Many a Keane visitor knows the feeling, like floating into a Kerry kind of dreamtime. Enveloped in that lyrical, laconic narrative of cabbages and mountain kings, of "natty" men who danced light as feathers and could play the fiddle and march at the same time, of ballrooms of romance and waltzes that never ended, the world dissolving into a shimmer of dappled light and old shades and the shadow that hovers now over the story-teller's every word: a profound, abiding sense of loss.
"Different . . . different . . . a totally different world. I didn't know it in the 1950s when I started writing seriously but I was recording faithfully a life that would disappear forever. The characters are true to their time and place. I was one of them.
They're all gone now . . . "
"They" are his beloved, staunchly independent people from places like Lyreacrompane, the Ivy Bridge, Renagown, Dirha West and B≤ithr∅n Dubh "out the road", who prided themselves on their music, their turf, their cattle, even their cabbage, in that "magical past". "And the saddest thing of all is that so many passed on without leaving anything behind them; people with marvellous stores of stories and songs and anecdotes . . . It all went down with them . . . It was the reason I became a playwright. I don't have any doubt about it."
He has spoken of a "desperate" need to express himself, although desperation is hardly a quality one associates with this gentle, genial story-teller. Yet the darkness and the savagery that cut through plays such as Big Maggie and Sive - often diluted in the early days in what he calls "shoddy productions" that milked the scripts for laughs - have always been indicative of an inner life that is surely stormy at times.
Now, in the room above the little Listowel pub where Sive "gushed" out of him when he was 29 and where the cancer that afflicts him saps his energy and sometimes his train of thought, he grapples with the question.
The thing to remember about John B. Keane is that he never walked away from a scrap. He might even have invited them at times. He was probably born scrappy. He puts it down to a kind of "turbulence" inside him, the kind that niggled - still niggles - like "an old worry", something he has wrestled with for all his 73 years. It probably made him what he is.
"There was always this turbulent thing there, even as a young lad. I'd be studying and I suddenly just couldn't comprehend what I'd be looking at. I had this thing inside in me. When I wrote a play called The King of Friday's Men, there was this fella who was suffering from a 'hurt', a great hurt. There were a lot of fellas in the countryside that time who would be silent and slinking around the house if visitors came, wouldn't go to church or anything . . . But the people around would say 'Don't mind him, he has a hurt'. They wouldn't know what it was, d'you understand?"
But it is part of that Keane north-Kerry dreamtime that, although they couldn't define it or determine its source, they wisely made space for it.
As a boy, John B.'s "hurt" manifested itself in wild urges, such as climbing to the "uppermost limb of the highest tree, putting my life totally at risk. I was a wild young fella, a wild man, no question about it. I was christened the Spider then. At the top of the tree, like any monkey, I hurled insults down at the denizens underneath," he recalls with a smile.
"Scraps" of the physical kind, his and others, figure prominently in his personal tales of emigration, football and pub-keeping.
Generally, scraps were good things, especially on the football pitch, where wise referees let lads get on with it (not like now, he suggests, where boys play themselves out at night, in street fights, with knives). "Ah I had a few scraps all right, I'd a few good scraps. It was very common at the time, y'know." Then there were the scraps in the pub. All it took was a derogatory remark about a neighbouring football team or about a fella's girl - "she mightn't be exactly, you know, the flower of the flock but he thought she was absolutely beautiful . . . And they'd fight like dogs."
And sometimes they came in just looking for a fight. "It reminded me of the old Texas cow towns long ago, and you had a barman in town who had a reputation as a gunslinger and they'd want to fight him. It was the same with me - they thought I could fight as well as write."
Clearly, he could hold his own and was the man to beat. And behind it all, was this inner turbulence that kept on nagging. It wasn't an insecurity, he says slowly, thoughtfully; he had a very happy childhood.
And it wasn't conscience. So what was it? He's still not entirely sure.
"I think it would be basically worry. I'd be very worried about my family, about my parents. As a child, I tended to worry a lot. But I think there's a basic fear in every person. That would be there in me. I would have great courage when the chips were down. I would wade in. I'd have no fear. Maybe it's the fear that I'm a fraud, living another life - here I am, a tough man playing football and maybe I'm a coward at heart."
Later, he suggests another possibility. "At night I'd wake up thinking about something and I'd be flustered and worried - and I think now it's all part of that writing system. That's it. It's a thing that's in you and it hasn't come out and until it comes out, well . . .
"As you get older, you expect it to go away; it doesn't quite. No. It reappears, not like a ghost, but an old worry . . . " Later still, he puts it down to "a worry for the security of others. I was greatly concerned always for my friends . . ." And later again: "I would say that anybody with artistic tendencies would have this turbulence. It's like, I suppose, the change of the tide in the sea. When it ebbs and flows, the precise time that it changes, that's the time for turbulence and I think it's the same with man."
The most serious scrap coincided with his two-year spell in England where he had repaired to write the Great Irish Novel (which turned out, he says baldly, to be "a load of bullshit, if you'll excuse the expression").
"I thought it'd be no bother to me, two or three fellas . . . " In fact, he was lucky to escape with his life.
So significant was this particular scrap, that when I ask him to suggest the opening scene for a movie of his life, he doesn't even pause for thought. "The first scene would be myself getting this fierce hiding in a laneway in Northampton in England.
Because it was after that that I turned my back on futility and street fighting and all that kind of thing, and moved on. That was pivotal all right. That was a low period. Oh yes, I realised absolutely that the Great Irish Novel wasn't working. I was going through a phase, you see, a transition. I was going from youth to real manhood."
Meeting Mary, his wife, would be the turning-point in our hypothetical movie. "She did bring me a certain peace of mind and as I became older, the external side of my activities - the wildness in a way - dissipated. But I still had the turbulence . . . " Did the later times of turbulence correspond with any particular periods in his life? From a man who all his life seemed to thumb his nose at the critics, who has been accused in the past of an unhealthy focus on the box-office, the answer is surprising.
"When I was young, it was with great trepidation I'd go to see a new play of mine. Generally it would be crucified. You'd get one or two critics who would give me great reviews; the rest of them you know, they'd dismiss me, wipe me out completely. The worst thing you ever did in the early stages was to be a success . . . " It wasn't that he lacked self-knowledge. He was never a man to talk up his technical skills and was well aware that "shoddy productions" were doing nothing for his reputation. "But a play, no matter if it's the greatest play that was ever written, is at the mercy of the producer and if the producer has ideas about himself, the play is shagged from the word go. The playwright is forgotten. I sat through a few of my plays in those days and didn't know what I was at for a while." He never fails to acknowledge generously the work of later producers such as Ben Barnes, Arthur Lappin and Barry Cassin in enabling his acceptance by the theatre establishment and other writers.
"I think what turned a lot of the professional theatre against me in those days was that I was getting away with murder. Shoddy productions, while the dialogue was good and entertaining - they felt that I was poxed with luck. We could go up to Dublin in 1959 - 60 and fill the Olympia which held about 1,600, mob it out with a play like Many Young Men of Twenty." You can see what he means when he remarks later that The Chastitute was making £1,000 a week for him at one point with Big Maggie always nipping at its heels.
'I also found that many of my critics had a vested interest - they'd be writing plays themselves and many of them succeeded in later life." There are people, including Keane himself, who believe too that some of the establishment, so recently transplanted to the metropolis from the countryside, were still too close to the plays' characters and language to be comfortable with them. Then, as now, voluntary amnesia reigned.
Some would say that Keane himself contributed to this in a small way with his visible, too public rendition of what was perceived to be the stage Kerryman, making it easier for his critics to dismiss his work as stereotype. If this were so, it would be a poor reflection on the "professionals" whose job, after all, is to isolate the work from the trappings. Whatever the motivation, if the intention was to shut Keane out of the theatre establishment, it succeeded. It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when Joe Dowling was artistic director of the Abbey, that a Keane play was finally produced in the State's national theatre. In 1998, total victory came in the form of the Gradam, the National Theatre Society's highest award, presented to him for his contribution to Irish theatre.
But in the meantime, in a way that few people could have imagined in such a relaxed, genial, outwardly successful man, the stress of the critical crucifixions entangled with his old friend, the "turbulence", manifested themselves physically.
"I remember a Dublin theatre festival . . . I got a rash out on my head, a terrible rash, that then went to my hands. And my doctor said to me that it was tension because the pressures were enormous. What I felt was that it was like going into battle without a sword - because I had no control of what was going to be said about me. My enemies would have pens, which were knives really. They often brought them out of me dripping with blood . . . " Suddenly, he seems bone-weary and his illness seems to invade the room. Or maybe it is the bleak memories.
"The worst thing to be was successful. Ah . . . terrible. A curse in Ireland, because it often breeds resentment . . . And I did discover that this - what shall I call it - this tension in me, all these rashes and that, which lasted for several years. I'd say, I must get rid of this. And I did. A lot of it was my absences, sitting by the sea in absolute quiet. I'd go away on my own for days, book into a guest house, then at night, I'd slip into some country place, have a few drinks and talk to the people. But in the daytime, I'd disappear into total silence while I was, I suppose, curing myself, curing myself of this turbulence you see. As I said, it's like the sea. Sometimes, the sea is calm like glass, beautiful. Then it changes. It's impossible to try and examine the reasons for man's depression really . . . "
It was Mary's idea of course, this notion of removing himself to a wild place for days at a time which went on to have such a "huge influence" on his life. It started when he was around 35 and it became his saviour. "I'd go out to a place now like Brandon and I'd try to meditate. I'd spend a lot of time there, thrashing out my life with myself and the elements. I love the elements, the wilder, the more robust and aggressive they are, the better. I love to go straight into that, my arms outstretched, to blend with it. I'd come back then a new man, well, not completely a new man. I'd still have all the old woes; you're stuck with those . . . The innate turbulence that all of us have cannot be really diminished by anything. You accept it, you learn how to use it and once you do that, you can achieve anything."
His unswerving faith in prayer and the afterlife has been a given throughout his life. "I am so thankful for the fact that I'm not cynical about prayer. And I do believe there is something in the afterlife. I never had any doubts. By and large, it's up to yourself to get into that calmness of life, to get lost in that calm part of the sea. I can honestly say that I've had a full life. I don't think that I have any enemies. My kind of writing doesn't do that - it's gentle writing basically. I am a fulfilled man; I suppose that's a thing called peace of mind - which is just another name for the grace of God."
But if at times he sounds like a man who is softly closing a door, he is certainly not abandoning his plans. "We partially achieved our dreams," he says of that long-ago time in Northampton, when he and an old friend called Denis Murphy dreamed their youthful dreams - Denis of owning an Irish Grand National winner, John B. of becoming a "famous writer". Denis won the Kerry National - "and to a Kerryman that would be a lot more important than winning the Grand National you know".
And John B? "I would like to write a good few poems yet. I know I can do it because I started off writing poems. I won a few prizes for them but I never had the time . . . Now I can afford to. I'm certain that within four or five years - if I live that long - I can produce some fine poetry. I know how to do it, it's just getting a style, just getting access - that's the thing - to a style of poetry, a style of thought, and not to be too profound because those who profess to be profound aren't profound at all."
He knows that he is loved: "I get that feeling that I'm fairly popular in the country. I get it when I talk to people, and when I was very ill, people stopped me in the street, in all the towns and cities I've been in, and told me they were praying for me . . . " As for his professional status, that validation, it seems, is no longer in question. He holds two honorary doctorates - one from Trinity College, to which he has presented his papers - and his work has been seen from Moscow to Los Angeles. Four of his plays are currently running in this country, including Big Maggie at the Abbey and The Matchmaker, which moves to the Gaiety next week, starting on Monday. The new frontier is Edinburgh and its festival, its avant-garde audiences poised to pass the verdict on work that, Keane has suggested, "may have been before its time". Familial abuse, greed, the craving for security and the legacy of sexual repression are assuredly not passΘ in this new Ireland.
It is probably no coincidence that Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh are the young playwrights whom he singles out of the current crop as great talents. Many would see Keane's work as a precursor of theirs, even if by some ironic twist, they can ratchet up the grotesquerie and push it to an extreme that would once have been derided as crass melodrama in Keane.
Downstairs a bus load of Austrians has piled into the pub. While they yodel a song specially for Mary, she ladles the cream onto 14 Irish coffees. Upstairs, in another universe, we are summoning up a few verses of 'The Land of Lyre', a recent Keane poem and his favourite:
As he went out through the land of Lyre
The beaded dews did the fields attire,
And the old, grey world was turned to fire
In the month of May in the morning.
Out of the bowers, by the bright sun lit,
Lark and linnet and long-tailed tit
And every other that ever did flit
Sang loud of the sun's adorning.
Sang from the foliage green and gay,
Sang for the love of the newborn day,
Sang for the blossoming buds of May
And sang for the rude and the randy;
Sang for a soul who had never loved,
Sang for a spirit too long reproved
As over the Ivy Bridge he roved
To the land of Dan Paddy Andy.
The Matchmaker (with Anna Manahan and Des Keogh) returns from tour, to the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from Monday to next Saturday and transfers to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (at the Assembly Rooms from August 3rd to 27th). The Field is at the Everyman Palace, Cork, until next Saturday. Big Maggie is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until next Saturday. The Chastitute is at Civic Theatre, Tallaght, from Monday until August 11th