It could be Belfast’s answer to Riverdance and if enthusiasm alone could make it so, Colin Urwin’s Celtic Heart is already on its international encore.
Celtic Heart: A Belfast Story – to give the show its full title – is running over the summer months and already has had audiences stamping their feet, clapping their hands, wiping away tears and laughing until it hurts at the Waterfront Hall.
Bringing it all to life is the Co Antrim storyteller, singer and musician – also a feeder of red squirrels in his spare time – who penned the story of his character, ‘Liam’, told through dance, spoken word and traditional Irish music.
It is the first full show he has written from scratch, but Urwin is already well known in the professional storytelling circuit for keeping an audience spellbound with re-imagined myths and tales from Ireland’s folk lore past.
Set in the industrial heart of early 1900s working class Belfast, Celtic Heart is an intimate and compelling story; one that unfolds around a qui et kitchen table as a father reflects on a life shaped by love, loss and impossible choices.
With his at cap perched on his head and waistcoat neatly buttoned up, Urwin fully ‘feels’ the part as well as looking it.
“I think it important to be as authentic as possible when telling stories,” he says, “otherwise, the audience will disengage. You’ve got to be honest and you’ve got to be authentic. Basically, you’ve got to tell it from the heart.
“You see some storytellers telling a tale as if they have learned it by rote – I truly think audiences know the difference. They can tell if the words are coming from your head or coming from your heart. You’ve got to invest yourself in the story and you’ve got to really want to tell it. You’ll never convince an audience if you haven’t first convinced yourself.”
For ‘Liam’s’ story, Urwin – storyteller in residence at the Court house, Bushmills, and recently ap pointed ‘Seanchaí’ to the chief of the Antrim McDonnells at Glenarm Castle – is fully invested.
“I started writing it just before Christmas and at the beginning we envisaged a small-scale show, but then it totally morphed into something on a grander scale,” he says. “Is it Belfast’s answer to Riverdance? I think maybe it is….I actually think it is more than Riverdance. I have been to Riverdance and Lord of the Dance and they are great dance shows, but this is something else.
“I hesitate to say ‘more’, but it is more. There is dance, music, storytelling and song; it’s a whole mosaic of all these elements and, four shows in, I have been blown away by the audience response.”
A not-unfamiliar love-across the-divide type story, he says Celtic Heart has evolved from the kind of authentic trad session you might stumble across in a pub, to a full-scale production for international audiences. And, for many of the musicians involved, it is a real once in-a-lifetime’ step-up from informal sessions to a major venue residency.
“Originally it was to be a short, one-hour show, but if has morphed into something much, much bigger, something more involved and with more musicians,” Urwin explains. “It is certainly the largest scale thing that I have ever done – I usually just work on my own or with one other storyteller or musician.
“It has everything - from haunting ballads to floorboard rattling jigs and reels shown off to their best in showstopping choreography full of vibrancy and passion.”
Stories, especially those steeped in the local history of the Glens of Antrim, are his own passion, but he wasn’t always a storyteller, having started his performing career - “very young” - singing and “playing a bit of banjo, bit of guitar….” at trad sessions and gradually becoming part of that scene.
Now aged 60 and a grandfather-of-seven, the self-taught musician (he plays banjo, mandola, mandolin and guitar) has found himself in an acting role for Celtic Heart, narrating the story he has written while indulging in a “tiny bit of singing” as ‘Liam’ reminisces over life’s milestone events.
“Liam is a dreamer and he passes all these old stories and songs on to his daughter, “says Urwin in softly hypnotic tones that instantly draw you in – a bit like an affable Irish Pied Piper. “When he’s remembering his daughter – who you never see on stage – he remembers her singing I’ll Tell Me Ma when she was a young girl, so that’s a cue for a great version of that song, sung by one of our brilliant vocalists, who are then joined on stage by the dancers.
“All the songs and music are very of the period - folk songs such as My Lagan Love, Black Velvet Band – that kind of thing. Stories and songs are intermixed - at one point, Liam, tells the well-known mythological story about Oisin and Niamh and the theme of that beautiful Irish love story runs through the whole thing.”
The vast majority of Urwin’s stories come from the Glens of Antrim, but he puts his “own stamp” on other, well known stories too, including the ever-popular Oisin and Niamh and Tir na Nog favourite which he believes to be around 1,500 years old.
“These stories were first written down by Christian monks in the 11th or 12th century and before that they just purely existed in the oral tradition,” he says. “Since then, people have translated them from the old Irish into modern Irish and English and everyone who writes a version of it down, tells it slightly differently.”
One of his own best known tales is The Story of The Madman’s Window – a natural beauty spot near his home in Glenarm which has intrigued visitors and locals alike for centuries.
“There’s a little scrap of folklore around it – it’s just a huge big rock with a hole through it that looks out to sea -” he says, “but the local lore was that this young lad from the village lost his sweetheart who drowned at sea and he used to go there and stare through the window until he lost his mind.
“No-one knows where that came from – there’s lots of little scraps like that which must have had a bigger story at some point or another. During Covid, I collected most of these little scraps and developed them into bigger stories that still have the feel of a folk tale.”
When he’s not performing, Urwin - also the caller in award-winning Haste to the Wedding ceilidh band -spends a lot of time researching old stories, hunting through old archives and writing them up. His most recent compilation, The Man Who Talked to the Wind: And other Rathlin Folk Tales is based on the recordings held in the Ulster Folk Museum of old island tales pre served by late ferryman, Tommy Cecil – perhaps best known for rescuing Sir Richard Branson after his hot-air balloon ditched into the sea off Rathlin.
Then, there are the red squirrels that keep him busy and, as he comes to the end of this particular story, it seems they are waiting to be fed. “I’m going right now to feed the squirrels in Glenarm Forest,” he announces, happily. “I am part of the Glens Red Squirrel Group. Every glen has a designated feeder and I happen to be the one for Glenarm. It’s a lovely little diversion.”
