Skit Happens

Après Match member Gary Cooke is shortly to star in the debut run of the new Ross O’Carroll Kelly play, Between Foxrock and a Hard Place, at the Olympia Theatre. With the Celtic Tiger having died a death a few years back, the one-time playboy of the Southside is decidedly down on his luck these days – Foxrock... finds him overweight and in the midst of a divorce.

As if that wasn’t enough, his parents are splitting up and selling their Foxrock home, which has plummeted in value as a result of the property crash. This is the cue for some shenanigans involving a lobbyist, a suitcase full of cash and a masked gunman.
“I play the gunman,” explains Cooke, speaking during a break in rehearsals. “(Adopts Dub accent) A bloke who used to be in the Lebanon man. He’s a bit of thug for hire really. I did my own play last year and of course I was in I Keano as well, but it’s the first time in a while I’ve been in a play where I haven’t been doing impressions. I had seen the Ross O’Carroll Kelly columns; they’re very clever and well written. Paul Howard, who obviously writes all the Ross material, is very good and the last show was successful. I read the script, which again was good reading, and on the basis of that I decided to do it.”
Does Gary have a preference for theatrical roles or comedy performing on TV?
“The comedy stuff I suppose,” he replies. “Between Foxrock and a Hard Place is a comedy as well, so it slots in. It’s not that I’m not interested in acting – I am, and I started off as an actor – but I guess I gravitate more naturally towards comedy.”
Gary’s most recent theatrical venture, 2009’s MacBecks, found him tackling the David Beckham phenomenon with characteristic satirical flair.
“It was a comedy-musical about him, his missus and their love triangle with Alex Ferguson,” reflects Cooke. “It was on in the Olympia last year, but it didn’t come back. There was a large cast of 16 – it was far too big!”
It sounds quite similar to I Keano, Father Ted writer Arthur Mathews’ comic mythologising of Mick McCarthy’s and Roy Keane’s infamous bust-up in Saipan before the 2002 World Cup.
“It was up to a point, but it was quite different in many respects as well,” counters Gary. “MacBecks was more ambitious in its staging and so on. There are certain similarities in that it’s a particular kind of writing and acting style, but doing impressions and making them real in a semi-acting way, that was something that kind of emanated from Après Match anyway. To be honest, I think Après Match was ground zero for all of that kind of stuff.”
Now 12 years on the go, Après Match – the comedic trio which consists of Cooke, Risteard Cooper and Barry Murphy – have produced some of the most essential Irish satire during that time. Back together for their regular post-match slots during this summer’s World Cup, they performed some of their finest ever sketches, including their sublime of skewering of Tonight with Vincent Browne.
The recession is at the heart of the new Ross O’Carroll Kelly play, and this was the subject Après Match tackled in those sketches, albeit from a very different angle. Instead of creating fictional characters, they instead sent up the empty rhetoric that now dominates Irish current affairs shows. Among the personalities they parodied in typically merciless fashion were Brian Lenihan, Enda Kenny, Joan Burton, David McWilliams and, of course, Browne himself.
“It was a bit of a departure for us,” notes Cooke. “Obviously there’s so much going on in relation to the economy, it’s hard not to touch on it. You’ve got to do something about it – it’s where the hotspots are. It is empty rhetoric, you’re absolutely right. That’s what we were aiming for; it is all rubbish. In many ways, the media doesn’t help with the amount of space that it has to fill, and that’s what Après Match takes the piss out of. The notion that there’s this industry talking about stuff, and none of it is ever going to be put to the test!
“It’s like what Graham Taylor, the old England manager, said about the teams that journalists pick: (Does perfect Taylor impression ‘Your teams never have to actually go out and play,’ I thought, ‘How fucking right he is!’ Whatever you think about a manager, they call it as they see fit. People in the media... some of them might know something about the economy, and many of them don’t know anything about it. There’s too much media in this country and too much fucking talking. It’s fucking pain in the hole to listen to.
“If all media was banned in this country for a month – apart from Hot Press, of course! – it wouldn’t make any fucking difference. In fact, we’d probably be happier.”
When you take into account the spectacular car-wreck that is Anglo Irish and the fact there are close to half-a-million unemployed, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Gary’s short-term outlook on the country’s prospects are fairly bleak.
“All people really need to know,” he opines, “is that we are bankrupt, and that even if the politicians did know what to do about it, they probably still couldn’t do anything. And a combination of the EU and IMF are coming into this country within the next 18 months – I’d be amazed if it didn’t happen – and this country is going to turn into fucking Bulgaria! With all the property unsold as well.”
But the decline in the level of debate about our current predicament seems to have reached crisis point. The night before our interview, I watched The Frontline, and such was the amount of pointless blustering coming from the government spokesmen, the opposition representatives and the studio audience, it felt like being repeatedly punched in the face.
“It is, but isn’t it argument for the sake of entertainment as well?”
Undoubtedly – it’s just not very entertaining anymore.
“Exactly, it’s not,” responds Gary, “and The Frontline is one of the best of them as well. We all know Pat Kenny is sharp and all of that. Personally, I’d like to take this piss out of all of this more, because it’s just unbearable. Even people I really like, such as Moore McDowell. I just know he’s not bullshitting me, and I know he’s not trying to do theatre shows and sell books. (Laughs) But even listening to him after a while, you just go... I don’t want to know how bankrupt we are!
“Everyone will say this, but I wish I had somewhere else I go to, like the way Johnny Logan can go to Turkey to do stuff. (Laughs) Even Albania would do – just to have somewhere else to work!”

Ross O’Carroll Kelly; Between Foxrock And A Hard Place runs from October 15 - November 14 in The Olympia, Dublin.