It may even recall Mel Brooks’ The Producers but for Wolfe Tones front man Brian Warfield writing a musical about the Irish Famine was a very serious business.
The man who has been belting out songs like A Nation Once Again and The Man Behind the Wire to old – and, recently, very new audiences - for over sixty years has dreamed of making a stage show about one of the darkest chapters in Ireland’s very dark history for years.
Tonight, in The Complex venue in Dublin’s Smithfield, his dream finally comes true when Celtic Exodus: The Musical is staged for the very first time.
"It is very difficult and I think I’ve succeeded with that because the Irish are a very fun loving people even in hard times, they loved their dance, they loved their song, they loved their music and they loved their craic."
"I had to do it. I didn't care, I still don’t care and if I lose because of it; I still don’t care. So what? I couldn’t go and die without doing this. It cost a lot of money. I’m financing it and I couldn’t let it go without doing it."
He compares his new musical to Les Misérables and even hit Broadway musical Hamilton, which told the tale of US president Andrew Hamilton, and it certainly has all the elements of a sweeping Irish epic, from forbidden love amid starvation, rebels out for revenge on the English invaders, and a very Irish tale of dispossession. It’s even got a village idiot and a cruel landlord.
A keen amateur historian with an impressive library of books on Irish history, Warfield has always felt that The Famine is an overlooked era of Irish history. Celtic Exodus: The Musical is his way of addressing that.
"It is such a huge event. I think we try to sanitise it a lot," he says. "They try to play down the actual figures and the suffering of the people and make it nice and compatible for young kids to read. I think we are well mature enough to know our history and not go out and take revenge for it.
"That’s not what history is about. History is about learning and not letting it repeat itself again and that’s what our story of the Great Hunger in Ireland should be doing."
Celtic Exodus: The Musical, which includes former Fair City actress Clelia Murphy, Denis Grindel, who starred in The Commitments in the west End, and Irish theatre mainstay Morgan C. Jones in the cast, begins in 1823 with the genesis of a bitter feud between Ned 'Rinca’ McDonagh and Big Dan ‘Buckey’ in the townland of Kilturk.
"We're not apologising for it, we're just presenting it to the people" - Actress Clelia Murphy on Celtic Exodus, showing this week at The Complex.
— The Complex Dublin (@ComplexDublin) January 21, 2025
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The play then leaps forward twenty years and Big Dan’s daughter Siobhan is betrothed to the idiot son of the local Shebeen owner. She flees to the hills where she falls in love with Ned McDonagh’s son, local rebel Sean, who is on the run for the murder of a land agent.
As the synopsis for the play reads, "But in 1845, and just as fortune seems to favour the star-crossed lovers, the famine hits the land. As the village starves and suffers under the thumb of Fitzwilliam, the vengeful new land agent, the people of Kilturk rally in a desperate act of rebellion against the might of an empire. But will Sean and Siobhan be forced to sacrifice their own future to lead their people to a brighter fate?"
"Celtic Exodus is about normal people, like me and you," says Warfield. "They’re seen as starving figures with no flesh on their bones - we see them differently but they weren’t - they were normal people like you and me.
"The story should be told and it should be told to everybody, including the people of England. I hope Celtic Exodus will whet the appetite of people to delve into this story more than I can do in a play."
Warfield himself has a small part as a journalist for the Illustrated London News, whose illustrations depicting the catastrophe in England’s oldest and closest colony did much to bring the horrors home to English readers.
"We had all kinds of things thrown at us over the years, `the musical wing of the Provisional IRA' . . . if I had a penny for every name I was called!"
Celtic Exodus may reopen the debate about whether The Famine was a natural disaster or a genocide by the English government. Warfield is in no doubt. "It was a genocide against the Irish people," he says. "If you read some of the articles in the London Times of that period, they were gloating about the fact that there would be no more Celts left in Ireland, that this was a gift from god to get rid of the `Irish Problem'.
"They had no idea what was going on. They never made any real attempt to feed the Irish people. In fact, when money and help came from other places, they took it over and distributed it in their way and it didn’t feed the Irish people."
The new production will feature 15 new songs by Warfield and it looks as thought it goes in for plenty of dry ice to represent those misty bogs but as Sting found out with his stage venture The Last Ship, musicals are notoriously risky to stage, both financially and otherwise.
Warfield, who financed the whole project himself, laughs and says: "I had to do it. I didn’t care, I still don’t care and if I lose because of it; I still don’t care. So what? I couldn’t go and die without doing this. It cost a lot of money. I’m financing it and I couldn’t let it go without doing it.
"I’m putting the money up to lose it. I’m not putting it on to make any financial gain. I know how risky it is but I believe an Irish musical needs to be out there telling the story. We have Les Mis for the French and Hamiton for the Americans and now we have Celtic Exodus for the Irish."
Warfield, who is originally from Inchicore in Dublin, founded The Wolfe Tones with Noel Nagle, and Liam Courtney in 1963. They rode the Irish ballad boom of the Sixties, singing rebel songs and sad tales of the Irish diaspora.
Long branded "the musical wing of the IRA," more recently the band have enjoyed an extraordinary upsurge in popularity and found themselves embroiled in a culture war about Warfield’s song A Celtic Symphony, which features the line "Ooh, aah, up the Ra!"
It became a chant for a whole new generation of young Irish people born after The Troubles and when Ireland’s women’s football team were criticised for singing it as they celebrated another victory, many people saw red without necessarily seeing green.
Micheál Martin was even drawn into the flame war when he was asked about Celtic Symphony during a radio interview and said it had a "simplistic narrative" that is "hurtful to victims of violence."
Call it knowing irony or an easy way to give a two-fingered salute to Official Ireland but the song and its key lyric has become the chant of choice for young Irish people. It had also given The Wolfe Tones a new lease of life as they prepare to retire later this year after six decades in the business of ballads.
After playing to a packed tent at Electric Picnic in 2023, last year they headlined the main stage, as well as selling out three nights at the 3Arena and a night at Belfast’s SSE Arena last October.
"Well, I’m used to it," Warfield laughs when I ask him about the criticism. "We had all kinds of things thrown at us over the years, `the musical wing of the Provisional IRA’ . . . if I had a penny for every name I was called!"
However, the upsurge in the band’s popularity is all part of a new generation - from Derry Girls to Kneecap and to TV drama Say Nothing - who are looking back on another dark chapter in Irish history with fresh eyes.
"I think it’s great because back then everything was censored so people never got an opportunity to hear the argument of the various sides," Warfiled says.
"If you were on the Republican side, you were totally censored, you couldn’t speak about it, you were helping terrorism if you did."
These days, Liam Gallagher half-jokingly suggests that The Wolfe Tones should open for Oasis next August in Croke Park and the band have found a whole new audience just as they prepare to retire.
"The Wolfe Tones are retiring this year and I would love to be going on for another sixty years but I don’t think that can happen," says Warfield. "But I am continuing on the fight to highlight our story by writing this musical play that will continues telling the story that I have told over the years.
The bold ballad men take their final bow at Thomond Park Stadium in Limerick next July and sked how emotional he will be, Warfield says, "I wouldn’t feel emotional about it to be honest because I treat every show in the same way. I want to go out there and give a show to the people so they can remember the Wolfe Tones as a great live band.
"It is sad and it is a bittersweet moment. We’ve had unbelievable voyage of sixty years across the world, telling Ireland’s story has come to an end.
"But I’ll not give up the fight. I’ll continue on the story as much as I can. I’ll tell it in a different way. I’m still writing songs and, you never know, performing. Celtic Exodus is the next step of what I’m doing."
Celtic Exodus: The Musical is at The Complex, Smithfield, Dublin from 22 to 25 January. Tickets are on sale now
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