Surreal take on rural life from Little John Nee at Town Hall

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Sparkplug Callaghan, vintage mechanic and blues man, comes to the Town Hall Theatre next week, courtesy of the one-man powerhouse that is writer, actor and musician Little John Nee.

Sparkplug is a surreal comedy featuring original blues music, which Little John was commissioned to write by the Earragail Arts Festival in 2012. The central character, Sparkplug Callaghan who lives in Tullyglen in rural Donegal, also appeared in Little John’s previous show, The Mother’s Arms.

Sparkplug, which was a highlight of last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival and won an Irish Times Theatre award in February, was in gestation for a while, Little John explains. He’s had two radio plays on RTÉ based on the same character – Sparkplug and Wee Black Bees.

Sparkplug lives in his dead uncle’s disused barn and has got a bad dose of the blues. Everyday there’s another funeral, Joe Duffy is on the radio and the banks are putting people on the side of the road. But across the meadow he sees a vision of a better life. He falls for a bohemian Belfast artist, living in her late father’s dry-docked boat, but discovers he has a rival in the form of an ex-cop.

Little John, who has a great ability to write surreal comedy, loves the notion of exploring a contemporary rural life that’s every bit as culturally rich as city life, but, at the same time, is in touch with the rural landscape, “where the past meets the present”.

He loves developing ways of telling stories, using contemporary narrative techniques and looped music alongside the tradition of the seanchaí or storyteller. 

Because Sparkplug is a blues man who is into vintage cars and machines, he marries the past and present perfectly.

“For years I’ve been doing shows and got to wondering what would have happened if I’d stayed on the one theme and focused on developing one character?” Little John says of this show. “That way you can really spend a lot of time developing their world.”

Tullyglen is a place with many eclectic characters and John describes the show as “a rural blues comedy, because there are lots of comedy elements in it. But the music might be more melodic than in others of my work”.

Little John has composed and performs all the music and songs on an eclectic array of instruments from cigar box guitar to harmonium.

He also designed the show’s unusual set. Niall Cranny, of Earragail Arts Centre who previously worked with Druid, lit Sparkplug. Otherwise Little John did everything.

“It was a really low-budget sort of job and a challenge getting it to every stage it got to.”

It got excellent reviews from The Irish Times and Irish Theatre Magazine when it played at the 2012 Dublin’s Fringe Festival and was the subject of an article in The Irish Times by writer Michael Harding, who compared the piece to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism style of writing.

Then Sparkplug was nominated in the Irish Times Theatre awards for Best Sound Design – and it won.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune