Jon Kenny is happy to show a Keane edge to his talents
IF A thing’s not broke, don’t try to fix it. Jon Kenny and Mary McEvoy’s touring production of John B Keane’s The Matchmaker has been charming audiences up and down the country for two years now.
The show runs in the Everyman, Cork this week.
It will be one of its last hurrahs before the same team — Kenny, McEvoy, and director Michael Scott — return with another Keane piece, The Successful TD, in the autumn.
The Matchmaker centres on the attempts of Dicky Mick Dicky O’Connor — a man who’s half farmer, half old-school dating app — to forge love between the lonely bachelors and bachelorettes of rural Ireland.
“It’s nice because I can go to an extreme of comedy in it,” says the Limerick actor.
“I play a load of characters and it’s really nice to jump in and out of them. And there’s a bit of a song in it, too. So, it’s a lovely vehicle for me.”
Kenny — who hails from a part of the country not too distant from Keane’s native Listowel — has a great affinity with Keane’s work, and he has appeared in a number of his plays over the years, including a turn as The Bull in Shoestring Theatre Company’s 2013 production of The Field.
As a young man, Kenny used to enjoy Keane’s columns in the Limerick Leader — “It’d be like, ‘What does Keane have to say for himself this week? What yarn is he going to spin?’” — and when he was coaxed into amateur theatre by his friend John McGrath in the early ’80s, Sive was one of his first plays.
“I did Thomasheen Seán Rua in it,” he recalls. “And I loved it altogether. I loved the badness of the bastard. There was colour in him and all these sides to him.”
Indeed, the colour of Keane’s style is what Kenny most admires.
“A huge part of it is the language and the colour. And he mixed in a lot of magic as well.
"In rural Ireland we wouldn’t even call it magic, but it gets close to piseogary, you know. It gets close to paganism.
"I always find with Keane — and he’s a man I never spoke to — that there’s another Ireland that exists in a lot of his work.
"It’s an ancient, pagan Ireland. This very ancient current is flowing under a lot of the characters and stories he wrote.
"They’re nearly like something out of mythology. They’re mysterious. They’re dangerous. They’re larger than life.”
Of course, as a comic performer, Kenny made his name by playing uproarious characters, most famously as part of D’Unbelievables.
The ‘big’ characters created by Kenny and Pat Shortt were a bit like John B. Keane’s wildest characters, but souped up on angel dust.
Yet, like Keane, it was a feature of D’Unbelievables’ comedy that they conveyed not just the outlandishness but also the humanity of these figures.
As much as Ireland has changed — a change that Keane famously observed — these characters still exist.
“They’re in every town, thank God,” agrees Kenny.
“There are these young people with amazing character and colour. There’s a boldness in them, a brashness. They just say what they want to say. And I like that.”
Paying attention to how people speak has been key to Kenny’s success as a performer, and it was vital to Keane’s success as a writer also.
“I love his use of the language, that crossover between English words and Irish words that have been nearly forgotten,” says Kenny.
“Keane was writing about things that were dying out, even back then in the ’60s and ’70s. But he uses all these bits of phrases, and Irish mixed in with English, and it’s nearly like you’re talking English but in your head you’re still thinking in Irish.”
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