The ten years that have elapsed since the completion of Brendan Kennelly s Book Of Judas have seen many of the poet s prophetic visions of Dublin and Ireland become the stuff of reality or at least, Sunday supplement think-pieces. The forthcoming Kilkenny Arts Festival world premiere of Judas the stage adaption of Kennelly s epic poem affords the opportunity to review a work which has been compared to Beckett s prose trilogy in terms of scope and ambition.

Upon its publication in 1991, The Book Of Judas became a bestseller as well as winning its author the Sunday Independent/Irish Life Award. It also inspired Bono to pen an effusive review for the Sunday Press, in which he declared, Like David in the psalms, like Robert Johnson in the blues, the poet scratches out Screwtape letters to a God who may or may not have abandoned him, and of course to anyone else who is listening.
Indeed, U2 gazed deep into Judas labyrinthine passages, its gallery of masks and mirrors, and found a wealth of raw material for their Zoo TV headflux (by some fluke of synchronicity, Bono had also been meditating on the Judas-mind in Until The End Of The World ). Here was poetry at its most dementedly post-modern, discarding chronology and flashing through multiple personae (including Hitler, Marilyn, Joyce and Behan), like a half-tuned radio broadcasting a symphony of disembodied voices, white noise, obscured music.
Mind you, Kennelly s gutterspeak upset many of those who might propose that poetry belongs in genteel drawing rooms rather than the public houses, roominghouses and whorehouses of the nation. Here was one book which couldn t be counted on to say the right things at dinner parties, or take the Aosdana coin and keep a civil tongue in its head. But then, the poet might have responded to the carps of the literati with the book s key line: The best way to serve the age is to betray it. His Judas went about detailing Ireland s turbulent evolution, telegraphing the congested madhouse Dublin would soon become ( Seeing a cat crucified to a telegraph pole/The latest fast cars gulping the highways/I realise God created the world/In a psychedelic haze The Devil s Lilies ).
Elsewhere, in the section entitled Bunk , the book taps into the paranoia, suspicion and hypocrisy rife in public and private Irish lives, as well as unveiling the blueprint for a new kind of Celt, the moneymad cappuccino-guzzling, laptop-and-phone-toting viable men ; casually barbaric automatons flicking through the property supplements and gossip columns of the Squirish Mimes and Funday Sindependent.
In Money in Love , Kennelly even lampooned the Irish teenypop boom a good five years before it existed: My good friend, the Pinstripe Pig, says/There s money in love/Especially in shining teenage eyes/Pinstripe s mind, all bonny-bladed edge/Hires me to write songs/That shiver their little fannies/While they pour out tears and screams/And tidal monies.
Like its predecessor Cromwell another chain of meditations from the point of view of the damned Judas caused many an Irish mother to revise their opinion of this chuckling Kerry cherub.
Here, pole dancers pulled blood-smeared billiard balls from between their thighs, heretics had the flesh flayed from their backs with cords stiffened in pitch, the crucifixion was televised, AIDS jokes and toilet graffiti became the stuff of a legitimate poetic dialect; nothing was taboo.
Kennelly wrote of fist-fucks and incest and rape and centuries of murderous silence, and yet, although it could ve been described as a channel hop through the seven circles of hell, Judas still buzzed with a kind of rebel hope, restoring free speech, a scapegoat whose tongue was silenced almost 2000 years ago.
The stage adaptation of Judas is a co-production between Theatre Unlimited (who also performed Cromwell ten years ago) and the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and it will preview in the Watergate Theatre on August 10th and 11th.
Director Maciek Reszczynski spent the last four years reading over 350 pages of text, boiling down its essence to a play within a play, featuring dialogue between Judas (Adrian Dunbar) and Jesus (Phelin Drew).
Incidentally, Bloodaxe Books plan to publish The Little Book Of Judas next year one can only cackle in anticipation of what the self-help/daisy-age demographic will make of a condensed version of Kennelly s most brutal work.

Judas previews on Thursday August 10th and Friday 11th in the Watergate Theatre at 8pm and continues until the 20th as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Admission is #12/10.