When the Irish fought the mafia
Elaine Murphy’s comedy, Shush, premieres in May, while this month features Richard Dormer with his own new play, Drum Belly.
“It’s a play about the beginning of the demise of the Irish mafia in New York,” says Dormer, fresh from rehearsals. “It’s set in Brooklyn in 1969 during the eight-day period of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I suppose you could call it a thriller. It’s darkly funny and it explores themes of friendship, trust and betrayal.”
Dormer has been a fixture of Northern Irish theatre for over 15 years. An actor and writer, he remains best known for Hurricane, his one-man show inspired by snooker icon Alex Higgins. The Lisburn native’s career has entered a particularly fertile period of late. In addition to a new play opening at the Abbey, Dormer is the star of Good Vibrations, a new film based on the colourful life-story of Belfast record label maestro Terri Hooley. It’s just been released. Dormer has also recently joined the cast of hit TV series Game of Thrones.
“I’ve got a lot of pans on the fire,” he laughs. “I’m spinning plates.”
Drum Belly uses the Irish-American gangster milieu to explore issues of Irish identity and the nature of exile, says Dormer.
“One of the characters in the play says that, ‘In exile man finds his true nature’, and I think that’s very telling. None of these characters have ever forgotten the Famine. In a way this is a Famine play. It’s about the diaspora. These men — they’re second or third generation Irish — and they dream of a place they’ve never been to. They pine for it. It’s like a myth. It’s like the moon. It’s always there, even when you can’t see it, and it has a pull on you. It’s almost as if they’ve lost themselves and they’re trying to rediscover who they are, and, of course, they can’t. Because they’re in a completely different culture and an alien environment.”
One can feel an exile in one’s home environment, of course, and Dormer suggests his own upbringing in Northern Ireland bears its own subtle influence on his writing.
“As a Northern Irish Protestant living in the North, I suppose I’ve felt like an exile almost all my life,” he says. “I’ve not been considered an Irishman because I live in the North and I have a British accent, but when I go to England I’m not considered a British person, because I’ve got an Irish accent. So I exist in a place that is neither Ireland nor England. And that’s probably influenced Drum Belly as well.”
Dormer considers the play to be akin to a musical piece with several movements. The insight that a good play resides in the rhythms and the music of language came to him, he says, when he was performing in Peter Hall’s production of Waiting for Godot on the West End.
“Peter used to sit with the text on a musician’s stand and he would close his eyes and listen to the rehearsals. And that really inspired me and got me thinking about language. If you close your eyes and listen to the words, then you can almost see it. Every word has a meaning and a place, even if it’s just ‘Huh?’ or ‘Yeah’. There’s an essential rhythm.”
Rhythm is also to the fore, of course, in Good Vibrations, in which Dormer plays Terri Hooley, the record-store owner who discovered the Undertones and brought punk to conflict-era Belfast. “It’s such a lovely story and Terri’s such a brilliant character,” says Dormer. Research for the part began with his sharing an Ulster fry and the sinking of a few pints with the real Hooley.
“He was funny and charming and mischievous. I had never heard so many anecdotes come out of one man in the space of a couple of hours. After that I spent a few months on YouTube listening to the music and then met all the bands from the era. It was a real joy to make. I think the film’s a testament to Terri as a visionary, and to Belfast as well, in that we’ve come through these horrible times and we can celebrate the good that was in the bad.”
* Drum Belly opens in the Abbey on Friday. Good Vibrations is in cinemas now
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