The atmosphere in the Bewley’s Theatre Café feels very different post-performance, and yet it still retains its bohemian artsy vibe. As I walk in, I suddenly feel as though I am in Paris, in a small café on the left bank. Technicians buzz around, striking the minimal set, opening the shutters and letting the dust fly out onto the street for the street cleaners to handle. A few stray elderly ladies totter out into the open once again and the clanking of dinner plates suggests a satisfactory lunch. It is about 2.15 p.m. and Simon Toal, who I may have accidentally called Peter while organising this interview- shame on me, has just completed another performance of ‘The Friends of Jack Kairo’, the run of which will finish on the 14th February. I have come to talk to him about what happens next but it seems like he might need a moment, the sweat still trickling down his brow.
When he finally regains a semblance of composure and stops bounding in and out of doors that I didn’t even know existed, he finally comes to a halt at one of the café tables and tells me he is ready to begin. Standard questions first: he tells me that he began training as an actor in 1996 at the Liberties College, Dublin. He then went to study as far afield as Denmark under Eugenio Barba (International Theatre School of Anthropology). From there he studied in Poland (Song of the Goat) and finally in the UK (KAOS). He describes his time with Barba as being the most rewarding. ‘A very interesting man, my work with him was extremely intense- sixteen hours a day- and there was a huge demand that we be both physically and mentally fit- something that has come in very useful while playing Jack Kairo’. Back in Dublin, he now finds himself at someone of a loose end, being blissfully ignored by everyone.
‘From a very young age I wanted to be an actor’, he says. ‘I think it came mostly from watching old movies with my dad. What made my vocal range so impressive in fact, was listening to ‘The Goon Show’- Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. I can actually do every single Peter Sellers voice from the show, so well that people have even tried to convince me to do a play about the mental health of Peter Sellers based around the novel ‘The life and death of Peter Sellers’. I’ve even considered the possibility of doing a live goon show at Bewley’s where, just as in the show, I wouldn’t know what the special effects are’. ‘Bewley’s is a perfect place for this kind of theatre, for cabaret and comedy.’
‘The Friends of Jack Kairo’, the one man show written by Simon Toal himself, is a play jammed full of bizarre characters and caricatures. Where on earth did the inspiration come from? The novelist Raymond Chandler, Toal explains, and his acclaimed series about hardboiled detective Philip Marlowe, has had a huge influence over his work. Kairo is somewhat based on Marlowe, the ultra-charming, moralising, wise cracking good guy, who has a penchant for hard liqueur. ‘The Big Sleep’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘Farewell my lovely’, ‘The Long Goodbye’- all major influences along with more modern films like Frank Miller’s ‘Sin City’. ‘What I wanted to do’, says Toal, ‘was not to take the piss or to parody film noir, but rather to recreate the shading and subtlety of the making of these expressionist films in a theatre setting’. ‘Me, standing on stage, back lit, with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth, that’s how these films were actually made’. ‘I wanted to trace the lives of these characters trapped in a beautifully lit, perfectly shot world’.
Toal performed Jack Kairo at the Romanian National Theatre Festival a few years ago to packed audiences and a standing ovation, invited to perform in their black box space which, he explains, was the size of the Abbey and certainly the biggest theatre he had ever been in. When asked by the Romanians if he’d ever performed at the Irish national theatre, he responded: ‘The only way I’d get to perform in the Abbey is if someone accidentally left a back door open’.
Now that the run is ending, I ask, what will you do? A silence. ‘The Sunday Business Post wrote a review that left it all open’, he muses, ‘is there the possibility of Jack Kairo investigating another case?’ ‘I think there is a definite possibility, but I need to make it topical, and yet the more topical I get, the more angry I become’. Toal is thinking about a case that includes Irish gangsters paying for GI’s to be brought home from Afghanistan and their funerals paid for, so as they can smuggle heroin and opium in their body bags as part of a plan conceived with the CIA. ‘This is the kind of thing that happened in Vietnam and is currently happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. It makes me so angry that even in death people are still using you as a piece of cattle.’
Toal assures me that while all this is still only in the thinking stages, we shall not have to say goodbye to Jack Kairo and his troupe of human rarities just yet. Look out for ‘Jack Kairo and the long hard kiss goodbye’- coming soon.