In 2009 a radical show telling the stories through song of Irish gay men who had come out at a time of blanket oppression, took the Dublin Theatre Festival by storm and then toured across the world. Now, its creator Seán Millar has refashioned the show for an intimate Christmas special at Outhouse. It’s about inclusion at a time when people oten feel let on the sidelines, he tells Brian Finnegan.

In 2008, as part of the Bealtaine festival, an unusual show appeared in the line-up. Silver Stars was dubbed a song-cycle, rather than a musical, in that it didn’t have linear narrative, but rather featured songs that told individual stories. Based on interviews conducted by singer/songwriter Seán Millar with older gay Irishmen, they were songs about the search for happiness and fulfillment in a country that was challenged by their very existence. The show was an instant hit, although Millar didn’t know it at the time.

“I remember after that very first performance people sat in their seats for 25 minutes,” he says. “There had been light applause and we thought they hated it, but then they started coming over to us and they were crying.”

A deeply moving song in the show, entitled ‘I Love You More Than God’ may have been the trigger for their tears. It told the tale of a gay man who left Ireland because he couldn’t live his authentic self, and a visit made to him in Paris by his deeply religious mother, during which she told him that despite what she’d been taught about homosexuality by the Church, she loved him more than God.

“‘I had to live. I had to live with honour,’ is the first line of that song,” says Millar, “and in a way it encapsulated the show. It’s the juxtaposition of what you’re supposed to be and who you are, about love for the self. I think everybody can relate to that, because everybody has their own struggle with that.”

After three sold-out nights at Bealtaine, Silver Stars returned the following year as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, in a version directed and produced by Brokentalkers. Still, Millar, his producers and his cast of ten didn’t quite know what they had on their hands.

“It got amazing reviews and we were immediately booked to play in New York, for two weeks; that was just incredible,” he says. “After that we went to Paris, Berlin and Auckland. Everywhere we went, people were stopping cast members in the street, throwing their arms around them.”

The central theme running through Silver Stars may be about love for the self, but beneath that there’s a strong political current which has its roots in Millar’s younger days.

“I’ve always been a politicised person,” he says. “I grew up in a politicised family, so it gave me a different view of the world as being divided between very conservative forces, and the rest. I was on the side of the rest. A lot of the people I knew were gay and were older than me, and we were part of the counterculture.

“ It’s the juxtaposition of what you’re supposed to be and who you are; it’s about love for the self.

“In the 1980s, the gay men I knew were literally being told they were a disease. Declan Flynn could be killed in Fairview Park for being gay, and the people who said that they did it could walk free. So to me, being gay and out was the ultimate bravery at the time. I saw those older men as heroes of our republic, as people who stories should be told.”

Millar has refashioned Silver Stars for a special theatrical outing this Christmas. “For years I’ve been talking about trying to do a version of it that’s a mixture of the text and the songs in a very simple way,” he says. “It’s a really informal event over three nights in Outhouse. All of the original performers will be there.”

The show, Millar maintains, is an antidote to the exclusion people often feel Christmas. “So many people struggle at this time of year. They feel like they don’t belong. I wanted to create a space where for at least an hour or two of your life, you feel like you belong, no matter who you are. This version of Silver Stars, of the song cycle, is a way to create that. In a way, that’s what the show was really about in the first place, inclusion.”

’The Songs of Silver Stars’ is at Outhouse Basement Theatre, December 15, 16 and 17 at 8pm, tickets from eventbrite.ie