'Frank Morgan', by Shay Rowan

The last time most people in the area will have seen Joe O’Byrne, he was smashing up a chair with a baseball bat – on a Salford stage. His last artistic incarnation – Frank Morgan – was part of his one-man play ‘I'm Frank Morgan RewiRED’ which bought this aggressive eponymous figure and his dark, mysterious club ‘The Ace of Spades’ in front of audiences far and wide, including locally at The Kings Arms.

But Bolton-based O’Byrne has plenty more on the cards– and certainly is no stranger to writing about and acting the dark and devious.

Joe O’Byrne captures the gritty of the city as a director, writer, actor and teacher – regularly bringing his talents to Manchester. His fictional work ‘Tales From Paradise Heights’ sets the scene, highlighting his creation of an often twisted, sometimes terrifying estate. It’s the place from which the character of Frank Morgan was later plucked and turned into a stage figure.

Jo Harding, Andrew Yates and Peter Slater in 'The Haunting of Blaine Manor', by Karen McBride

Inspired by dark and atmospheric experiences, O’Byrne’s writing has also included a theatre in the wild version of 'The Three Musketeers' at Heaton Park, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' (a play surrounding the events of the Salford Blitz when during WWII the community was bombed), and recently, a particularly creepy play ‘The Haunting of Blaine Manor’ which gained critical acclaim and won the Salford Star Best Play of 2017 Award. The play is set for a return at the Buxton Festival next month, then an autumn tour culminating in a centre stage Halloween event at The Met in Bury. It even toured to a haunted pub in London – and the performance itself often features O’Byrne’s impressively eerie artwork around the stage.

'The Haunting of Blaine Manor', by Shay Rowan

Also known for his role in the feisty films Lookin' for Lucky (2009), The Watcher (2011) - both Tales from Paradise Heights -  and the title role in Jon Williams and Michael Booth's Diary of a Bad Lad (2010), Joe O’Byrne talked to HAUNT Manchester about the range of his experiences and how the Gothic side of the city is just the start of fuelling him on:

1) Hello Joe. Would you say the Gothic side of Manchester and the surrounding area has influenced your writing and how so?

“Absolutely. There's always been a base of gothic around Manchester and the surrounding areas for me that I've always been drawn to, tripping as I spend most of my time looking up instead of where I'm walking.  Expressed best on cold wet days and nights for me, the murky reflections reaching as far down as they do up, a wet underworld.

"The architecture stands out - particularly around Manchester city centre, Manchester Town Hall courtyards, the churches, the John Rylands library, to the choir stalls of Manchester Cathedral with its dragons and the quite brilliant wodewoses - fearsome hairy man beasts - battling dragons and other mythical monsters.  Every town around the north and beyond has areas like this and they seem to awaken something in me, stir the imagination.  But they aren't 'contained' for me, they bleed out, they escape, they mix with the other structures, the abandoned or transformed factories, the tower blocks. 

“The tower blocks are the thing for me though, the booty, the dark treasure.  For me Paradise Heights is an area of dark towers, monolithic blocks, over a council estate at their base.  These blocks like dark and terrible giants casting long shadows over the houses, their 'children' at their feet. My gothic is much more urban - places like Hulme, Salford where these mighty towers scratch the sky's arse.  The life that teems within, the joys, the strifes, the struggles, the terrors.  I grew up in communities like this, I still live like this. Fertile ground for any writer.”

2) What is the biggest difference in creating horror for the stage compared to conveying it in a book?

“You can be very descriptive in a book, you can get into the minds of your characters and express for them, convey the horrors through them - they are the reader - at the same time the reader can create their version, fire their imagination, so don't give them everything. When I say don't give them everything I mean let their version of the horror bleed into what they are reading. I try not to give them the whole picture.  

“On stage it's a whole new world, and your job as writer/director is to create a real world that your characters are invested in, that your actors project fully, truthfully, without letting the ball drop - once you have that then an audience will share that, immerse themselves in that, be there.  It's the projection of the actors, their truth, their magic, their creativity from moment to moment and the delicious parts in between those moments, they embellish the moments that you create as a writer/director - they give it life, soul, new meaning. 

“In addition to this is sound, I think sound is massively under used in so many productions.  You can have all the digital trickery in the world, the smoke and mirrors of visual, but what I wanted to focus on with The Haunting of Blaine Manor was sound.  That was where we created the real terror on stage, and that's where the partnership with the audience works.  For every terror experienced - seen - by the actors onstage, this was fed by the audio experience, the chilling sound effects created by Justin Wetherill and the cast one rainy afternoon in a sound studio in Sheffield.”

'The Haunting of Blaine Manor', by Shay Rowan

3) In terms of staging your writing... were there certain local venues you had in mind? Do you think The Kings Arms, for example, captured the mood well?

“The Kings Arms was a fabulous building for The Haunting of Blaine Manor, I mean that space - with that magnificent dome?  Once the set was in, you felt like you were in a haunted manor, you felt like you'd been flipped back through time, waking in the early 1950s, but waking into a building that was so much older than that, a manor hundreds of years old.  A building with a pulse.  It's a truly Bohemian building is the Kings Arms, with an amazing history.

“The play has also played converted chapels and haunted pubs from Oswestry to London, with tales to tell from those venues too, so yes it lends itself well to certain spaces - but the play works equally well in large spaces.  The historical theatres of the West End await, I'm sure we'll get there with it, but in addition I believe the play would work magnificently in places like Ordsall Hall, Salford, Smithills Hall, Bolton - old Tudor buildings and suchlike. There are also a wealth of National Heritage sites, ruined castles, abbeys and manors where the play would work magnificently, and I'm keen to talk to the National Heritage about this. 

“But there's a magic to The Kings Arms too and I'm going to be bringing back all the Tales there, a season if you will - 6 plays and three films thus far all with fabulous reviews, they have a fab army of followers and I'm always looking to widen that audience obviously. There are other theatres I'm doing that with too and I'm still looking for further spaces.”

4) Can you tell us a little more about The Haunting of Blaine Manor - and do you think it has particular appeal to a Manchester audience? 

“I've been enjoying creating Tales from Paradise Heights, but I wanted a little sabbatical. I wanted to write something removed from today's dangerously real world of Paradise Heights, even though there has been a flavour of the supernatural about those tales, with ghosts and angels appearing in the series. But I wanted to go a little further - no, a lot further. I write in the witching hours, the wee small hours, the hours between midnight and four in the morning, I've always written my best stuff during those hours. 

“I'd always wanted to do a haunted house story…and the ghost at my shoulder every time I sit at the keyboard has always wanted me to do one.  Not just a ghost story though. I wanted it to be a period piece, something that would fit the world of M.R. James, Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. At the same time tipping the hat to the Hammer Horror Classics that I watched in my youth, and how many of these classics tapped into England’s cultural history of haunted castles, demons and witchcraft - the gothic fabric of a very haunted England?  Blaine Manor has something of the Borley Rectory about it.

“In tandem with this I also wanted to create a black and white film on stage, a ghost story yes, but also something that was a throwback to the Hollywood Golden Age.  Where glamour mixed with danger like bourbon poured over rocks. 

“As to appealing to Manchester audiences?  Yes it has, no question, as we have now played the Kings Arms twice with it, to sold out runs each time, but it also has a wider appeal.  We sold the play out in London two weeks before we got there purely on the strength of the reviews, and we played to packed houses in Oswestry - thus far these are the only two places out of Manchester where we have been with the play, but a tour is on the way and we play the Buxton Fringe Festival next month.  ]

"I have to mention here that a huge attraction for the play has come from some of the simply stunning photography of Shay Rowan and Karen McBride, the brilliant trailers created by Darren McGinn they have conveyed so much about the play in image and sound, dripping in the atmosphere being created around the production.  So that's a very long way of saying yes it has particular appeal to Manchester audiences, but the play is also blessed with a wider cultural appeal.”

'Frank Morgan', by Karen McBride

5) Do you have any more dark-influenced work you are planning to develop in the future?

"So much.  I'm Frank Morgan: RewiRED was very much an experiment, something that would take me further to a play idea I have called Torch. As it seems that experiment has very much worked I am going to be returning to visit characters mentioned in I'm Frank Morgan: RewiRED, but I want to go a step further.  We were in Frank's club - The Ace of Spades - in that story.

“I'm currently exploring a return to his club, but this time I want the audience to feel even more immersed in the club, to see the live the band they heard, to have their feet tapping to live tunes, cheering the band and the singer on, to see live the singer they heard (The Queen of Clubs - Miss Nula Christie) she has her tale to tell, an explosive drama, a blood and thunder urban opera in a way I suppose.  There will be mythical themes within of course, that supernatural taint to the tale - but with a flavour of 1930s Berlin?  You'll see.  There are echoes to those times today. 

“A poem that I wrote on my website - The Night Death Put Me Down - will be the source material for an animated project I'm working on with Darren McGinn (the man responsible for the Tales from Paradise Heights promotional imagery) and sound master and composer Justin Wetherill.  I'm also going to be collaborating with Justin Wetherill on an album of songs from The Heights, and I still have a short film script that I haven't produced yet, The Last Drop.

“I’ve also started on the novelisation of Strawberry Jack, and the play will be back in time for this Christmas, well it is a Christmas Tale so that made sense and it's also on the same set as I'm Frank Morgan: RewiRED. 

“You know one day some TV executive is going to wake up and realise that this is the next TV series, an urban gothic collection of interconnected fabulously reviewed tales set on and around a council estate.  The scale of it is huge and it's still growing.  Manchester, Salford and Bolton influence all this...Urban Gothic meets Magic Realism.

“So yes, plenty more to come and -well, I keep getting ideas!”

To keep updated with Joe's literary progress, particularly Paradise Heights related, you can visit the website, whilst 'The Bench', novel-length tale from Paradise Heights is available for purchase via Amazon.

Photo credit to Karen McBride and Shay Rowa