Cillian Murphy soars in Misterman

To describe Cillian Murphy as amazing in Enda Walsh’s one-man show Misterman barely begins to do justice to the actor’s performance.

Misterman is a strange piece of work – its 90 minutes has moments that are comic, tragic and plain mad, with language that is frequently biblical in scale. It’s also very physical and beautifully lit and scored.

The city’s Black Box has been transformed into a warehouse space for the show, in which Murphy as Thomas Magill is recreating scenes from his past as he tries to stop his world from falling apart.

It’s apparent very quickly, despite the quick-fire comedy of the early moments, that he is not a well man and that there will be no happy ending.

Thomas sees himself as a modern day Messiah, in league with God, whose mission in life is to save the inhabitants of the midland town of Innishfree from their sins. The only problem is they don’t want to be saved. They also don’t realise quite how mad he is and that mistake is fatal.

Thomas lives with his mother, who has a penchant for Jammie Dodger biscuits, and their cat, whose kittens he has recently drowned for what he regards as humanitarian reasons. His father, who owned the local shop, has died recently and Thomas feels the loss greatly.
At first he seems pretty harmless, but as he recreates conversations he has with his neighbours, you realise he is a zealot.

He impersonates many of his neighbours, effortlessly skipping from one character to another. His recreation of the local vamp, Mrs Cleary is great and evokes memories of Breakfast on Pluto.

Cillian Murphy’s physicality and his intensity as he moves through the events that have brought him to this warehouse are amazing. There are moments when he barely moves, moments when he can’t stand still and at one point when he is cowering during a beating from an irate neighbour, it’s difficult to believe that he is the only person on stage. That’s not the only moment when you believe that there’s a host of villagers alongside him. He finds ‘an angel’ Edel – voiced by Alice Sykes – with whom he falls in love and dreams of their bright new future. His language becomes highly poetic and as he tells her of the Eden he is planning, and asks if he can hold her hand, you can sense her presence.

In addition to his impersonations, Thomas recreates ‘conversations’ with his mother and his neighbours, courtesy of a series of reel to reel tape recordings he has made of them.

MISTERMAN IS SOLD OUT!

JULY 07 19.30 Black Box Theatre   JULY 08 19.30 Black Box Theatre   JULY 09 19.30 Black Box Theatre JULY 10 18.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 11 20.00 Black Box Theatre
(SOLD OUT) JULY 13 19.30 Black Box Theatre
(SOLD OUT) JULY 14 19.30 Black Box Theatre - SOLD OUT JULY 15 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 16 15.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 16 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 17 18.00 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 19 19.30 Black Box Theatre JULY 20 19.30 Black Box Theatre SOLD OUT JULY 21 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 22 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 23 15.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 23 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 24 18.00 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT)

MISTERMAN - CILLIAN ON STAGE

Cillian On Stage - MISTERMAN

Risk and art go hand in hand, says arts chief

SOCIETY MUST continue to “take risks with art” and allow for failure, which is an integral part of creativity, the Arts Council chairwoman Pat Moylan has said.

Opening the Galway Arts Festival last night, Ms Moylan said that while the economy was “risk averse”, society cannot “turn on and off” its commitment to those who are creative.

“Any time we put an artist in front of a canvas, we don’t necessarily have any guarantees about the result, but this is how art is created – not in a foolproof way, and there is always a risk it won’t succeed,” she said.

“If we don’t continue to fund the arts, we could find ourselves in a few years’ time in an artless society,” she said.

Paying tribute to the Galway Arts Festival for its energy and enthusiasm for “risk”, Ms Moylan noted that the event’s economic value was close to €20 million in 2009, with 190,000 visitors.

“One has to continue to make an economic argument,” she said, but it shouldn’t have to be the case.

Ms Moylan noted NUI Galway’s partnership with the festival this year, through its new volunteer programme involving 10 graduate students.

The selected group have been given passes for shows, post-show talks, workshops and masterclasses, while also assisting organisers as part of a “hothousing” training initiative.

The festival’s opening show last night was the world premiere of Enda Walsh’s Misterman , starring Cillian Murphy, in the Black Box Theatre.

Artists from Africa, North America, Asia, Australia and Europe have been booked for this year’s programme, along with Irish productions.

Highlights include the return of the all-male Shakespeare theatre company Propeller, under the direction of Edward Hall, with a double-bill of Shakespeare’s Richard III and The Comedy of Errors. 

Corcadorca is presenting Request Programme , with Eileen Walsh and directed by Pat Kiernan, in a city centre apartment, while Fishamble Theatre Company is staging Silent by Pat Kinevane in the Druid Theatre.

The Macnas parade, which includes a strong volunteer element drawn from the city populace, takes to the streets next Sunday night from the Spanish Arch – with the title This Fierce Beauty. 

French acrobatic and circus artists Les Philébulistes are also part of the street programme, with Arcane , in Eyre Square tomorrow and Thursday at 2pm and 6pm.

The festival’s extensive visual arts programme opened on Sunday with Hughie O’Donoghue’s The Road . He speaks about his work today at 2pm at the temporary festival gallery in Galway Shopping Centre on the Headford road.

Some 14 separate free art exhibitions, including the work of Charles Lamb in Connemara, are at the Galway City Museum.

Music ranges from Blondie to Afrocubism to Iarla Ó Lionáird and Iris DeMent, and Brassroots, who played at the festival opening last night.

Also opening this week for a fortnight is the Galway Loves Theatre festival at Nun’s Island Theatre.

The concept behind this new event is to allow greater participation by Galway artists, according to director Paraic Breathnach.

Only one of two Galway Youth Theatre submissions to this year’s arts festival was accepted, which effectively meant that the city-owned Nun’s Island venue would have been booked for only one performance a day. It will now present five different productions.

CILLIAN MURPHY IN: Misterman

Cillian Murphy on Misterman’s ‘amazing immersive experience’

Galway Advertiser, July 07, 2011.

By Charlie Mcbride

Playwright Enda Walsh’s Misterman is one of the hottest tickets at this year’s Galway Arts Festival due in no small measure to the fact it sees Cillian Murphy take a rare break from his film career to ‘tread the boards’ again.

On Monday morning at the Radisson Hotel the duo took part in a press conference to talk about the play which sees them work together for the first time since Disco Pigs. While it has been 12 years since that production was last staged, Walsh and Murphy have remained good friends and live near each other in London.

It was over a sociable drink one evening that Murphy suggested Walsh should revisit Misterman, a play he had initially written as a one-act that he himself performed in 1999.

“I hadn’t done theatre for a while, it’s been five or six years and I was trying to find the right thing,” Murphy says as he talks about the motivation behind doing Misterman. “I’d been to all of Enda’s plays and I kept thinking ‘I wish I was in that’ and it just struck me one day ‘why don’t I just ask him?’

“And working with friends, because you know each other, you can go straight to the work, there’s no getting-to-know-each-other or tip-toeing around, it’s very liberating. That’s what I miss most about theatre, the rehearsal process, that laboratory of throwing ideas around and particularly when you’re in a room with a friend there’s complete ease.”

Murphy expands on what drew him to the play.

“I love Enda’s work first and foremost,” he says. “Any actor saying his words and playing his characters, they’re really challenging, you have to give everything. What he’s digging for are themes I’m very interested in.

“I think this play is about loneliness and guilt and carrying something around with you and the corrosive nature of that and what it does to a person. It’s a really bizarre and non-linear investigation of that.

“Thomas Magill [the play’s protagonist] is a brilliant character, very funny and very loveable but also, as you’d expect from Enda play’s, slightly not all there. And also, it being a one-man show, having not been back in theatre in a while you feel like ‘sure we’ll jump in the deepest end of the pool!’”

Misterman is a dark and blisteringly funny tale of one man, Magill, who is on a self-appointed mission to “do the Lord’s work” in the small community of Inishfree. The play brings us indelible portrayals of the evangelising Thomas and the various townsfolk he encounters throughout his personal crusade.

“Those characters that are on the periphery in small towns interested me,” says Walsh. “He’s massively lonely and also someone you would be unnerved by. I like characters who are on the edge. This is the world he’s built and we’re sitting in it. The play gives you hallucinogenic shards of deepest darkest quiet Ireland.”

Murphy describes the challenge of doing a one-man show.

“In this play it’s not just one character, he peoples the town so you get to play several different characters and that’s always fascinating to do,” he says. “It’s very fast and very intense so it’s an amazing immersive experience and I love that. I love characters and projects that take you miles and miles away from yourself. I like work that’s intense, I think Enda does as well. It involves a lot of commitment.”

Misterman previews from tonight to Monday and then runs throughout the festival from Wednesday July 13 to Sunday 24.

Tickets are available from the festival box office on Forster Street and through www.galwayartsfestival.com and www.ticketmaster.ie

Enda Walsh - Misterman, Cillian Murphy, and the Galway connection

Misterman is a play that’s had a massive effect on everything I’ve written since 1998 - Enda Walsh

By Charlie Mcbride

One of the definite highlights of this year’s Galway Arts Festival is Enda Walsh’s Misterman which sees him reunited with Cillian Murphy for the first time since their feted collaboration on Disco Pigs 15 years ago.

Misterman is a dark and blisteringly funny tale of one man, Thomas Magill, played by Murphy, who is on a self-appointed mission to “do the Lord’s work” in the small community of Inishfree. The play brings us indelible portrayals of the evangelising Thomas and the various townsfolk he encounters throughout his personal crusade.

Speaking ahead of the play’s Galway Arts Festival run next month, Walsh – who also directs the play - talked about the creation of Misterman.

However he began by recalling that earlier landmark staging of Disco Pigs which would prove such a breakthrough in the careers of Walsh and both its cast-members, Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh (who also features in this year’s Galway Arts Festival in Corcadorca’s Request Programme).

“I was really lucky to get these two terrific, enigmatic actors who were both perfect for the kind of energy they brought to their roles,” Walsh tells me. “The chemistry between them was just so right and the play itself just seemed to be the right play for Cork and for the theatre scene at the time.”

Premiering in Cork, Corcadorca’s staging of Disco Pigs had a huge impact on Irish audiences and subsequently toured successfully to Edinburgh, London’s West End, Australia, Canada, and mainland Europe. It set Walsh, Murphy, and Eileen Walsh firmly on the paths to success they have all enjoyed in their careers in the years since. And while they haven’t worked together since, they remain in regular contact and, co-incidentally, all live within 20 minutes of each other in London.

As he explains how the arts festival production of Misterman came about, Walsh reveals that the initial impetus came from Cillian Murphy. The play itself first saw the light of day as a one-act production, which Walsh himself performed for Cordadorca in 1999. This new staging is a substantially re-worked and expanded version of the piece.

“I’ve never revisited any of my plays before,” Walsh reveals, “but Cillian came to me one day about two years ago and said he would really like to perform Misterman. When I looked at it again, I felt there was a lot more I could do with the play. I wanted to delve deeper into Thomas and really crack open the head of this character and all his dealings with issues of guilt.

“Misterman is a play that’s had a massive effect on everything I’ve written since 1998. On the page it seems slim but the world of it, the character’s history, his disturbing psychosis, always felt huge. I suppose now with 13 years’ experience and a little more craft I can see what we missed all those years ago. More than the spine of the original remains but it has been developed much further over the past year.

“Its story travels a more circuitous route than before. There’s none of the rush of telling the story, instead we see the strange detail of what he remembers, of how he has learnt to lie, and how his guilt has shaped his bizarre existence.”

Many of the other characters who feature in the play appear in taped conversations with Thomas which is one of ways in which this version differs from the earlier one, as Walsh outlines.

“The first version was staged much more sparsely than this one is,” he says. “We didn’t use any tapes first time around. This will be much more elaborate, and there will be almost hallucinogenic use of lighting at times. The play is kind of like Disco Pigs in that it portrays a character who basically has arrested development. Thomas is stuck with this simplified catechism view of the world. And Thomas is the kind of guy that if he doesn’t continue on this mission of his he would probably commit suicide. It’s a story that’s crazy and vibrant and sad.”

While Walsh might be associated with his native Dublin, and Cork through his fruitful early association with Cordadorca, recent years have seen him develop a strong, and prolific, affinity with Galway.

Druid has premiered no fewer than five of his plays – Medea, New Electric Ballroom, Walworth Farce, Gentrification, and Lynndie’s Gotta Gun, Galway Youth Theatre have presented Chatroom, Fregoli have staged both Bedbound and Disco Pigs and the Galway Arts Festival has hosted a production of The Small Things.

“I’ve been quite seduced by the city,” Walsh laughs as he considers this remarkable run of Galway productions. “And I’m really looking forward to having Misterman on in the arts festival. I love summertime shows and I love having a play on as part of an arts festival where you can have theatre taking place alongside other artforms.”

Walsh is also effusive in his praise of the creative team who have come together to bring Misterman to the stage.

“We have gathered an amazing creative team including designers Jamie Vartan [set], Adam Silverman [lighting], and Gregory Clarke [sound]. The production will also feature the world premiere of a specially commissioned score by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary composers, and founder of the renowned Crash Ensemble, Donnacha Dennehy. I feel so privileged to be working with them all.

“And in Cillian Murphy we have an actor who has the intensity and courage to push himself to the limit. Working to all our potential I hope and believe we can offer a slice of Ireland and Irish theatre that feels dangerous, deeply unsettling, and challenging for any audience.”

Misterman will run at the Black Box Theatre from Thursday July 7 to Sunday July 24 (excluding July 12 and 18). Tickets are on sale from the festival box office and through www.galwayartsfestival.com and www.ticketmaster ie

CMTFA is taking the ticket buyer link down for “Misterman”

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MISTERMAN - Cillian Murphy

(NOT FROM MITZIMURPHY)