Jimmy Fay, Executive Producer at The Lyric Theatre in Belfast, remembers his friend Ken Harmon, award-winning playwright and longtime writer for RTÉ's Fair City, who has died aged 57.
We lost Ken last week. I feel for his kids and his former partners.
I met him sitting on the Priory wall in Tallaght's main street almost 40 years ago - the great Robert Webster introduced us - and we started a conversation that with occasional pauses for breath never really stopped until now.
Ken devoured everything and knew everything there was to know about working class pop and urban culture, beat literature and the method. He was always so alive to the moment and one of the most generous people I've ever known - generous in the sense that he listened deeply to you, understood you as a flawed human being and elevated you to a position of absolute love.
(Picture via Jimmy Fay)
He wrapped us all in his spirit, that sense of love, his hilarious wit and fun.
The amazing Terry McMahon cast Ken and me in a production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, in The International Bar in Dublin. The rehearsals were intense and passionate. Ken was so exceptational in that. A 40-minute play became a 2-hour existential epic.
Ken wrote outstanding plays with amazing titles - Speedmetal Farmers, Wideboy Gospel and The Decline of Breakdancing. He also wrote a wonderful TV series called Legend that was so ahead of its time that it wasn't understood, but it's so good and worthy of rediscovery.
Recently, he asked me to write a reference for a bursary award:
Ken is one of our most vivid and engaged playwrights. His work approaches the prose poetry of such iconoclasts as Jack Kerouac and Brendan Behan. His language is of the suburbs – wisecracks, pop lyrics, ancient slang, drug and sex euphemisms mingled in everyday jargon to produce something occasionally violent, always edgy and quite often unique.
From his Speedmetal Farmers to the Stewart Parker Award-winning Wideboy Gospel, Ken is never afraid to confront the demons in us all with headbutts, tongue-lashing and gallows’ humour. He mixes folk horror with breakdancing and dresses it up as romantic fiction. His characters are quite often marginalised, abandoned, given up on sometimes even by themselves.But they edge towards the light, and in that the glimmer of possibility is just visible. And offers a particularly truthful type of hope.
I found out tonight he would have received the letter of offer for the busary this morning.
RIP Ken Harmon.
