Play music for me

Following on from the unfeasibly intercontinental-ballistically gigantic success of Waking Ned, the latter’s co-star David Kelly has lent his vast experience to the not entirely dissimilar Mystics, a good-natured and undemanding caper with an apparently conscious debt to the Ealing comedies of the 1950s. This time out, Kelly – noted for roles in Ballykissangel, Fawlty Towers and Strumpet City – is teamed with another hugely accomplished and multiple award-winning stage, screen and television veteran in Milo O’Shea.

For Mystics’ purposes, O’Shea and Kelly gleefully play a couple of, well, old scamsters who, no longer gainfully employed in the theatre, earn their living by pretending to communicate with the dead at their ‘Temple of the Truth’ which is, of course, a room above a Dublin pub. Their ill-judged attempt to pass themselves off as mystics with divine predictive powers lands them in serious danger when a local gangster dies, though it’s safe to say that Mystics never remotely ventures into dark or threatening waters. Liam Cunningham and Maria Doyle-Kennedy are also aboard the cast, while the script comes from pre-eminent Irish screenwriter Wesley Burrowes.
As Kelly and O’Shea explain, this isn’t the first time their paths have crossed in the course of their extensive careers.
“I’ve been playing with O’Shea since 1956,” grins Kelly, “so we’ve kind of got the hang of it. In fact, the only time I haven’t felt nervous on stage in all my life was when I did The Sunshine Boys with Milo. We’re a good balance.”
For his part, O’Shea readily concurs.
“David and I have been a team for a very long time. We’ve done everything from pantomime to revue to Beckett, and we’re so used to each other it’s like playing tennis. He usually places the ball excatly where I want. Apart from anything else we’re very good friends, which helps.”
As it turns out, the film evades the worst excesses of Paddywhackery that contaminated Ned, and its admittedly parochial references are supremely well-judged (Ronnie Drew as the voice of God himself: could anyone argue with that?)
Kelly confesses: “I had a real fear that the film would be stage Irish, but it’s such a good story and it doesn’t lose out on any of that Irish wit and charm. It has the lightness of an Ealing comedy but it’s very original.’
The shoot also afforded the boys the opportunity to jet off to sunny Barcelona, but this particular experience didn’t quite unfold the way they had envisioned.
“It was pouring rain, and freezing cold, from the moment that we arrived,” rails Kelly bitterly. “With some of the rather nice gear we were wearing in Spain, we actually had hot water bottles under our Hawaiian shirts to keep us warm. Jesus, it was freezing. I’ve never heard Milo O’Shea use language like he used on that boat in Barcelona that day.”
Still, the experience wasn’t quite as daunting as Kelly’s mind-bending nude motorcycle-chase scene from Waking Ned.
“That was more than a little intimidating; I’d no experience of being naked in public, and very little of being naked in private. That was maybe the hardest moment of my career.”
Hard moments aside, David Kelly was a little shocked throughout late 2003 when people of his acquaintance kept coming up to him to check that he was, indeed, still alive: “it had been reported everywhere that David Kelly had gone into the woods to kill himself,” he notes gravely, “which was grossly exaggerated – I mean, the script wasn’t that bad.”

Mystics is released December 5