Donal Giltinan's 1950s play, Goldfish in the Sun, is getting an ambitious reworking for a modern audience, writes Mary Leland

The task facing playwright Ray Scannell when he took on a new commission for the Everyman Palace was how to link another writer's character arc from an almost forgotten Cork to the Ireland of today. His job was to put manners on Goldfish in the Sun, a play written by Donal Giltinan in 1950, produced then by both the Abbey Theatre and the Cork Opera House and now in rehearsal for a revival at the Palace. It's being revived because Everyman's artistic director, Pat Talbot, wants to stage large proscenium-arch dramas as a counterbalance to the black-box or studio-scale productions with a cast of two or three people, which he believes are being dictated by the economics of modern theatre.

So this is big. First there's the play itself, then Ray Scannell's re-working especially of the third act (yes, this is a three-act play), then songs written for it by John Spillane and his collaboration with musicians Ger Wolfe and Ricky Lynch, then a cast of 15 and a crew of 10. It is also a play of its time and of its place. For non-Corkonians, the goldfish is the gilded salmon topping the weather-vane on Shandon Steeple. The time is the 1940s and 1950s, an ill-defined era which Scannell and Spillane are excavating, using references to Frank O'Connor, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Daniel Corkery, like miners' lamps illuminating the tunnels to the past.

THE FIRST DIG had to be in search of Giltinan himself. Born in Cork in 1908, he worked at the Customs and Excise offices on the North Mall before moving to Dublin. His writing career is a succession of more than 600 radio programmes in Ireland and England, revues, operettas, pantomime and even film scripts, his later work including BBC television and ITV, with Armchair Theatre and the Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre series and scripts for Dan Dare among his credits. His radio play on the life of Percy French was re-written for the theatre as The Golden Years. He wrote a novel, Prince of Darkness (1955), and retired from the Customs and Excise service to settle in London as a full-time writer. With his wife, Frances Harbourne, he also lived part of the year in Spain, where he died in 1976.

The plays presented at the Abbey included The Gentle Maiden (1952), The Flying Wheel (1957), A Light in the Sky, based on the life of Robert Emmet, staged in 1962, and Goldfish in the Sun, which seems to have started it all, in 1950. Yet Pat Talbot admits that he had never seen a Giltinan script (research for this production has been carried out for Everyman Palace by Margaret McBride) although he was aware of the writer and knew that on its initial run, Goldfish had had a huge popular impact.

However, the actor Michael Twomey had appeared in the play when it was put on at the Cork Opera House and, having held on to his book, he was able to give it to Talbot, who realised that "we haven't had a play like that in Cork theatre for a very long time, a play set in Cork and addressing a large canvas." It does so, amazingly it seems now, without drawing in religion.

"There's no reference to the church or to priests," says Talbot, "and no particular political theory either. The circumstances of the people work as an eloquent commentary on the fabric of life at that particular time, with the return of a retired merchant sea-man bringing a reminder of other worlds, and an opportunity to live vicariously through his travels. Giltinan is telling the public story through these private lives, and it's a graphic overview of what life must have been like then for the working classes of this country. But that kind of society, with the young people longing for escape, or deliverance, and the traveller himself always haunted by images of the city, in fact with the city almost a character in itself, and the river and the harbour functioning as an integral metaphor - that kind of society will be alien to the modern audience, though it will have some resonances."

A public reading of the play in April made both distance and resonance obvious, and Ray Scannell was invited to work out how to give the whole play as it was intended, remaining true to its spirit, but, as Scannell says himself, smoothing out the creaky bits and tidying it up.

"Writing plays is more formulaic than people think, and I was brought in really as a technical editor, largely to re-write the third act. But I wouldn't have worked on it unless I respected it. It's very clear what Giltinan was trying to say and the characterisation is very strongly drawn, but when I read it first I didn't recognise the Ireland that was portrayed: the fear of leaving, the longing for home, and then the solidarity of this community in the economic struggle. And there's another context too which seems foreign to us now; the setting isn't all that long after the Civil War, and there are still left-over issues, the awareness that the romantic ideal wasn't compatible with reality, or the tensions over things like changing from the Civic Guards to the new police force."

Living as he has been with the inhabitants of Joybell Court, the inner-city neighbourhood based on Bachelor's Quay and its Doll's House (both now vanished but earlier figuring in Frank O'Connor's novel, The Saint and Mary Kate), Scannell feels most strongly the lack of a wider horizon as a definition of the time. As his own career plans seem focused on a move abroad and without having invested too much of himself in the play, he could relate to its themes of absence and return. And especially to its lacing of typical Cork humour, with no one allowed to get ideas above his station.

"IS DRAMATURGE THE word?" asks John Spillane as he mentions Pat Talbot, with whom he has worked before. "I thought about this commission, and started to work on a song, and then the verses were coming up very easily. There's lots of references to music in the play - it's what brought people together in those times - and there are several songs already in the script. And then I thought of getting Ger Wolfe and Ricky Lynch involved. The three of us had collaborated on Magic Nights in the Lobby Bar which was recorded by Christy Moore and was a great success for us, so this would be an excuse for us to hang out together, and we met once a week upstairs in the Long Valley - I felt it was like Daniel Corkery and Seán Ó Ríordáin in Dan Lowry's long ago: we were setting up our own little circle."

Unstoppably enthusiastic and possibly freshened by his Meteor award for the best folk/traditional act this year, Spillane asserts that he is in full flight. This is almost literally true with his return from a gig in Milan, another in Gweedore and several days in England all in the past week. He has just finished recording The Gaelic Hit Factory with Louis de Paor, which will be issued in October, and his second album for EMI will be recorded at Christmas.

"This is my time, I think. After the dreary years and the dole years, I'm in full flow, and I saw the play as a lovely project and as an opportunity for some great fun with Ger and Ricky."

So what Spillane calls "a whole different thing" got going. "Ger jumped on the lines, like the poets of old, extempore. And Ricky identified especially with a character called the Bo'sun."

Together they wrote seven numbers, some no more than snatches, or traditional street rhymes. And indeed they had great fun. But, Spillane admits, "we'll have to wait for opening night really to see how it all fits together."

There's also question of how it will fit into Pat Talbot's campaign for a building-based production company in Cork. Last year the Palace generated three home-grown professional presentations, but that's not enough to sustain a company, and Talbot knows it. Individual groups such as Corcadorca or Meridian are achieving great individual profiles but he believes that the need is for mainstream theatre, something like the Old Vic has done in Bristol.

"We'd like to be able to produce 50 per cent of our shows and to fill the balance with touring companies. More than that, we'd like to be able to tour ourselves."

As he explains funding and management, and how difficult, in fact impossible, it is for professional theatre artists to maintain a career in this town, I find myself thinking - not so different, after all, to Giltinan's world, the world of Goldfish in the Sun.

Goldfish in the Sun opens at the Everyman Palace, Cork, on Aug 15