De Staic goes radio gaga for St Patrick’s Day

Celebrated Shrule entertainer Aindrias de Staic’s ‘The Man from Moogaga’ will be broadcast on Newstalk on St Patrick’s Day.
The piece tells the story of a young musician and his friends growing up rural Ireland where football is their currency. A musical-comedy-storytelling hybrid, it is written and performed by De Staic.
What started as a small one-man stage show about music, magic, friendship and football, ‘The Man from Moogaga’ has blossomed into a beautifully crafted, theatrical radio production.
Premiering on Newstalk 106-108fm at 6pm on St Patrick’s Day, the production casts de Staic in full seanachaí mode, and the performance sees him using his exquisite fiddle playing and mastering a loop pedal to embellish the narrative. The result is a riotous affair, which celebrates the rhythms of small town life in rural Ireland, taking inspiration from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milk Wood’, and from Irish traditions of storytelling and music.
“The show is a simple rites-of-passage story, tracing the journey of a few lads in a village and their struggles from innocent times in the ’80s, through their teenage years, to them becoming men, right up to the present day in post-recession Ireland,” De Staic explains. “I wanted to create a show that was deeper, that looked at the Irish psyche, but at the same time preserve my own style of storytelling where huumor is pivotal.”
‘The Man from Moogaga’ is part of the Spring Season of Drama on Newstalk. It will be broadcast on Newstalk 106-108fm at 6pm on St Patrick’s Day and repeated on March 18 at 7am and 11pm. It will also be available as a podcast at www.newstalk.com/documentaryonnewstalk after the first broadcast.