Riding a wave from page to stage

READING Star of the Sea is to experience a book of textures, the novel as collage. Joseph O’Connor’s modern classic is a book about books, but also a book about journalism, log-keeping, letter-writing, and 19th-century print culture. It leaps off the page with its multiple voices, but it certainly does not suggest that it is leaping towards a stage.

Yet, stage bound it is, in the hands of Galway’s Moonfish Theatre Company, in a production for the Galway Arts Festival. “When I looked into the kind of work Moonfish did, I was intrigued,” says O’Connor, whose voice in conversation is familiar from his RTÉ radio columns, though perhaps more relaxed here.

Moonfish’s last production was a bilingual adaptation of Pinnochio. Its onstage texts, sound effects, music and puppetry were enough to breed confidence in any attempt by them to wrestle O’Connor’s 400-page sea monster onto the stage. O’Connor was happy to give the company a free hand in their adaptation.