Pat McCabe takes a seat on the stage in an empty Smock Alley Theatre ready to discuss everything from the birth of an idea to the destruction of civilisation. The venue in Dublin’s Temple Bar is much smaller than the Olympia where one of his first plays, Loco County Lonesome, was staged in 1994. But size doesn’t matter when it comes to Country and Irish, his new drama, McCabe insists. “Not to me. I’d put on a play in a telephone box. The language and the sincerity is all I care about. You couldn’t do this play in the Olympia. You’d be wasting your time, you’d just be embarrassing yourself. This venue is perfect.”
McCabe is on a sojourn to the capital from his home in Clones, Co Monaghan. He had a second home in Dublin until a few years ago but got fed up with it. “I don’t think I’ll be moving any more,” he says. “Too old now. Children are all reared.” He’s not hands-on with the play either: “Something like this is such a quirky animal, either the director gets it or they don’t. There’s not a lot I can add.”
Fans of McCabe’s work will find a familiarity about Country and Irish. In it a man from Longford is in trouble with Albanian gangsters and his overbearing mother, and records his final testimony into a tape recorder. The familiarity doesn’t just come from the actor, Peter Gowen, who performed in McCabe’s last stage play, The Big Yum Yum (2013). McCabe aficionados will recognise his anarchic vision of rural Ireland, viewed through a prism of pop culture and macabre musings: a milieu the author created in his two Booker-nominated works, The Butcher Boy (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (1998).
The protagonist in Country and Irish styles himself as Walter Neff, the anti-hero from the movie Double Indemnity. The author’s self-constructed genre, which some have called bog gothic, owes a lot to film noir’s double crosses and dead-end streets. The play also includes the music of Brendan Shine and other Irish country-music performers. McCabe has long been fascinated by the interplay between music and language. In the 1970s he played keyboard with a showband.
“I’m not much of a musician,” he insists. “I’m probably a failed musician. I grew up in a small place where people were always whistling and singing.”
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Even when an instrument isn’t involved he composes prose like it’s music. Country and Irish and its lonely sense of dread seems Beckettian in design. “I don’t think Beckett is entirely beyond criticism,” McCabe says. “I like to think I’m an optimist. I have another grandchild coming and I don’t think it’s a disaster for the world. It’s certainly not a disaster for me. I like to look at things as sacred almost. You’re lucky enough to have this opportunity. Lots of people don’t. I’m not about to throw this experience in the dustbin and make fun of it.”
In the early stages of creating his new novel, though, there were times when he wondered if he was throwing it all away. Poguemahone is a free-form experiment that reads like a psychedelic ballad. Narrated by an Irishman living in England, it’s McCabe’s weirdest and wildest work to date. “And it’s my best,” he insists. “I worked so hard on it. I’m not a great fan of indiscipline. It might look like this is wild, but everything ties up in it, and that’s not always the case with me. It won’t be for everybody, but it is for me.”
The project began five years ago when he started writing phrases in Irish to an inner rhythm. He hammers on the table in Smock Alley — rat-a-tat-tat — to explain his process. “I wrote thousands of pages with this beat. I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, it’s going nowhere.’ Whatever hope I had of a career as a writer is going down the drain now.”
Hanging over this was a series of poorly performing novels such as Hello and Goodbye (2013) and The Big Yaroo (2019). “My books would never really be commercial,” he points out. “I don’t know how The Butcher Boy happened. It’s more to do with my own emotions than what anybody else would think. I’m not writing to try and make my mark.”
McCabe describes the voice in Poguemahone as “somewhere between Allen Ginsberg and Dion Boucicault [the Irish actor and playwright]”. But when he approached publishers with the manuscript they asked: “Who is this for? Will this sell? What is your unique selling point?” He describes the process as deeply unpleasant — “like a school exam”.
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The author eventually found a publisher, Unbound, which crowdfunds its releases. Some 500 supporters helped to pay for the novel, which will be published on April 14. John Mitchinson, a co-founder of Unbound, has described Poguemahone as the culmination of McCabe’s work.
“The perception of me, he suggested, is that I was this wunderkind who fell into a holding pattern for ten years talking about small-town Ireland,” McCabe says. “I told him, ‘Joyce’s small town was Dublin. I have my own.’ It’s not really a question of the populace at large issuing this diktat that I have to follow. I have to get out of there when the muse says it’s done.”
McCabe describes the search for his literary voice as long and arduous: “It took me 60 years. I’m still doing it.” He describes his first adult novel, Music on Clinton Street (1986), as a big disappointment (“It’s not good. It’s just amateur”). Carn (1989), his portrait of a small town on the Irish border, was his breakthrough and during the 1990s he became a household name. “Look, it was an interesting time. I suppose what was lovely about it was I got to travel, because I hadn’t travelled very much. I stopped all that by design. I had two small children. It gets messy — you’re not home enough.”
The influence of his manic rural black comedy can be seen in the work of Enda Walsh and Martin McDonagh, in comedians such as Pat Shortt and Tommy Tiernan, and in Irish noir films such as Dark Lies the Island and Calm with Horses. As a child growing up in Clones, McCabe adored the escapism of cinema. Now he was working in it, writing the screenplay for Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy.
“Everybody said at the time that it was unfilmable. When the Warner Brothers crest came up on The Butcher Boy it doesn’t get much better than that. I think it stands the test of time.”
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A stage-musical version of Breakfast on Pluto was due to open before the pandemic, but was put on hold after criticism of the casting of a non-trans actor in a trans role. McCabe says he wasn’t involved in the production. “The book is my statement, so after that I had nothing to say about it. If the musical doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You certainly wouldn’t want to discommode anybody. I’d be progressive by nature.”
We discuss Cillian Murphy’s performance as Patrick “Kitten” Braden in Jordan’s adaptation of Breakfast on Pluto. Murphy is filming Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s film about the creator of the atomic bomb. As a child growing up during the Cold War, McCabe became fixated on “the beautiful but terrible mushroom cloud”. Nuclear holocaust is a backdrop to The Butcher Boy. These past three decades we have been privileged, he says. Now, after the invasion of Ukraine, the fear is back. “We’re here again,” he says, gravely.
Between literature, film and music, McCabe, 66, still pursues the interests that besotted him as a child. Does he have more to prove? “See, I don’t feel I have anything to prove to anybody. I never really did. If it was only about proving myself, I might as well be Lassie the dog. That’s a neediness I don’t have.”
He does feel compelled to write, though. “I wasn’t really much good at anything else. When it goes well, there’s a peace that Zen yoga people talk about, or Catholics when they receive the host, Presbyterians when their voices join together. Whatever it is, that exaltation exists for writers.
“You don’t get it very often, but you live in hope. It could be viewed as an emotional disorder. For me, though, it is like a faith.”
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Country and Irish is at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, from Wed until Apr 9; smockalley.com
