Pat’s powerful plays in special three-night run

I feel very grateful and I remind myself, daily, to be grateful,” says Cork-born Pat Kinevane, one of Ireland’s most inspiring theatre writers and performers about his life as an actor.

Pat’s three one-man shows, exploring different facets of Irish life, will be in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre from August 23-26. Presented by Fishamble: The New Play Company, and directed by Jim Culleton, this run offers audiences a rare opportunity to see Silent, Underneath and Forgotten over three nights.

Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and filled with humanity, the plays – which have won multiple awards at home and abroad –  were written over a 10-year period that began when Pat turned 40. A successful actor, he felt he needed to change direction as he approached that decade.

“I hate sounding artsy about this, cos I’m not artsy – I’m from a working-class Cobh background – but I felt at a crossroads,” he says.

“While I was grateful for the chances I’d been given, I felt I wasn’t making a difference with my work. Sometimes through no fault of anyone else or your own, you can find yourself repeating yourself.  I was stuck artistically and wanted to give myself a passion again.”

He found that passion with Forgotten, a play portraying four elderly characters living in retirement homes and care facilities around Ireland, which mixes Japanese Kabuki dance and Irish storytelling.

Pat’s second play, Silent, is told through the eyes of Tino McGoldrig, a homeless man living in Dublin but originally from Cobh, whose mind has become increasingly fragile. Tino recreates his past through re-imagining the romantic world of silent movie star Rudolph Valentino, after whom he’s named.

The most recent work, Underneath, was first staged in 2015, and is an unusually told story of a girl who has had to cope with being disfigured in childhood. “It’s about how she deals with it and the cruelty of people and how they judge her,” explains Pat, as he adds “I really wanted to talk about that and see the funnier side of it”.

He does that by having her tell her story from beyond the grave “when you don’t worry about things any more”.

Each play stands alone, but seen together, the three give an overview of Pat’s approach to theatre and his ability to give a warm, light touch to often difficult themes. His characters are fully fleshed-out people; funny, flawed and getting through life with varying degrees of success.

For more from Pat Kinevane see this week’s Tribune here.