The Love Hungry Farmer, The Everyman, Cork

Des Keogh gives a fine performance in this one-man show, adapted from John B Keane’s Letters from a Love Hungry Farmer. As John Bosco McLane, a lonely, whiskey-imbibing bachelor trying to find love, Keogh succeeds in being both hilarious and heart-achingly sad.

Playing myriad roles, he brings the audience on a journey that encompasses everything from a day out at the Dublin spring show to a surreal encounter with a married man whose sexual interest is a rubber woman.

McLane is embittered, and suspicious of cunning ‘townies’ and city slickers who seem to have all the luck with women. But he lives in hope, enlisting the help of a matchmaker in a final stab to procure a woman. What ensues is a number of anecdotes, dramatised by Keogh, which reveal his pathetic failure to seize the moment. Even when he is with a woman in a hotel bedroom, McLane is thwarted by a man he befriended.