Welcome return for Diarmuid’s Pádraic O Conaire

It’s been 13 years since actor and writer Diarmuid de Faoite last performed his superb show, Pádraic Ó Conaire, based on the work and colourful life of the Galway writer.

Now he’s reviving it and it will be staged at the Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday next, March 1, before embarking on a national tour.

Pádraic Ó Conaire, which won the 2001 Stewart Parker Award’ is an epic piece peopled with more than 30 characters, including theatrical genius Mícheál Mac Liammóir, poet Austin Clarke, short-story writer Liam Ó Flaherty and revolutionaries Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. They offer hilarious and sometimes tragic accounts of their escapades with Ó Conaire from the Easter Rising to the troubled birth of the Irish Free State and beyond.

Pádraic Ó Conaire captures the life of this one-man cultural revolution, the father of the modern Irish short story and a committed socialist.

This was a man who turned his eye and his pen to societal problems as he brought the Irish language writing kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

Diarmuid de Faoite’s show is a warts and all account of Ó Conaire, his family, his era, his addiction to alcohol and his tragic death.

De Faoite’s physicality, mastery of accent and fluidity when it comes to playing multiple characters of both genders while weaving an epic tale, led the Irish Times to describe this as “a mesmerising one-man show”.

The play effortlessly moves between Irish and English, with English synopses of passages in Irish being provided. But these are hardly needed as de Faoite’s story moves between the comic and tragic to bring the story of this wonderful writer to life.

■ Tickets €15/€12 from tht.ie, 091-569777 or from the box office.