IT may well be, as Owen O'Neill freely admits, that a lot of people will be wondering what a standup comedian is doing giving a performance enhanced lecture on the great Spanish playwright/poet Federico Garcia Lorca, but for O'Neill it's a case of coming full circle after almost 20 years of performing. It was while working as a labourer in London that O'Neill passed by a pub which had an inviting sign on a window - "Pints for Poems" and once he found out that you could get not one, but two pints for every original piece of poetry you read out in the pub, he dashed home and scribbled away furiously.
"Even though everyone thinks of me as a stand-up, I started out as a poet and indeed have always done bits of poetry in my stand-up routines," says the Cookstown native. "It's not my problem that they are purists on either side who think the two cannot, and should not, be mixed". Indeed, there are closer links between poetry and stand-up than most people would have you imagine: Jeremy Hardy, Jenny Eclair, Phil Jupitus and Mark Steel all started out as poets before getting diverted by the "alternative" rush of new comedy in the last decade.
"For instance, after the Omagh bomb, the only way I found I could really express myself was through poetry, and that's something I've had even when I used to write small bits for the school magazine when I was younger," he says. "I can understand people's preconceptions to an extent, I mean I would wonder if I saw that Jack Dee was giving a talk on T. S. Elliot, but I think people know my stuff isn't exactly just pure gag material, so that should help."
A Perrier nominee back in 1994, O'Neill has always distinguished himself from the pack by delving into deeper, more theatre-based material. His first one-man show, Shouting from the Scaffold was a poignant account of his days on the building sites - in material, pace and presentation it was in a different world to his usual 20 minute stand-up performance.
The follow-up, Off My Face (which he brings to Los Angeles for a 10-date run directly before Belfast) was a harrowing account of his problems with alcohol, which won the London Weekend Television Award for Comedy Writing last year. "From the poetry to the stand-up to the one-man shows has meant that I've gone through three or four agents in the past few years. All of them would say to me `how can we market you? Who are you going to be this week?' I don't find it a problem at all, but maybe audiences do, in the sense that I have people who know me from different aspects of my career."
It's interesting in itself that O'Neill didn't choose someone as obvious as Patrick Kavanagh or Seamus Heaney with which to reintroduce himself to the world of poetry. He choose Lorca simply because he was deeply impressed by his work after reading the play Blood Wedding a number of years ago. Besides that play and the equally brilliant, House of Bernardo Alba, Lorca is bestknown for his poetry collections - Gypsy Ballads and Divan Del Tamarit. From the Andalucia region of southern Spain, Lorca was a contemporary and good friend of the film-maker Luis Bunuel and the painter Salvador Dali. Although not overtly political, he was perceived to be a "lefty intellectual" and for this reason (and probably also because of his homosexuality) he was arrested by the right-wing Falangist group shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and executed by a firing-squad. The murder remains one of the most shameful episodes of the Spanish Civil War.
`THE original plan was to take Lorca's Blood Wed- ding and stage it in the Battersea Arts Centre in London with an all-Irish cast," says O'Neill, "this was very much on the cards but between me going to Australia and elsewhere, it got shelved for a while. But the word had got around that I was doing something with Lorca so I got this invitation form David Johnston, who is professor of Hispanic studies at Queen's University, to get involved in a festival commission, written by Johnston called New York in a Poet: The Urban Night- mare of Federico Garcia Lorca. "It's basically a dramatisation of Lorca's trip to New York in 1929 which gave us the volume, Poet in New York. There'll be music and anecdotes alongside the poetry and both David and myself will be coming in and out of the action. We've got a flamenco dancer, who is offstage but able to be heard and a Spanish guitarist, so it should be interesting."
"Lorca really moves me as a writer and I think the show works because we explain something of the man's life which obviously had an effect on his work. I think he was more political than people make out and he suffered for that when the Nationalists rebelled against the Republican government in Spain and there was also his homosexuality in a country which gave the world the term machismo. What really astonished me reading his work was how much of an advocate he was, at the time, of women's rights and his great use of imagery, such as the unforgiving mother figure in Blood Wedding who represents Spain."
Although the whitened walls, black shawls and unforgiving sun of Andalucia might seem on a different astral plane to O'Neill's Co Tyrone upbringing, he did find some similarities. "I suppose the Catholic thing is very obvious," he says but it's very similar to Northern Ireland in the sense that the issues of land, identity and status are crucial to Lorca's work, as they are in the North. The over-riding feeling though from Lorca's work is a sense of `live and let live' - let's just respect people who aren't like us and get on with it. And people ask me is Lorca still relevant?"
New York in a Poet is at The Crescent Arts Centre on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (November 21st-23rd) at 7.30 p.m.
