Culture That Made Me: Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca reveals his influences

Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca theatre company in Cork. Picture: Darragh Kane
Pat Kiernan, 54, grew up in Glasheen, Cork. In 1991, he co-founded Corcadorca Theatre Company. In 1996, Corcadorca premiered Disco Pigs. Written by Enda Walsh and starring two unknown teenage actors, Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, it toured internationally to widespread acclaim.
The play set the benchmark for several original, landmark productions, including site-specific shows like The Trial of Jesus on Cork’s Patrick’s Hill. Corcadorca will premiere Éadaoin O’Donoghue’s Hail to the Great Wave! on Monday, November 22 at Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin St, Cork.
Growing up, music was my thing more than theatre. I was born in 1967 so I was catching up with punk retrospectively in my teens. I bought all The Clash singles. London Calling is still a favourite album. The energy of Joe Strummer was extraordinary. When he was on tour, he’d run marathons at the drop of a hat. The intensity of him and the band live – at 14 you mightn’t fully understand what was going on but it felt so sincere and important. How they embraced different musical styles and diversity – they were so progressive.
I remember seeing Echo & the Bunnymen in The Savoy in Cork. It was probably for the Porcupine tour around 1983. They were fresh at that time. I was a huge fan. The Savoy was magic as a venue. There was a great sense of expectation. It was an old cinema in the middle of Patrick’s Street. You had to go right up the stairs, and then down into the cavern for the gig. My memory is being up so close for all of those Savoy gigs. It was the volume if you weren’t used to it. That experience of a live music gig and the audience is as interesting as theatre for me.

When I was about 20, Borstal Boy the play – in a production by Joe Dowling – was on in Dublin. I hadn’t really thought about plays. I went to see it because it was “Brendan Behan” more than because it was one of his plays, as I was into reading his books, but it blew me away – what theatre could do. It was an incredibly theatrical production. Niall Tóibín was in it. It had a huge cast, but it wasn’t the detail of that – it was about how they could represent a prison and then the next scene would be somewhere else. I hadn’t foreseen the language of theatre.
I remember seeing a production, Carmen Fúnebre, by a Polish theatre company called Teatr Biuro Podróży at the Galway Arts Festival in 1997. It was an outdoor production that was based on testimonies from the Balkan Wars. It was a non-verbal piece with people on stilts, with cast members taking people out of the audience, herding them up and putting them into chambers. It was a beautiful, frightening production, with this huge sound design going right through it. It had amazing scale. At that time, I was beginning to do work outside of theatres. We were all standing around in a carpark in Galway watching it unfold and I was thinking: I absolutely love this.
I love new writing, but I have a huge appetite to do Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It's such an incredible piece of writing. Over the last 10-15 years, we have become more compact in how we tell stuff in theatre. Edward Albee’s play is three hours yet it needs every second of it. It's vicious, beautiful, horrible. It’s so uncomfortable. There’s so much going on there. The challenge in terms of making it would be: how do you make sure everybody experiences that as well? It's a brilliantly crafted play. An actor who doesn’t do the obvious David Pearse – or DP, as he’s known – is an extraordinary actor. Often with theatre actors, the obvious relaying of a line or interpretation of a line, they can understand most of the time, but DP has this knack of making the line understandable but not in an obvious way. It’s interesting. He doesn't go for the obvious.

The film The Night of the Hunter is important to me. Robert Mitchum is in it. Charles Laughton directed it. It’s film noir. It’s designed so beautifully. There’s a story behind it too. It wasn't well received. Charles Laughton never made another film after it. It's of its time, but if you look at it now, you can appreciate how extraordinary it is, visually, and with incredible performances and ideas in it.
I’ve gorged on true crime documentaries: The Jinx, The Staircase, podcasts like Serial. I'm fascinated by the form of the new reveals, where it seems like you know everything, but the way information is released makes you press play on the next episode. It’s so considered and calculated. I’d love to bring that idea into theatre. Somebody was saying to me about the play we’re doing now: “Oh, if we release a promo and we include that piece of music will it be a spoiler?” I’m thinking: “Spoilers are the past because nobody comes into something without having some idea of what it is.” As a theatre maker or a Netflix showrunner you have a responsibility: despite spoilers how do I keep the audience engaged? You may know the outcome, but the journeys within that are still interesting.
Manchán Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape is brilliant. I didn't like Irish at school, but I’m beginning to get it at last. I have an appetite to learn it – how beautifully descriptive it is. It might be an obvious or simple way into the language, but I love the book. I remember John Creedon – I think we were at a match or fishing together one time – and he said to me about the Irish language: “In English, we say, ‘I am sick’ while in Irish, we say, ‘There’s a sickness on me.’ That differentiation is brilliant – the care in the language.
I’ve always loved going to watch Cork City since the mid-1990s. I still go. Conal or Blake Creedon first dragged me along to Turner’s Cross. When it's singing and alive, it’s an incredible space. At a stadium like the Aviva, you need binoculars. It’s such an intimate experience at Turner’s Cross. A favourite chant I remember was from the late-90s when we had a great rivalry with St Pat’s. They’d a good sense of humour. When the Russian billionaire Román Abramovich took over Chelsea around 2003, there used to be a chant about Brian Lennox the chairman [and chip-shop owner]: “Who needs Abramovich, Brian sells lots of chips!”