon's most straight-laced project to date. In fact, he admits to being somewhat daunted at first by the prospect of undertaking such a re-enactment. "The Crucifixion is in many ways the cornerstone of Western civilisation's spiritual belief." He is almost at pains to point out this is no send-up. "We are aiming to remain as true to the original story as is possible."
A far cry from Creedon's first novel, Passion Play - a whacky story of dislocation and despair, structurally based "only loosely on the Passion of Jesus Christ". Pluto, the novel's central character, finds himself abandoned and betrayed by modern society, only to make hell a Heaven, as he over-looks his native city from - surprise, surprise - Patrick's Hill.
"I am more or less as religious as the next man. But the whole story does hold a certain fascination with me, as I believe it does with most people. Even though lots of people have drifted from the practice of organised religion, I think that we haven't completely ditched the cultural significance of our faith."
He explains how he came to be a playwright. "From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s I was working in a launderette. I had always been a scribbler, but never bothered to send my stuff out there, in a way I was a bit embarrassed about the whole writing thing. I suppose I always felt that writers were a breed apart. I spent most of my time sitting in the launderette scribbling and watching clothes go around. "By 1993 my place was bursting at the seams with drafts of radio plays, short stories, monologues. It was actually a bunch of art students, regulars at the launderette, who convinced me to do something with the scribbles. So I sent the stuff out. The reaction blew the socks off me."
Within a year, he had won prizes in the Francis MacManus Awards, The George A. Birmingham Awards, Life Extra Short Story Awards, and had been short-listed for the P.J. O'Connor Awards, One Voice Monologue Competition BBC, and the C.W.P.C. Short Stories Competition.
But writing isn't Creedon's only passion. "For real passion . . . it has to be Turner's Cross on a Sunday Afternoon, to see Cork City FC play, there's usually anything up to 20 of us . . . and then the pilgrimage; the crawl from the southside, home to the north side, through every pub in the book (I mean the book, Passion Play) a crawl that has been know to finish with breakfast Monday morning. Who says men don't talk!"
Whatever the controversy over Jesus being a black man, Jesus being a Corkman could well be the theological debate in the pubs of Cork for the next 1,000 years.