Love and hate in the Midlands

The Bull provoked outrage when it was first staged two years ago. Colin Murphy visits its creator, Michael Keegan-Dolan, as he prepares to take the show to London

In Michael Keegan-Dolan's The Bull, a woman is suffocated with a plastic bag, two nurses are stabbed in the neck with knitting needles, a priest is stabbed through the heart with a shears, a man is knocked out with a golf club and then choked with a golf ball, two men duel to the death with slash hooks, a man is set alight with petrol and another is strangled with a telephone cord. The coup de théâtre is a scene where the two nurses attempt to kill their patient by infecting his wounds. One sticks her finger in a cut, and spits into it. The other then sticks her finger up her bottom, and rubs it in the wound.

The Bull was first staged at the 2005 Dublin Theatre Festival, and Joe Duffy's Liveline went livid at this profanity and its “gratuitous” nudity (a character playing a dog wears no clothes). Now, the play has been revived, and revised, and runs at the prestigious Barbican Centre in London till 3 March – though the profanity's all still there.

“Everybody knows the healthcare system is fucked,” says Michael Keegan-Dolan, laughing. “It's good if people in the theatre are having a pop at it. But the complaints about naked people on stage – that's childish, turn-of-the-century regressive stuff.

“I had no intention of offending anyone. I didn't set out to shock. When I read Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin (the ancient Irish epic on which The Bull is based), I was shocked at how violent, how visceral it was.”

Keegan-Dolan invited a local audience to see The Bull before it heads for London, at the Backstage Theatre in Longford. It was an energetic, somewhat chaotic performance, without costumes, set or lights, and it got a rousing response.

“We arrived in the space at 4pm that afternoon. It was Robert Lepage (a Canadian film and theatre maker with whom Keegan-Dolan has been working) who taught me that – how important it is to force stuff, and show it in front of an audience before it's ready.”

Keegan-Dolan leads his cast back on stage after the show to talk about it. Sitting himself cross-legged at the front of the stage, unshaven and wearing a shabby old tracksuit, he explained how it had been developed.

The Bull is some kind of cross between a play, a musical and a dance show. The cast is a mix of dancers and musicians, from diverse traditions, with a sprinkling of acting experience. “We're asking ourselves to do things we're not really very good at, like singing, or clapping in time,” says Keegan-Dolan. “[In rehearsals] you see people excel in their forte, and become more vulnerable in their weaknesses. That's the human condition. The product here [on stage] is almost secondary to what we do at Shawbrook.”

Shawbrook is the nearby dance school, just outside Legan, Co Longford, where the cast and crew have been interned for the past four weeks. What they do there is gruelling: 6am starts for nearly two hours of yoga before breakfast, then long days rehearsing.

“It was minus eight morning, and you're in a converted hayshed with no insulation and a very cold floor. It's tougher in the winter than in the summer.”

The place has provided something of a spiritual home to Keegan-Dolan's company, Fabulous Beast, but the company's growth has “pushed Shawbrook to breaking point”, he says – and he means it literally, with a septic tank twice overflowing during the recent rehearsals.

Keegan-Dolan lives on 20 acres, near Legan, where he was born and which he inherited from his father. It wasn't just the land he inherited, but a relationship with it, one which comes out in the mixture of homage and satire that weaves through his work. (The Bull is the second part of a Midlands Trilogy, which he intends to conclude with a production of a new work, James of the Midlands, later this year.)

He elaborates on what he's trying to do with The Bull. “I didn't study theatre, didn't study English. I studied practical things. I learned to dance, to drum, to fight, to do yoga. I'm trying to invent a style that integrates everything, where the people involved can sing, can dance, have rhythm, rather than just these semi-alcoholic, overstimulated, stiff motormouths [of mainstream theatre].”

That rhythm explodes in the great percussive finale of The Bull, a kind of drumming circle where the cast take up the detritus of the stage to bang out a frenzied beat, while Colin Dunne – the former lead dancer with Riverdance – drives the rhythm back into the soil that covers the stage. It is a celebration, and an indictment.

“It's a rage against your predestination to death,” says Keegan-Dolan. “These characters who are all going to get killed are angry with that destiny. But at the same time they're in love with life – which is why they're angry at having to leave it. It's the love that comes out of anger and the anger that comes out of love, expressed through dancing.”

He laughs, catching himself being “wanky”.

“It's also a knees-up, on a very simple level. It's a way of dissipating the tension that comes out of all that grim stuff to do with The Táin.”

The Bull is at the Barbican Theatre, London from 21 February to 3 March 2007. www.barbican.org.uk, 00 44 20 76 38 88 91