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Vintage Little John Nee in Limavady, My Heart's Delight E-mail
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Wednesday, 07 February 2007
Little John is big in Galway. He's epic in Errigal, award winning in Washington and may now be massive in Derry's Limavady.

Bigger, madder and further-fetched than even he, however, are the whimsical tales he tells. Wreathed in clouds of joss-stick exhaust and lively ditties, the quirky 'Limavady, My Heart's Delight' is no exception: a tale that is barmy, balmy, idiosyncratic and definitely shaggy. Vintage Little John Nee.

From a town named Bunion in the West of Ireland, to Shimla in Northern India, Little John's latest dramatic persona weaves a bizarre route in and out of love, luck and lyrics. In his own words, it's a story that could or should have been called 'But Then Something Else Happened'.

A blues ukulele player loses his job at a bingo hall somewhere in the West of Ireland and is forced to take to the road. Citing his mother, 'the famous flying Philomena', as posthumously advising him to find redemption in Limavady, the hapless player is led astray by a femme fatale, 'Phyllis' and her band 'The Phyllistines'. Somewhere along their winding way, a deadly strain of B-Movie thriller narrative takes over...

In Kavanagh's words 'Gods make their own importance': anything, however banal, can be given life through artistic endeavour. Clearly the musically minded Little John is of a similar philosophy: his text concerns 'a pick of piebald ponies', 'the aesthetic of the rusty rails', 'fairy queens in gabardine', and 'hedgerows of sparrows'. Although lacking a little pace at times, a play born and bred in Ireland cannot be ignored when it starts with the lines, "Forget for a moment that we are in India..."

Armed with his ubiquitous ukulele, Little John is a wistful troubadour of the 21st Century. He may not glorify the deeds of an aristocratic patron, but he is a poet-musician describing the tribulations of love in ways that seem to echo this medieval tradition. The update is Flann O'Brien meets an expurgated Dylan Thomas. Though the results are more often daft than absurd, droll rather than riotously funny, and at times a little limited, there are moments of Chaplinesque pathos that hint at a subtext slightly more profound than the ditsy surface initially indicates. Unrequited love is not entirely a laugh.

For the first time in recent theatre history, Galway's favourite one-man theatre company allows a thespian to step out of the Chorus to join him in the acting limelight. For good reason: Little John's musical director, a lithe Laura Sheeran, leaves her keyboards and sashays on stage as the fickle Phyllis whose solo spots (as a 6ft, pink-haired, jazz-folk singing Marilyn Monroe) bring the house down.

'Star of stage, screen and street corners', Little John strides boldly and tunefully through Ireland and beyond with this nostalgic portrait of small-town intricacies, the bon mots, broken hearts and people with 'smiles as wide as the Atlantic'.


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