Shakespeare meets the Beckhams

'Macbecks', a musical comedy brimful of Shakespearean references, expounds on our obsession with the modern circuses of football and celebrity, writes Sarah Keating.

THE SOBEREST hour must be just before the dawn, because the sun is barely up when I meet Gary Cooke and Malachy McKenna, the duo behind the new football-musical comedy Macbecks, and they are in sombre, contemplative form. It is early morning and they have both been working for hours, tweaking the script before rehearsals begin. It is only a week into the rehearsal process and it is all still serious business for the lads, who are performing in Macbecksas well.

The pair first met in 2005 while performing in I, Keano, the musical based on the Irish football team's disastrous adventures during the 2002 World Cup preparations in Saipan. It was in fact while on tour with the show and sharing a "bedsit in a compound in an industrial estate in Manchester", as Cooke describes it, that they came up with an idea for a new football musical, which would dissect the symptoms of "celebrititus" - that prurient obsession with celebrity that plagues contemporary culture.

Cooke, well known from the Après Matchsketch crew, and McKenna, whose first play, Tillonsburg, won the Stewart Parker Award in 2000, were natural collaborators. Over the course of three years, they came up with a skeleton script that they performed entirely themselves for potential commercial theatre investors. After a five-day showcase workshop, Long Road Productions came on board to finance Macbecks, which premieres at the Olympia Theatre in January.

THE STORY OF Macbecksrevolves around a football dynasty in Elizabethan England, which is lorded over by soccer hero Macbecks and his queen, a fashionista and former pop star called Poshoria. If the contemporary parallels are barely veiled by the lead characters' names, the theatrical puns are hardly disguised either, and the play is brimful with Shakespearean references. Macbecks's fate follows a similar arc to that of a famous deposer of the Scottish throne, complete with the intervention of three witchy women who are determined to spice up his life. His future is shaped by a tyrannical father figure, Fergie, of King Lear proportions, who is determined to make sure that his protégé fulfils his potential.

Meanwhile, Macbecks is flanked by a pair of defenders who are really pretenders to his throne, and Garycrantz and Phildenstern, as the Siamese pair are known, come to a sticky end of Hamlet-esque proportions.

If much of the storyline is borrowed from the real-life travails of David and Victoria Beckham, McKenna explains that Macbecksis "not just about football. It is really about the whole culture that surrounds it: all the money and celebrity that seems to go with it these days."

Cooke elaborates: "In a way it's more about Wag culture, the sort of Footballers' Wives phenomenon, and in a way that's sort of separate from football culture. I don't mean to say that we're talking about blonde bimbos - Macbecksis more about what they represent. These are women who know exactly what they want - fame, money - and they know how to get it."

While the real-life parallels the Beckhams provide are important for engaging the audience, Cooke explains, they are also incidental: "It is not about the Beckhams as individuals, or us criticising them, judging their need to be a brand, or whatever, because I'm sure that, even though we seem to know everything about them, there is a lot that goes on beyond what we see. I mean, for a start, I don't think they would have lasted that long if [the image] was all there was to it." The point, the pair seem to be saying, is that we, as individual consumers of mass culture, are responsible for making the Beckhams what they are.

COOKE AND McKENNA are both vocal about the importance of football to contemporary popular culture, though they don't go as far as discussing "the beautiful game" as live theatre for the 21st century.

However, both are acutely aware of the elitist attitudes to popular culture that prevail in contemporary Irish theatre, and they are keen to offer their own perspective on the importance of theatre as a medium to address all aspects of contemporary life, including aspects - such as football - that might seem anathema to traditional theatrical fare.

"There's this view," Cooke explains, "that popular theatre is in some way not as worthy as 'high art', and - despite the fact that we put a huge amount of work into what we do, as much as any [artist] - it doesn't seem to command the same sort of respect. The thing is that many people seem to dismiss what we do without seeing it - as if there's some pompous deity up above deciding what's art and what's not. There's also this idea that [popular theatre] is not a relevant part of the culture, but if anything it is more relevant, because it is actually speaking to the culture that it comes from. I mean when we did I, Keano- well that's the sort of subject matter that should be tackled in the Abbey. Sean O'Casey? That's the sort of thing he would have been writing about in his day, because at that time Saipan was the biggest, the most important, thing happening in the country."

McKenna picks up the thread, tongue not quite in cheek: "I mean Shakespeare could have written I, Keano! When you think about it, the plays that he wrote were of his time, and even when they were history plays they contained veiled references to what was going on in his world. They were plays that people could recognise their own world in.

"Is it important to us that the theatre pundits give our work its due acclaim?" - he hesitates as he repeats my question - "Well to be honest we'll take a full laughing house over commendation any day."

"Are you going to review it?" Cooke interjects suddenly. I have no idea, but I decide to say no. McKenna puts the final touches on the latest version of the script as our conversation starts to wind up, and Cooke pours himself another coffee, still trying to shake the severity of the early morning off him before rehearsals begin. In fact, as they banter back and forth about the latest Roy Keane headlines and the bedtime rituals of their children, I get a distinct sense that the lads are actually trying to avoid the rehearsal warm-up. Indeed, 25 minutes later the cast are limbering up with the rigour of professional athletes, and Cooke and McKenna are nowhere to be seen.

As musical director Paul Higgs comes in to guide them through a vocal warm-up, the pair pop up, near the back of the chorus; Cooke making jokes to Paul Reid's Macbecks as he bounces a football in the curve of his foot, while McKenna diligently takes notes. As director David Bolger enters the room, Higgs guides them through the ensemble We Hate Youanthem, and Cooke gets into character, catching my eye and smirking as I watch from the sidelines.

Jody Trehy's rousing score carries the compulsive rhythms of a football chant and as the chorus of fickle football fans reveal their true colours, Cooke, still meeting my eye, sings the chorus with vociferous vigour and some appropriate gesticulation thrown in for good measure. All of a sudden, he is very, very funny, and I have no doubt that, whatever the Eamon Dunphys and Johnny Gileses of the theatre world will say, that the audience will be laughing their heads off.

• Macbecksruns at the Olympia Theatre from Jan 9-31 and at the Cork Opera House from Feb 3-14