Peadar de Burca

Last updated

Peadar de Burca
Copy of Copy of Peadar DeBurca.jpg
NationalityIrish
Occupations
  • Actor
  • playwright
  • comedian

Peadar de Burca is an Irish actor, playwright and comedian. He was originally from Galway City, County Galway and has gained recognition for his work in the entertainment industry.

Contents

De Burca first gained prominence as a theatre director, before transitioning to writing and performing in comedy shows that tour throughout Ireland. His comedic style and writing have been noted for their American influences, although he maintains a distinct Irish perspective.

De Burca has made appearances on television and radio, often taking an antagonistic approach. In one incident, the Irish broadcaster RTÉ received complaints after he referred to the Irish Prime Minister as 'Ireland's answer to Shrek'. Additionally, during a performance of his show "Why Men Cheat," De Burca was punched by a female audience member. The show is based on real stories of infidelity, and there was confusion over whether De Burca himself had cheated or not.

Adaptations of films

De Burca has produced a number of stage adaptations of popular films. In 2002, he founded MorWax Productions and launched the company with a successful stage adaptation of Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs".

The popularity of the production led to two additional adaptations of Tarantino's scripts, "Pulp Fiction" and "True Romance", which also enjoyed sell-out runs. These adaptations were known for their youthful casts and unique interpretations that differed from the original film productions.

De Burca declined offers to tour the "Tarantino" shows outside of Galway, where they were initially performed, instead focusing on producing other film adaptations. These included adaptations of "When Harry Met Sally...", "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and a version of "Psycho" produced by MorWax Productions but directed by Frances O'Rourke.

Irish Theatre

Parallel to adapting film works for stage, De Burca directed a string of classical Irish stage shows, keeping in line with the MorWax philosophy of offering theatre for everyone. Three initial sell-out hits included Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming , John B. Keane's The Field and O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars . The latter is a notoriously difficult show to produce and had never been staged in Galway. It is always seen as a triumph for MorWax that the show sold out its week-long run at the Town Hall Theatre main stage, despite the company being non-funded and a hostile reaction from local press.

Shakespearian Tragedies

Although an artistic city, Galway lacks the population to sustain longer theatrical runs and has a limited artistic programme. While companies visited with touring Shakespearian production, there was not yet a theatre company producing Shakespeare in Galway.

In 2004, De Burca mounted a successful period version of Macbeth . The thirty strong cast was supplemented by ten musicians and was remembered for its sword-fights and a strong performance from Emma Daly as Lady Macbeth. Buoyed by this success, De Burca tackled Hamlet the following year. In this production, ten actors played all the parts in a production that included audience participation, a ladder from the stage to the audience balcony and a Player's scene entrance where the actors cycled bikes among the audience. The production had no set, only two antique chests that were manipulated by the cast for whatever effect they desired. Playwright and novelist, John Arden assisted with the production in what many thought was MorWax's finest hour.

Original Scripts

De Burca's foray into writing did not begin promisingly. His only writing credit had been a bilingual show during the 1993 Galway Arts Festival, Poitin Rock until his love of graphic novels pushed him to write an original stage version of Batman in 2005. The show was a highly ambitious production, staged in the cavernous Black Box Theatre Galway. With only six actors playing over twenty parts, martial arts, live music, puppets, singing and a three-level set, the show was a critical and commercial flop causing one blogger to write the headline, "Peadar De Burca stole eighty minutes of my life!". Many believe that the fall-out from this show forced De Burca in a new direction towards comedy.

Why Men Cheat

There are many different theories as to where the idea for Why Men Cheat came from. De Burca himself has said on record that the idea to write the show came to him in a dream, where former US President Bill Clinton told him to write a show with this title. It has been put to De Burca that he wrote the show form an autobiographical standpoint, an assertion that he has always denied. What is known, is that De Burca toured around Ireland and England interviewing men who cheated and women who were cheated on and collected their stories.

"Many of the guys I spoke to were real losers. These guys weren't James Bond type characters at all, they weren't the type of guys you'd like to hang around with. Most of them were really insecure."

The stories from these men and women were collected and condensed into a ninety-minute monologue driven show that became a hit up and down Ireland, first as a ten-man show, then more famously as a five-man show with each actor taking on more monologues. De Burca, initially wanted only to direct the show and refused to take part, potentially because it has been said that he wasn't confident about his abilities in delivering comedy directly to an audience. A week before the show opened in Galway, an actor dropped out and the author was forced to take the most demanding monologue, Cheating is Good, a monologue that demanded audience participation and various amounts of improvisation and ad-libbing. The opening night, according to De Burca;

"...Was a disaster. I'm sitting onstage with nine other actors having to listen to all these jokes I wrote in full view of the audience. The first set of shows were two hours long but with no break and all the actors were bricking it as they had no experience doing comedy monologues. No one laughed, some people thought the show was a self-help group for men who couldn't be faithful. And to top it all off, one of the women that I spoke to and whose monologue is the lynchpin of the show came and sat in the front row. It was horrible."

Fortunately, local reviewer for the Galway City Tribune Stephen Glennon gave the show a fierce review that set the trend and the production went from success to success around Ireland, playing to standing ovations almost everywhere. The show is still touring, as a one-man with De Burca himself doing all the parts, and is expected in the Hen and Chicken's Theatre, Islington, London, The New Theatre in Temple Bar, Dublin and the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Peadar began writing comedies for MorWax Productions in 2004 with the comedy Why Men Cheat which toured Ireland and was the surprise hit of the Dublin Fringe Festival 2006 where it played to packed out audiences in Andrew's Lane theatre in Dublin. The show is set to make its debut in New York, off-Broadway in June 2009.

To create this show, Peadar spent almost six months travelling around both Ireland and England interviewing men who had cheated on their partners and transformed their stories into an explosive mix of comedy and pathos. The show received a lot of media attention and led to Peadar writing his one – man comedy show, What Men Want. Seen as a follow up to Why Men Cheat it has toured to almost every theatre in Ireland and was written using the same interview technique that was so successful with Why Men Cheat.

Peadar has written three other plays, Like a Virgin, another monologue driven comedy that deals with the experiences of being a virgin in Ireland, Jane's Hero, a play based on the real life exploits of an Irish United Nations soldier who saved orphans in Sarajevo and How The West Was Won! which dealt with US president, Ronald Reagan's visit to Galway.

Current Writing Work

Since March 2010, Peadar has been a regular columnist with Gazeta WyborczaKocham Śląsk jak Irlandię. He is also a regular contributor to Elle Poland and recently begun a new column called Goldeneye for Papermint book magazine. De Burca is currently working on a book Why Men Cheat, based on his interviews with 250 unfaithful men. A premiere of his new show Sunshine is planned for February 2012 in Korez, Katowice.

Related Research Articles

<i>Waiting for Godot</i> Play by Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter O'Toole</span> British actor (1932–2013)

Peter Seamus O'Toole was an English stage and film actor. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic and with the English Stage Company. In 1959 he made his West End debut in The Long and the Short and the Tall, and played the title role in Hamlet in the National Theatre's first production in 1963. Excelling on the London stage, O'Toole was known for his "hellraiser" lifestyle off it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galway International Arts Festival</span> Annual arts festival in Galway, Ireland

The Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF), founded in 1978, is a cultural organization that produces an annual arts festival in Galway, Ireland. It also produces new work that tours nationally and internationally, in addition to presenting the discussion forum, "First Thought Talks". The festival maintains a non-profit status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peadar Kearney</span> Irish songwriter of the national anthem (1883–1942)

Peadar Kearney was an Irish republican and composer of numerous rebel songs. In 1907 he wrote the lyrics to "A Soldier's Song", now the Irish national anthem. He was the uncle of Irish writers Brendan Behan, Brian Behan, and Dominic Behan.

Professor Frank McGuinness is an Irish writer. As well as his own plays, which include The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and Dolly West's Kitchen, he is recognised for a "strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Garcia Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim". He has also published six collections of poetry, and two novels. McGuinness was Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD) from 2007 to 2018.

<i>The Seagull</i> 1895 play by Anton Chekhov

The Seagull is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yvon Deschamps</span> Canadian actor, author, and entertainment producer

Yvon Deschamps is a Quebec author, actor, comedian and producer best known for his monologues. His social-commentary-tinged humour propelled him to prominence in Quebec popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s. A long time comedian and still active, Deschamps is now perceived the greatest in Quebec history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Campbell</span> British actor, director and writer (1941–2008)

Kenneth Victor Campbell was an English actor, writer and director known for his work in experimental theatre. He has been called "a one-man dynamo of British theatre".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beatrice Herford</span> American actress

Beatrice Brooke Herford was an American actress, diseuse and vaudeville performer born in England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Solo performance</span> Single person telling a story to entertain an audience

A solo performance, sometimes referred to as a one-man show or one-woman show, features a single person telling a story for an audience, typically for the purpose of entertainment. This type of performance comes in many varieties, including autobiographical creations, comedy acts, novel adaptations, vaudeville, poetry, music and dance. In 1996, Rob Becker's Defending the Caveman became the longest running solo play in the history of Broadway.

Duncan Pflaster is an American off-off-Broadway playwright, composer and actor. His first play Wilder and Wilder, was produced in 1995 at Florida Playwrights' Theatre in Hollywood, FL. He now lives in New York City, where many of his plays have been produced in theatre festivals, such as the Spotlight On festival and the Midtown International Theatre Festival. His first film Strapped for Danger was produced by Scorpio Film Releasing in 2017, and the sequel Undercover Vice: Strapped for Danger II followed in 2021. Scorpio Film Releasing also brought him in for additional material on their film Code Name: Dynastud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lakis Lazopoulos</span> Greek playwright, actor and songwriter

Lakis Lazopoulos is a Greek playwright, actor, comedian, script writer, producer, tv presenter, writer, columnist, songwriter and performer. He was ranked 83rd by the public in Skai TV's Great Greeks in 2009. In 2010, Forbes ranked Lazopoulos as the most powerful and influential celebrity in Greece.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Quilter</span> English playwright

Peter Quilter is a West End and Broadway playwright whose plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed in over 40 countries. He is best known for his Broadway play End of the Rainbow, which was adapted for the Oscar-winning film Judy (2019), starring Renée Zellweger. He is also author of the West End comedy "Glorious!" about the amateur opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins. Peter has twice been nominated for the Olivier Award and his Broadway debut was nominated for 3 Tony Awards.

Barry Creyton is an Australian actor and playwright. Creyton began his professional career in radio and revue in Melbourne, Australia and became well known in Sydney starring in and writing popular comedy-melodramas at the Music Hall theatre-restaurant in Neutral Bay.

Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Benson</span> English theatre actor, writer and comedian

David Benson is an English theatre actor, writer and comedian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gesher Theater</span> Israeli theater company

Gesher Theater is an Israeli theater company founded in 1991 in Tel Aviv by new immigrants from Russia.

Steven McNicoll is a Scottish actor, director, playwright and television presenter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Play (theatre)</span> Dramatic literary form

A play is a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than mere reading. The creator of a play is known as a playwright.

Val Vousden or Bill MacNevin was an Irish actor, poet, and playwright.

References

1. McBride, C. (2017, April 27). Confessions Of An Immigrant - Peadar de Burca is back. Galway Advertiser.


2. 2010.why men cheat.news24