Blindboy Boatclub - “Dogs can smell in stereo, they can smell time!”
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What is the new Abbey Theatre play “Animals” and how did it originate?
The podcaster and author Blind Boy Boat Club, good morning and welcome.
What's the crack, Brendan? How are you getting on?
Good, good. Blind Boy, you're expanding into another medium. What the I think they call it horizontal integration, Animals, a new play based on some of your short stories, and it's debuting in the National Theatre at the Abbey Theatre next month. Um would it be a stretch to ask you to explain it to people to Um
I mean it it's So I uh the the thing is with theater, theatre is is is fantastic because You you kinda you have to be present. You have to be physically present to enjoy the theatre. So with this play, you can do something that you can't do it in video, you can't do it on on a b in a book. It's about using The audience and using the stage to For the f the final piece of art that can't be monetized or put into something that can be sold, you're gonna have to be present. I mean, can I explain what it's about? There's a v a very talented director by the name of Dan Collie. Um is adapting my short stories. Mostly short stories from my last collection, which are released in twenty twenty three, Topographia Hibernica.
Um I don't know, there's gonna be a little something of everything in it for everybody. I can't explain it to you, Brendan.
Exactly. I I didn't think you would be able to, but I thought you tried and like it it feels like you're stretching the boundaries of standard theatre a bit as well to manage to put these stories on stage because they're quite surreal, a lot of your stories. That's the thing. But the
the the theatre maker, the director, Dan Collie His last piece of work was And this is what made me want to work with him. He adapted So there's a genre of writing from South America called magical realism. Um Mad it it's It'd be a bit like surrealism. I I suppose David Lynch's stuff would be the closest thing to it, but it's it's a it's very heavily represented in South America, where you'd have these deeply surreal stories. And there was a writer called Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he he wrote a story called What was it called? A man with impossibly large wings, I think was the name of the story. But Dan, he Adapted that for theatre. And as as soon as I saw right, okay, he's adapting South American magic of realism for theatre, I went, He can have a cracking.
He
was the man to wrestle blind boy into shape, yeah. And then again, like y as surreal and a an absurdist as a lot of your stories are, you'd say that most of them are based on things that actually happened to you. Like d so the story I'll give you Barcelona is i is in the play, right? And you explore Masculinity called Through the prism of Jim Nudity, basically, yeah. Mm-hmm. So that's that's
a short story I wrote about I mean it's that it's a ten thousand word story about one man biting another man's arse. You know, that's what that story is, and Like. It is based on a true story. I was going to the gym back in Limerick, right? And One day I went into the showers. And the showers in the gym are Big square room. All the men, everyone has to be nude 'cause it's a shower. And I was there and there was all these bouncers around me, so all these nude bouncers all around me, big, huge fellas, really strong fellas, like their job is to kick people's heads in. And then into the shower walks this About four foot nine. Bodybuilder lad in his late fifties? And he walks into the shower and then starts shaving his rectum.
At people. Like literally bent over, took it 'cause he he's a bodybuilder, so he had to he's to put on that tan, you know, so they shave all their bodies. And I was just fascinated by This man is is intimidating a lot of bouncers by pointing his he's recked em at them and shaving it. And I remember looking at him and going, I wonder what his dreams are like. That's such a str and and that became The impedist to write a short story.
Yeah, that I c I'm I I'm looking forward to seeing that on the stage of the Abbey.
But the thing is that uh that sounds really, really silly. But that's how I begin the writing process.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the new Abbey Theatre play “Animals” and how did it originate?
0:00–4:33
2
How does director Dan Collie adapt Blindboy’s surreal short stories for the stage?
4:33–20:32
3
What is the philosophical theory of Umwelt and why does it matter for perception?
20:32–22:23
4
How does Blindboy compare a dog’s sense of smell to human perception of time?
22:23–23:18