Risteard Cooper is alive and well and playing in Dublin
For Risteard Cooper, it’s always been about music. His parents were both trained singers, and his first stage performance was as a nine-year-old who liked the idea of his mother suggesting he be the only boy in the cast of a children’s opera she was directing.
And while Apres Match looms large in his career, having planted him firmly in the national consciousness for more than 20 years, he’s kept up a surprisingly diverse range of output. His one complaint is perhaps that there are limited opportunities on the Dublin stage for him to show his musical chops.
Little wonder then that he speaks with relish about his latest role, in the Gate’s upcoming production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, a musical revue of the Belgian singer’s atmospheric and theatrical songs.
Brel and Cooper go back a way, he explains between bites of a caesar salad in one of the Gate’s elegant reception rooms. He was asked to sing in a similar show in New York during a year studying abroad as part of his drama degree at Trinity.
“I was a young lad and everyone else was of doing waitressing jobs or bar work or whatever while studying with this Trinity thing, so it was a great introduction. It was brilliant to be part of it. I ended up doing it off Broadway. I mean, when I say off Broadway, I suppose I mean off off Broadway.”
It was, for Cooper, the start of an abiding fondness for Brel’s work. “He writes amazingly about war and death, but there is a lot of comedy in there too, a lot of hard edges, yes, but he catches you with funny lines. It’s rare to come across that depth of emotion In a musical revue.”
The trick, for Jacques Brel is Alive and Well, says Cooper, is not to overplay it. “You’re not spoon-feeding the audience. You’re not explaining the links between the songs, you’re letting the audience find that link.
I guess the link is, really, his life, the various stages of his life and of all our lives. It covers every bass — loneliness, depression, the difficulty relating to people. But also the ridiculousness of life, where you find solace in the most strange and weird circumstances. And there’s a lot of comedy as well.”
Apres Match has, of course, been Cooper’s most prominent project of recent decades. His partnership with Barry Murphy stretches back to 1996.
The phrase “It just snowballed” is almost inadequate for what happened in the years since Apres Match began randomly appearing after games during Euro 96, before finding a regular slot during France 1998, and a third member, Gary Cooke.
“It is similar to being in a band. If you’re in each other’s faces all the time it won’t last,” Cooper says. “But it does bring us all back together and the one thing we have as a common ground is that we love talking about sport.”
Apres Match has given him another perspective on performance. “In theatre there is a very specific relation between the audience and the performer, whereas in comedy you are directly engaged with the audience and talking to them. Some people say it must be scary to do comedy, because if people don’t laugh it’s not good — that’s the only judgment.
"And while that is true — it is hard and scary —you could say it is actually more scary to perform in front of people and deliberately not make them laugh.In a way, laughter defuses a moment, so it’s an incredibly hard skill, a massive skill and such a discipline to engage an audience and keep them with you without having to rely on laughter.”
Mind you, there will be at least some laughter in the Jacques Brel revue. There might be a few tears too. But one thing is certain — there will be great songs.
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