The lonely clown who had the last laugh

From a Celtic Tiger-era extravaganza to a pared down post-boom show, the latest production from Barabbas is itself a metaphor for the modern creative process

MARIA FLEMING seems embarrassed. Raymond Keane smiles sheepishly and gives a small shrug. In the sober light of today, they know it was a crazy idea. But a few short years ago the plans for Barabbas Theatre Company's City of Clownswere dizzying, intoxicating and slightly alarming; a perfect distillation of boom-time excess.

An outdoor performance featuring three internationally renowned clowns, it would take place on a manufactured island in Grand Canal Dock, its audience watching from the triumphalist red-spoke eruption of Martha Schwartz’s €8 million installation. The island would move gradually towards the audience before the coup de grâce, when 200 clowns appeared from the surrounding apartment blocks – some abseiling down glass facades, at least one arriving by jet ski.

“It was a Celtic Tiger show,” admits Fleming with a cringe, but at the time few of her potential co-producers were advising restraint. “I laugh at it now. We genuinely thought we were going to make this happen. That was the scale we were working on.”

The show never happened. But following a recession, a banking crisis, shrinking arts funding and an Arts Council purge which last year almost shut down Barabbas, its highest-profile casualty, City of Clownsis back.

It is now a one-man performance with the contribution of a volunteer cast of 50 clowns and a set that consists largely of cardboard boxes. You may have detected a glimmer of difference between the before and after versions.

The new show might be vastly more economical, but it has considerably more meaning, marking another rebirth for a company that has been reinventing itself and its "theatre of clown" since 1993. The inception of City of Clowns, though, precedes the company which Keane co-founded with Mikel Murfi and Veronica Coburn (both have since departed), when he first encountered the vast homeless communities of London's Elephant and Castle as a hairdresser in the late 1970s. The image held a haunting association for him as he developed his own physical practice and artistic philosophy. "Clowns are by nature homeless," he says.

Keane will often joke about a religious zeal for his discipline – “spreading the gospel of clown according to Raymond” – and this show might count as the gentlest form of proselytising.

It is centred on his new character, Fibril, who first emerges from a sealed packing box as though kept in long storage and begins to mischievously re-engage with the world before discovering his place in a vast society of clowns. The production requires an army of volunteers, many of them recruited through Keane’s “iaclown” workshop, which regards your “inner clown” as distinct as a fingerprint or intrinsic as a soul.

David Teevan, the director of Clonmel's Junction Festival and an early champion of the production, suggested that anyone who participated in City of Clownsshould be made a "cast member for life".

Since its debut at the Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise (where Keane is theatre artist in residence), its ranks have swelled with students, community groups, cameo appearances and even technicians (professional sceptics).

“A techie will be in the show, that really excites me,” says Fleming, the company’s general manager and producer, now directing a Barabbas production for the first time.

There is clearly succour in community. An earlier workshop of the production, staged in the week the IMF came to Dublin, was a much angrier show.

“It’s nearly like stupidity: survival,” considers Fleming. “Fibril has had a knock, and he comes out and starts to play again, to explore, and he gets another knock.”

Its ending is more haunting than obviously cheering, she agrees, but there is something stirring in the resilience of others.

“We’re all battered and beaten, but we’re in this together and that’s the way we go on. Even in the darkness there are moments of play and joy, connection and happiness.”

The company has discreetly funnelled this experience into the wordless performance, and whatever about the production’s journey from jet skis to packing boxes, its physical depiction of collapse and renewal can easily serve as a state-of-the-nation drama.

"I think we're subconsciously informed by what's happening around us," says Fleming, which is as true of Barabbas as their audience. A company with irregular funding (a project grant came through for City of Clownsjust two weeks before it opened), a board and a brand, Barabbas now occupies a curious position, established but precarious. Its most rallying belief then is in the work it produces ("That we were right to keep going, that we still have something to say") or in something as simple as the red nose that Raymond Keane always keeps in his pocket, as revered and respected as a ceremonial mask.

“Damage it and you’re dead!” he tells me as I gingerly take his nose in my hands. “The red nose is so abused,” he says, as though beginning a mini-workshop. “From Red Nose Day to sponge noses. Your attitude and presence in it is really important. The beauty of this is that when we get some time with people, they understand what clown is. I’m ridiculously passionate about it – and sometimes precious about it.”

Winning people to their cause, one clown at a time, the company’s ambitions may seem more modest. But Barabbas will build their city yet.

City of Clownsperforms at Chadwick's as part of the Clonmel Junction Festival until Wednesday, then An Grianán, Donegal as part of Earagail from July 19-20