Dance hall days and other stories

Gina Moxley can be a highly amusing character. She carries herself with the air of a quietly natty librarian, with a kind of dry, girlie camp to her humour; the drawled, deadpan poptastic words like "fab," backed up by a bullshit detector and a directness which can be sharp as a rapier.

It's an idiolect which resounded throughout Danti-Dan, her award-winning comedy of murderous female sexual awakening for Rough Magic in 1996; set in a sunlit nowhere between childhood and puberty, full of erotic dares of French kissing flavoured with Major cigarettes. Although the setting was 1970, on the bridge across the road from where she grew up just outside Cork, Moxley maintains, "it's auto-geographical not autobiographical."

She returns to a similar landscape with her droll dialogue outline for Tou- pees and Snare Drums, a kind of allegorical skit set in a run down show-band dance-hall in 1966, "although it's more sort of Longfordy direction." Opening tonight at the Peacock, it's a co-creation with choreographer/director David Bolger and his Coisceim team, with all the resources of the Abbey crew and wardrobe. "David had this showband idea floating around for years, and when he read this book, Send Them Home Sweating - I think it was by Vince Power - that crystallised everything. These mega-ballrooms had three and four thousand people in them every night of the week - a massive phenomenon, even in the cities. It sort of reminds you where you're from . . ."

When I probe into the script, she constantly brings me back to the fact that it's "very much a joint effort. The script is only a blueprint, and the talky bits are all welded together with the movement and the music. The idea was to do something which is genuinely dance-theatre."

It's This has certainly long been Bolger's aim, with his wildly exuberant, humour-drenched choreographical style which found perfect expression in Conall Morrison's Tarry Flynn at the Abbey (which ran recently at the National in London). Apart from Moxley's caustic comic dialogue, Bolger is working with some interesting ingredients in Toupees and Snares: sound by Bell Helicopter, and a cast, including the nimble heft of Sean Kearns as Dizzy Duffy, the dance-hall owner; as well as Anne Byrne, Donal Beecher; Cindy Cummins, Barabbas's Raymond Keane and Tony Flynn, and dancers Aideen Gohery, James Hosty and Muirne Bloomer.

The idea is an Easter Sunday night of damp, repressed romance, of fizzy mineral bottles of Bubble Up and sopping socks draped over cold radiators, yet it all escalates into wildness once "the Devil" arrives. ["]The notion of the Devil appearing at halls was common in the 1960s, and it came up very quickly when David and myself started talking. I remembered this woman going on about how the devil was in Bandon the night before, and how they all looked down and saw his tail.

"Later, I read that on the one hand, the rumours were generated by the Church to stop people getting smoochy, but also that rival dance-hall owners put it out so as to drive people from one place to another. I use it more as a collective wishful thinking on the women's part, that anything would be better than the galoots in this place . . .

"I'm also pointing up how outrageous it was that dancing was banned during Lent, with all that repression feeding into their expectations of Easter Sunday, especially the women's. Like, God you wanted something to happen but you forgot it was going to be this dismal . . ."

While the cast and crew were going through a technical rehearsal last week - ["]I'd rather go to the hairdresser's that sit through a tech["] , drawled Moxley - we convened on the spacious Coisceim offices in South Great George's Street. Upstairs are the Barrabas offices, while a few doors down, on the other side of Marx brothers, is Rough Magic's base, and PCC (formerly the Graphiconies) - a bunch of old friends and players who emerged during the 1980s.

Always a popular actor, Moxley came into her own as a writer with Danti-Dan, and having now adapted it as a screenplay, the project is up and waiting, with Gina pencilled in as director and a £250,000 "production loan" already pledged by the Film Board. Now comes the long haul of attracting matching investment, with producers Kate Lennon and Rough Magic's former manager Siobhan Bourke; and Arthur Lappin as executive producer. Although she hasn't formally directed for film, she did the Moonstone Filmmakers Lab in Galway last year. "Even the interview was tough - I was kicking car tyres when I came out - but it was an amazing learning environment. It was a three-week intensive, hands-on course where you shot your scenes with a four or five-person crew; with an acting coach and various people giving masterclasses in story-boards or editing. It was all shot on digi-Beta, which has a lovely quality, very up-to-the-minute smart-arsed stuff. And I had Antonia Bird as a mentor.

"We were flat out from 8 a.m., and still going at midnight. It was gas to be on the other side of the camera, looking longingly at actors having a great laugh in the bar afterwards, while you're running off to do your fecking storyboard. But I was like a duck to water, I didn't want to come home. I wanted to stay and shoot the whole bloody thing."

However, film production can be something of a lottery, and another Siobhan Bourke film project, Declan Hughes's Digging for Fire seems to have come off the back-burner a while ago. ["]It's a long slow process, and it can be hard to keep up your enthusiasm.["] In the meantime,

As the search for funding for the film goes on, she's been "working not non-stop, but fairly consistently, between writing and the ould bit of acting." The last few years have followed a pattern of film-acting work during the summer (like The Butcher Boy or more recently the TV series, The Ambassador), while the last theatre she did was Paula Meehan's Mrs Sweeney, again for Rough Magic. "You tend to gather your nuts for the winter, to stretch those few bob to last you . . ."

So, is the writing not that lucrative? "Are you out of your mind? I get money for rights, like for the German production of Danti-Dan, or royalty checks from Faber, which is like children's allowance money." But she had "a bumper year" in 1996, with a Stewart Parker Award, and an Arts Council Bursary, and with the aid of a canny accountant, she bought a house in Kilmainham.

Another play she wrote last year, Dog House, was commissioned by the National in London: a one-actor about the physical abuse of a young teenager, which was performed by a Belfast youth theatre troupe. I remark that she keeps returning to that age group. '`Oh, my teenagey references are thinning out," she laughs. "It can be an awful curse sometimes not to have access to children, to know what they talk about now. Like `give us a go of your child for a week'. I feel like `Mrs Brady, Old Lady', thinking that all kids have are yoyos . . ."

She is now teasing with the "germ of an idea" for a new play. "It's a more contemporary piece, but I don't want to take a commission, and put myself under time pressure." So drama is her real bent? "I suppose if drama is your background, it becomes the most available medium. It's like voices in your head: you put them on paper to get rid of them.

"Maybe I'm not blessed with discipline, but I've sometimes found it very hard to sit down to something. The actual writing, once I get cracking, is grand, but getting started is a slow one. I start things six times, and can't figure out what's wrong. Jesus, I turf all that stuff off the computer, in case somebody finds it."

What kind of computer? "Oh, just a Lady Mac." What??? "Yeah, it's pink, with rounded edges." For a split second, I'd gone hook, line and sinker.

Toupees and Snares opens tonight at the Peacock Theatre