Upcoming Shows:
28 November: Bartlemy community hall, Co. Cork
17 January 2025: Source Arts Centre, Thurles, Co. Tipp
29th, 30th, 31st January and 1st February 2025: Cork Arts Theatre
Biography
In a long career Pakie O’Callaghan has worked on stage, TV and radio. In his native Cork, with the Everyman Theatre, he appeared in a wide variety of productions including lead roles in Translations, Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, One for the Road and many others. Pakie also worked for several years with the highly innovative Cork Theatre Co. which familiarised local audiences with works by many of the great European dramatists including Ibsen, Lorca, Beckett etc as well as some local greats like Bernard Farrell, Dion Boucicault and Lennox Robinson.
In the mid-nineties Pakie featured in the RTE radio sketch series Shortt Circuit and subsequently played a lead role in the TV series Bull Island in which he is remembered fondly for playing, among others, the then minister for Finance Charlie McCreevey. He did many of the political “voices” on Tonight with Vincent Brown and also appeared in Browns TV series Midnight Court. In 2004 Pakie joined Joe Duffy’s Funny Friday Show as a writer/performer and has been there ever since.
With the late and much lamented Frank Twomey Pakie co-wrote and starred in the hit stage show Santa Ponsa or Bust which spawned two follow up shows, Surviving Santa Ponsa and Life after Santa Ponsa. Following sell out shows at the Everyman Palace Frank and Pakie toured the Santa Ponsa Trilogy to every corner of Ireland.
Pakie has written and performed three one man shows, In the National Interest, The Last Brown Envelope and No more Brown Envelopes, all of which toured nationally.
Press
Pakie O’Callaghan’s “A celebration of the stories of Eamon Kelly” developed out of an RTE radio programme that went out in the autumn of 2022 to mark international story telling day. Pakie was invited to tell a couple of stories on the programme and as a lifelong admirer of Kelly he opted to tell two of the master storytellers’ stories. He was subsequently invited to do a full length show based on Kelly’s stories and “a celebration of the stories of Eamon Kelly” is the result.
Eamon Kelly has been one of O’Callaghan’s theatrical heroes since O’Callaghan’s teenage years and he fondly remembers listening with his father to Kelly on Dinjo’s “Take the floor” which went out for many years on Sunday nights on Radio Eireann and later on to Kelly’s own programme “The Rambling House”. O’Callaghan remembers being transfixed by Kellys performances in his one man shows “In my Fathers Time”, “Bless me Father” and “Stonemad” which were performed to packed houses at The Everyman Theatre and which won widespread acclaim both in Ireland and internationally.
A celebration of the stories of Eamon Kelly will be a trip down memory lane for many but O’Callaghan is hoping to also develop a new audience for these stories which he describes as universal and timeless and always very, very funny.
In the show O’Callaghan does not seek to mimic Eamon Kelly and while staying true to the wonderful writing “A celebration of the stories of Eamon Kelly” is O’Callaghan’s own interpretation of the work of Ireland’s greatest storyteller.
The show is directed by Marion Wyatt, who is remembered for bringing us “Sunbeam Girls”, “Dockers”, “Katty Barry, Queen if the Coal Quay” and is currently working on celebrating another great Cork institution “Echo Boys” The show has its first outing on April 20 th in The Glen Theatre, Banteer with which O’Callaghan has a long and happy association, having previously brought his own one man show “In the National Interest” as well as The Santa Ponsa Trilogy there.
© Copyright Pakie O'Callaghan