Seamus O’Rourke: 'These bachelors couldn’t understand why women weren't more into them’
Seamus O’Rourke brings The Love Hungry Farmer to Cork Opera House on Friday night.
Seamus O’Rourke’s connections with Cork go back a long way. As a Gaelic football-mad child, he was enchanted with Cork’s 1973 All-Ireland winning football team, even though he grew up on a farm at the other end of the country in Co Leitrim. Later in the 1980s, O’Rourke played inter-county football for Leitrim. Of Cork’s 1973 team, which was captained by goalkeeper Billy Morgan, it was the dashing, buzz-cut Jimmy Barry-Murphy who caught O’Rourke’s imagination.
“I was a huge Cork fan,” says O’ Rourke, “to the point where for my confirmation name, I was already Jimmy (ie Seamus) so I couldn’t take that name. There was a fella in my class called Barry and I didn't like him, so I couldn't call myself Jimmy Barry, so I ended up with my confirmation name being ‘Billy’ after Billy Morgan. I never met Billy, but he’s always been a hero of mine.”
O’Rourke will be in Cork on Friday performing his latest one-man show, an adaptation of John B Keane’s novella (which Keane also adapted for the stage) at the Cork Opera House. The story centres on John Bosco McLean, a bumbling bachelor, not lacking in confidence but one “who has never lain down with a woman”, who is in pursuit of a suitable wife.
“I'm focusing on the idea of loneliness in a rural setting,” says O’Rourke. “I grew up in a very rural part of Leitrim. We were surrounded by bachelors. Yes, they were colourful and yes, we laughed at them in some ways, but we also did identify that they were lonely people, besides many people who chose to be alone who weren't lonely at all! I wanted to play the character seriously. Very often in John B Keane’s play, he's played as a buffoon, a clown who's continually messing up with women because he's a fool. But in his head, he's not a fool.
“He calls himself a fair-sized farmer, which means he's not a small farmer. He has a good house. He also had a boarding school education, which was rare. I think the reason John B gave him a boarding school education originally in the book was so that he gets to use beautiful language, a language that an ordinary ‘five-eight,’ as we call them up our way, wouldn't use. Because of that, there is a beautiful description of his failures.
“I knew a lot of these bachelors who had an opinion of themselves, that they had something very important that women should jump at the chance at, and couldn’t understand why women weren't more ‘into them’, as they say. Pampered by their mothers a lot of them and told how wonderful they were.”
O’Rourke recalls a “colourful bachelor” involved in the dating game from his youth in the 1980s: “One of my favourites was ‘Joe Clamping’ – ‘clamping’ because he was mad for women. He was a great dancer. A lot of these bachelors were great dancers and were specific about the women they wanted to dance with – they had to be good dancers as well. Joe had this wonderful ability that none of the rest of us young fellas had, which was he never got put off by a refusal. He was like a Cork hurler – he kept coming back!
“Someone heard him in operation with a very popular lady in the town. He was listening to what was going on. He could hear her say, ‘Kiss me, Joe, kiss me.’ His reply was, ‘I will in a minute.’ I don't know what he was doing at the time.”
O’Rourke, who was born in 1965, spent the first half of his working life in the construction industry, and raising a family, doing amateur dramatics on the side. He’s been prolific since going full-time as an actor, writer and storyteller.
His online sketch videos have garnered millions of hits, among them a skit in which Mossy Flood drolly tries to persuade viewers, while being filmed in a sodden field, that Longford is not “the most miserable place in Ireland”. It’s comic gold and is a sketch that still has legs a decade later. Fans still greet him as “Mossy Flood” when they encounter him.
“Strangely, I'm doing a video in a few weeks with Amble,” says O’Rourke. “One of the band is from up Longford way. Mossy Flood in a very strange way got me that gig. So, Mossy still works.”
- Seamus O’Rourke’s is at Cork Opera House, 8pm, Friday, September 4. See: www.corkoperahouse.ie
