Question of Taste with Patrick Talbot: Sean Connery mistook me for Michael Crichton
Patrick Talbot has been watching some modern classics during lockdown.
Patrick Talbot is from Cork and began his professional career backstage with Irish National Ballet. After stints with Scottish Ballet and Scottish Opera, he worked with the Abbey and Gate theatres in Dublin, before becoming director/CEO of the Everyman in from 2001 to 2011. As a playwright, his titles include God Bless the Child and A Great Arrangement. Two Lord Mayors, co-written with James McKeon, is now part of the Everyman’s Made in Cork - Play It By Ear online series.
Life Sentences by Billy O’Callaghan is an extraordinary achievement. Chronicling three generations of one family over a century, the mastery of the narrative suggests amazing things ahead for this Cork writer.
I have been watching some modern classics again. I had forgotten the breathtaking ensemble acting in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Not just Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who both won Oscars, but actors like Danny De Vito, Christopher Lloyd, William Redfield and Brad Dourif. Mesmerising.
After a blitz year of streaming, the stand-out for me was the Dublin actor Andrew Scott in Sea Wall by Simon Stephens, in which he simply stands in a rehearsal room and speaks a compelling tale straight to a camera.
Everything from Rory Gallagher at Cork Opera House 1987. This is my touchstone gig. My sanity. The embodiment of what this great bluesman was all about: rocking out, and even better-with a home crowd.
The Shadow of the Glen by John Millington Synge, directed by John O’Shea at Colaiste Chriost Rí Cork. It was the evening when, as a young boy, live theatre became a visceral presence in my life.
In terms of pure emotional impact the play that resonated with me the most was Frank Pig Says Hello, Pat McCabe’s adaptation of his novel The Butcher Boy (which I hadn’t read at that stage) directed by Joe O’Byrne and with two magnificent performances by David Gorry and Sean Rocks. Thirty-plus years later the experience remains with me.
TV viewing for me is usually about sport and news but during the first lockdown I stumbled on the cartoon channel Cartoonito and have since been enjoying the extraordinary artistry of the animation on show. For slapstick comedy nothing beats Masha and the Bear!
I am a big fan of Eamon Dunphy’s podcast The Stand, principally because one of his regular guests is Johnny Giles, a man who is nothing but an anchor and a voice of experience and rationality in a crazy world.
In a post-Covid paradise I would love to lure Daniel Day Lewis back to the stage, maybe in Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer in the title role, with Fiona Shaw as his ex-wife and Robert Downey Jr as his manager.
On the set of the film, The First Great Train Robbery, at Kent Station, Cork, when Sean Connery came up to me from behind, put his hand on my shoulder and spun me around, mistaking me for the writer/director, and also very tall, Michael Crichton (who would go on to create Jurassic Park).
During the Great Depression in 1930s America, President Roosevelt’s government set up the Federal Theatre Project, a fully funded, nation-wide, initiative to get theatres functioning again and get theatre practitioners back to work. After the devastation wrought on the performing arts by Covid in the last year it is instructive to recall that precedents exist to demonstrate how entire sectors of society were resuscitated at times of crisis.
Vacant city centre retail spaces to be opened up as pop up galleries to extensively exhibit the work of our visual artists.
