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“McPherson’s writing powerfully and poetically evokes social cohesion, loneliness and the irresistible pull of the supernatural. Director Andrew Flynn has a reputation for burrowing under the skin of a text and he unwinds McPherson’s play at an unhurried pace, allowing each well-worn yarn to trump the previous one… As the layers of McPherson’s piercing narrative are unpeeled, the plight of his compelling characters seeps persuasively and effectively into the individual performances.” The Stage

“Viewing Conor McPherson’s The Weir is like having a really, really good night down your local. Over the course of an hour and 45 minutes, we cosy up in Brendan’s pub, an isolated bar in a small Leitrim town while a vicious storm rages outside. Through superb acting and some gripping story telling the audience quickly becomes enthralled as the characters weave their tales of the unexplained and possibly supernatural, each trying to impress more than the last.” Pastiebap

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The Old Vic

AN INSTANT CLASSIC
The Times

Duluth, Minnesota. 1934. A community living on a knife-edge huddle together in the local guesthouse. The owner, Nick, owes more money than he can ever repay, his wife Elizabeth is losing her mind and their daughter Marianne is carrying a child no-one will account for. And, when a preacher selling bibles  – and a boxer looking for a comeback – show up in the middle of the night, things start to spiral beyond the point of no return… Brought to life by a 20-piece company of actors and musicians, award-winning playwright Conor McPherson beautifully weaves the iconic songbook of Bob Dylan into this new show full of hope, heartbreak and soul.

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It’s been a while since we here at Decadent have been involved with the Galway International Arts Festival but we’re absolutely delighted to be back this year with Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl, the smash hit that has wowed audiences in Ireland, the UK and all the way across the pond in America.

Set in the borderlands / badlands of South Armagh, three people intertwine at full throttle through lives of raw emotion, chicken shit and petrol fumes.  It’s raw, fast and in your face and is some of the best new writing to come out of Ireland in the past decade.  We produced Pumpgirl in 2008 in Belfast and loved it so much that we just had to bring it back.   Even better for us we managed to retain the amazing services of Samantha Heaney in the title role.  We wowed once, we aim to wow again!

“Andrew Flynn’s direction slowly cranks up to create a dark, hypnotic tension from the cleverly constructed interlocking monologues, punctuated by tiny bombshells of truth, unobtrusively dropped into the thought processes like little nuclear explosions. Our hearts go out to Hayes’s Sinead, who speaks in carefully rehearsed, routinised sentences until the moment a man quotes a line of poetry to her and her life goes into freefall. But, as with Hammy’s fun night out with Sandra and the lads, there is a horrible inevitability about the outcome, leading all of them inexorably down a slippery slope where survival is the least preferable option. This is an important play from a courageous new writer, whose characters and sentiments will translate and resonate the world over.” – The Irish Times

Pumpgirl

Nuns Island Theatre

15th – 30th July – 8pm

Matinee 22nd & 29th – 2pm

Preview 15th July – No Show 16th & 23rd.

The post The Galway Arts Festival – 2017 appeared first on Decadent Theatre Company.

Samantha Heaney played the title role in the Lyric Theatre production directed by Andrew Flynn in 2008. She also played the title role in the 2009 movie version, directed by Carol Moore, with screenplay by Abbie Spallen. Not only is she an amazing actor but she is also a native of Armagh where Pumpgirl is set.  And – believe it or believe it not – she’s also a stunt woman!

Patrick Ryan rose through the theatrical Garda ranks with Decadent Theatre, playing Tom Hanlon in A Skull in Connemara before landing his regular role of Sergeant Paudge Brennan in TV3’s Redrock

Seona Tully (Sinead) is well known for her role as Eimear O’Connor in TG4’s Ros na Rún.  She’s also a Decadent regular, having worked with us on Doubt by John Patrick Shanley, Crestfall by Mark O’Rowe and Country Music by Simon Stephens.

2. Pumpgirl is theatre in the raw

Pumpgirl is a fiercely observed, unflinching drama that explores the dangerously intertwined lives of ordinary people trying to escape their humdrum existence in a rural Irish town. At the local garage, the tomboyish pump girl loses herself in girlish daydreams about stock car driver Hammy, who occasionally drops in for fuel and a fumble. Her work is haunted by the history and geography of her native land, a borderland of bogs, caves, hills, and marshes, a place where the past is never really dead. She has described her work as “uncomfortable theatre” but while her plays are undeniably dark, there are flashes of beauty, humour and tenderness in their depiction of life on the margins.

3. Pumpgirl is set in the sometimes overlooked beauty of South Armagh.

4. Critics have loved it wherever it has been performed.

“Abbie Spallen’s imaginative daring matches her political courage. There’s a fieriness to her work that I really admire – it’s angry and tough and anarchic. But she’s also deeply serious and has a sense that drama ought to matter in the political world.”

Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times

5. Pumpgirl is written by the amazing Abbie Spallen

Abbie Spallen is a multi-award-winning writer, actor and film producer. Her writing credits include the Stewart Parker Award, The Tony Doyle Award, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Clare McIntyre Bursary from The Royal Court, the Peggy Ramsay Award, the Dublin City Council Bursary for Literature and the HALMA Foundation Award for excellence in the European Arts.

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2009 Film Adaptation of Pumpgirl

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Conor McPherson’s play The Weir (1997) achieved critical and popular success at three world-renowned theatres in the late 1990s: the Royal Court in London, the Gate in Dublin, and the Walter Kerr in New York. In London, it won the Lawrence Olivier Award, George Devine Award and Evening Standard Award as the Best New Play of 1997–98. The Weir received acclaim in the USA too, receiving the Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play.

In New York, where The Weir ran for eight months on Broadway, the New York Times’s Ben Brantly described the play as “beautiful and devious” and hailed the playwright, only twenty-seven at the time, as “a first-rate story-teller” and “quite possibly the finest playwright of this generation.” The original production, directed by Tony award-winning Ian Rickson, went on to further triumphs in Toronto and Belfast, and The Weir has been staged, almost always to fine reviews, by troupes in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Melbourne. Of particular note were productions of The Weir by the Steppenwolf Company in Chicago and the Round House Theatre in Washington.

More recently, The Weir, due to premier status as a “play of plays” (Michael Billingdon, chief theatre critic of The Guardian), has been presented in 3 powerhouses of the UK/Irish theatre scene, namely 7 years ago in The Gate (Dublin), The Donmar Warehouse (London) in 2013 and The Lyceum (Edinburgh) this year. As you will see that The Weir live up to its name from the reviews for The Donmar Warehouse’s production:

 DONMAR WAREHOUSE (2013) (Olivier Award Nominated)

“Truly marvellous and thought-provoking.” ★★★★★ The Sunday Times

“A treat for newcomers to the play and a chance for those who know it to savour its emotional profundities afresh. “ ★★★★★ Daily Express

“A masterpiece.” ★★★★★ Daily Mail

“Pitch-perfect,  I have no doubt that The Weir is a modern classic.” ★★★★★ Daily Telegraph

“Golden comic moments, flashes of poetry… delicate and haunting” ★★★★★ Evening Standard

“Enthralling.” ★★★★★ Metro

“I sat compelled throughout.” ★★★★ Financial Times

“Magnificent.” ★★★★ The Guardian

“Takes your breath away… Truly haunting.” ★★★★ Independent

“Wonderfully humorous and heartbreaking.” ★★★★ Independent on Sunday

“Enthralling… The entire beauty and sadness of humanity flower before us.” ★★★★ The Times

“A contemporary classic.” ★★★★ Mail on Sunday

“A mesmorising and haunting night.” ★★★★ The Stage

Actor Nominations

Actors within productions of The Weir have been nominated for a slew of awards too. Most recently, Ardal O’Hanlon A.K.A Father Dougal was nominated in the 2014 Olivier Awards for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Weir. While Brendan Coyle, known for his performances in Downton Abbey, won the Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role for The Weir in 1999. The depth of McPherson’s characters have routinely caught the eyes of the upper echelon of critical circles.

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When it comes to assessing a play’s worth, it can be best to leave it to the experts…

Plays like The Weir are very rare. Why so? Well, The Weir is a modern favourite of the critics. Not only is it seen as a vital constituent to the Anglo-Irish canon of theatre but also as one of the great English plays of the modern era. You’ll see why this is the case after you read the responses of some of the world’s greatest theatre critics to Conor McPherson’s masterpiece, The Weir.

Michael Billington (Former Chief Theatre Critic of The Guardian), The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present

“Nothing had quite prepared us for The Weir, a play that seems to consist of little except people telling ghost stories in a rural bar but which is filled with McPherson’s Chekhovian gift for the minute particular and his understanding of the Ireland that lies beyond Dublin’s affluent swagger… What is really amazing is his narrative power, his gift for language and his ability to excavate the quiet desperation of the unfulfilled.”

 

Fintan O’Toole (Former Chief Theatre Critic of The Irish Times), Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre

“About 50 years ago, a journalist asked an old woman in the West of Ireland if she believed in fairies. ‘I do not, sir,’ she replied, ‘but they’re there.’ Conor McPherson’s The Weir which opened last night in the Walter Kerr Theatre after arriving from London’s West End loaded with awards, is about that kind of uncertainty.

The characters don’t really believe in fairies or ghosts or the afterlife. But they can’t shake off the feeling that there’s something there. Critics like to use the word ‘haunting’ to describe plays whose images linger long in the mind long after the stage lights go out. The Weir certainly deserves that description. But it is haunting in a more literal sense. The plays is a series of ghost stories that shade gradually from mere spookiness to awful, heart-rending grief.”

Lyn Gardner, Chief Theatre Critic of The Guardian

“It’s just people talking,” said Conor McPherson of his 1997 play. But people talking can have you on the edge of your seat in this quietly unassuming and yet emotionally searing play set in a rural Irish pub where a group of lonely male souls gather most nights. But tonight is different, there is an incomer – a Dublin woman, Valerie, who asks for white wine.

When the stories are spun from the men’s lives, they have a competitive edge – but Valerie has a story that can top them all. As Jack, the grumpy, melancholic garage owner, proves in the dying embers of the evening, we are all haunted by different kinds of ghosts.

This is a slow burn of a play, full of toasty banter and tiny moments when the characters unwittingly reveal the depth of their dolefulness. The unexpected presence of a woman highlights the absence of female interaction in these men’s lives. The isolated barman, Brendan, is emotionally estranged from his sisters; the dim handyman, Jim, has a mother who has been fading fast for ever; and although the flash, resented Finbar is married, his wife is yet another ghost in the play.”

 

Ben Brantley, Chief Theatre Critic of the New York Times

“If a story is told well enough, you’ll follow it anywhere, even when it’s leading you to places you never intended to go. Take the plain-spoken, utterly alluring tales unfolded by the denizens of the rural Irish bar in ”The Weir,” Conor McPherson’s beautiful and devious new play at the Walter Kerr Theater. At first, they seem to beckon like comfortingly well-worn paths into realms of folklore both exotic and familiar, Gaelic variations on the sorts of campfire ghost stories you recall from childhood.

Then a moment arrives, and it’s hard to say exactly when because you’ve shed all sense of time, when you realize that you have strayed into territory that scrapes the soul. Suddenly, the subject isn’t just things that go bump in the night, but the loss and loneliness that eventually haunt every life. There’s a new chill abroad, evoking something more serious than goose flesh, but there is also the thrilling warmth that accompanies the flash of insight.”

Charles Spencer, Former Chief Theatre Critic of The Telegraph

“Conor McPherson’s The Weir seems the most unassuming of plays, just four blokes and a woman telling ghost stories in a lonely pub deep in the Irish countryside. I have no doubt however that The Weir is a modern classic. It can stand comparison with Brian Friel’s masterpiece, Faith Healer, and there can be no higher praise than that.

Though much of the play consists of banter and craic, there is also a sense of the numinous about it, and not just in the ghost stories. You apprehend the sad, thwarted lives of the characters that lurk behind their largely good-natured joshing, and there are sudden glimpses of compassion and grace that are all the more moving for being so understated.

McPherson moves seamlessly from the inconsequential to the profound, and there are two passages towards the end of the play that are among the most beautiful and haunting in modern drama. The first occurs when the female visitor to the area tells her own ghost story which is so upsetting and personal that it has haunted me ever since I first saw the play 15 years ago.

The second describes a simple act of kindness received by one of the characters when he was at his lowest ebb and realised that his chance of happiness had probably been lost forever. As the boozy old Irishman recounts it to the grieving woman it becomes a moment of astonishing dramatic grace and generosity.”

The post 5 Quotes From 5 Chief Theatre Critics About The Weir appeared first on Decadent Theatre Company.

In this confusing age of definitive facts and expert opinions, The Weir’s profoundly affecting use of age old storytelling techniques helps create a unique space of trust, sharing, mutual regard, and engagement within the most unlikely of environments (a rural pub) and participants (4 middle aged introvert men and 1 introvert woman). Through the acts of telling stories and listening to others’ stories, the characters in The Weir become known both to others and to themselves. The effect of which is both sustaining and transformative.

We live in story, we act in story, and we remember in story; storytelling echoes our humanness. Story is a fundamental way in which we order our experiences. We tell a story of what happened recently or long ago. We retell and embellish another’s story.  In some cases, our story is meant to unburden us, to explain concepts or to discharge emotions. And story can also serve to promote intimacy, as when two people exchange personal histories at the first stages of a developing relationship.

The Weir’s theme centres on the power of story to bring about a transformation, not only in the teller but also in the listener and in the space between them. Through each respective telling, its characters exemplify this power of story to transform, as well as to empower others similarly to tell their stories and so to find understanding and acceptance. The effect of the stories within The Weir are known to transfix and spellbind the audience. As one reviewer wrote:

“Some years ago, while in Dublin, I found myself in possession of a ticket to the Gate Theatre to see the first production in Ireland of The Weir. I sat entranced by the play and by the events that unfolded. As the curtain closed, I knew that I had witnessed the colossal power of story. It was breathtaking.”

The Weir teaches us a valuable lesson: a story untold is a life unlived. The more un-storied existence we can transform into experience, that is, and the more untold experience we are able to express, then the more powerfully and profoundly can our self-creation proceed: the more authority we have over the storying and re-storying of our own lives.

Without an informing idea, the details of real life are clutter, noise, chaos. We need an idea given form for things to make sense. And that’s what stories are: ideas given form, ideas given breath.

The Weir is a play of stories, and for this reason it is unique – for it is through stories that humans best understand what means to be human. Story, first plied from the lips of our parents and later lifted from the written page and from sacred stages, touches our emotions and engages our memory throughout our life. The Weir shows that stories have the force to burst through the dam of resistance and open us up to learning and understanding, even such that might transform and heal the soul.

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The seminal and unforgettable plays of The Weir by Conor McPherson and The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh will be toured around Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2016 by Decadent Theatre Company. These two plays constitute #Decadent2016.

THE WEIR

On its première in 1997, The Weir won the Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Olivier award for Best New Play, and established McPherson’s eerie tale as a masterpiece of modern theatre. Quietly compelling and strangely chilling, The Weir is the perfect story for a summer’s night. Decadent’s production marks the second major Irish revival but first national tour of this undoubted modern classic. With the support of Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre, Cork’s The Everyman and Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, we will be able to tour this show across Ireland this summer. Full details of touring locations and the cast will be revealed over the next short while.

THE PILLOWMAN

The Pillowman received the 2004 Olivier Award for Best New Play, the 2004-5 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Foreign Play, and two Tony Awards for production. Decadent presented the 2015 Irish premiere of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman; 25,000 patrons came to see this unforgettable show in packed Galway, Dublin, Cork and Belfast theatres. Peter Campion, Katurian in our production of The Pillowman, was nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award for his role in this production. Decadent’s remounting of this play marks the second large-scale tour of McDonagh’s piece de resistance, but this time around we will be able to reach more regional venues and audiences with the aid of further funding from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaionn and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Full details of touring locations and the cast will be revealed over the next couple of months.

WHAT OUR DIRECTOR HAS TO SAY

“Both The Weir and The Pillowman are two of the greatest plays of the Irish canon. We are privileged to mount large-scale tours for these two pieces as great scripts are central to our artistic process. It is a strange phenomenon for both plays to have never received  a national tour in their native land – both plays celebrate the Irish tradition of storytelling through their blending of comedy and tragedy through word power.

We are fortunate that in Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh we have living playwrights. Both broke onto the scene in the 1990s, both are Irish, both have won countless awards and both are still to this day the toast of West End and Broadway theatre circles. I am honoured to be working with them and to direct The Weir and The Pillowman, two of their best plays.

Finally, I am delighted to say that the creative team that worked on The Pillowman will be working on The Weir and The Pillowman (tour 2), so it is sure to be an aesthetic spectacle and pleasure. These shows, like all of Decadent’s shows, will tour – and tour extensively. It’s what Decadent likes to do, and what we do best.”

WHAT OUR PRODUCER HAS TO SAY

“Decadent are delighted to respond to the demand from regional venues and audiences for both of these plays, neither of which have had a professional tour in Ireland. Each of these productions will tour for 7 weeks, with The Weir opening in June and The Pillowman in late September.

It has been a dynamic and creative two years for Decadent. In 2015, we toured the Irish premiere of McDonagh’s The Pillowman and a stage adaption of Vernon God Little by Tanya Ronder. Collectively, 32,000 people came to our shows. This was all made possible by the support of numerous venues across Ireland, The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaionn, The Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Pat Egan Management and our tireless creative team and casts.

Hard on the heels of our 5 week tour of Pat McCabe’s The Dead School, 2016 is well and truly a ‘McDecadent’ year.”

2016 will be the biggest year of our company’s history. So support independent theatre, help us make bring inspirational theatre to the regions and Join the Revolution.

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“I’m not interested in writing about murder and mayhem per se, I think that is a kind of conduit or filter through which I refract or push my imaginative view of what the world is all about. Being born, living and dying – it is mayhem, chaos and madness.” Patrick McCabe

Traditional Irish small-town ordinariness is the archetypal territory of McCabe in The Dead School. This play retells the tales of rural Ireland by describing a place and its people through a secret lens. For Patrick McCabe, people who put down small towns are just trudging out the same old opinions – they don’t open their eyes. For the events in The Dead School are at times microcosmic and insignificant but yet they slowly culminate and reach a tragic crescendo of ordinary mayhem. It is this that he captures with great detail – that particular kind of bizarre, insane world of Irish country life in the 1970s at a critical moment; a moment where past rules, past opinions and past traditions no longer apply; a moment of utter and deadly inter-generational struggle. The world captured by McCabe in The Dead School becomes the realm of the social fantastic – one of everyday chaos and madness.

The Pathology of Cultural Transition in Ireland

The physical environment of The Dead School becomes the locus for this inter-generational clash. The schoolroom and the two main characters (Raphael Bell and Malachy Dungeon) that command it become symbols of the decay of the twin Irish gods of nationalism and religion and of the new rampant individualism.

A brief outline of the background, interests and music of the lives of Raphael and Malachy shows that these two protagonists couldn’t be more different.

Raphael Bell:

Background: Son of Evelyn and Mattie Bell. Born “on a warm July afternoon in the year of Our Lord 1913.” A model of good behavior, head altar boy, head prefect at St Martin’s College, the ‘king of all headmasters.’

Interests: religion, visiting the sick, the Eucharistic Congress (1932), pride taken in all things Gaelic and Irish, poems of the executed insurgents of 1916, balladeers, martyrs, St Brigid’s cross.

Music: Count John McCormack’s ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Macushla’, Charles Kickham’s ‘She Lived Beside the Anner’.

Malachy Dungeon:

Background: son of Cissie and Packie Dudgeon, “the biggest bollocks in the town”. He assumes the identity of American movie heroes.

Interests: partying, drugs, drinking, KFC, American Movies (Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate, Chinatown), comics, TV.

Music: Horslips, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, Bob Marley.

An Incomplete Transition

With discussion topis such as abortion, womens underwear, sex before marriage and divorce entering more and more into public discourse and interpersonal dialogue, Raphael, the protector of the old ways, begins to feel “as if someone slapped him right across the face.” For Malachy, the rebel, this is the language of his world, the new world.

Both men appear like aliens to the other and so they clash in a way which signifies more than just a difference of opinion. This is an incidence of cultural crisis for two men who have both lost a parent in their early lives and are therefore emotionally stunted as a consequence.

In The Dead School, the transition of the old Irish institutions – that of the church, family and state – to that of modern Ireland is fractured and incomplete. Consequentially, McCabe’s broken protagonists embody the repression and claustrophobia of Irish life, and are driven, in the case of Malachy, by the desire to reach beyond it to alternative identities derived from popular music, comic books, cinema and television. Raphael, on the other hand, becomes more and more atavistic, resisting every attempt by the new Ireland to influence him.

Madness

The interface and transition between ‘the new’ (the culture of global, telecommunicational, postmodern Ireland) and ‘the traditional’ (the family, the small town, the authorized national narrative, the social and religious character of the state) is imagined by McCabe as seriously pathological, having disastrous and monstrous effects. In The Dead School, the characters are in a state of flux as they move perilously from one cultural domain to the next. And there is no exit from this painful emotional and psychological state. It is a pervasive presence throughout the protagonists’ personal, familial and communal histories as a form of contamination, as a submerged, unthinkable supplement that can be put off for so long, until the entire structure of their world falls to pieces.

In The Dead School, both protagonists are sent crashing headlong into the warring forces of change and tradition to which there can be only one end: madness, mayhem and commonplace disaster.

The Dead School tours nationwide to Galway Town Hall Theatre, Civic Theatre Tallaght, The Everyman Cork, The Watergate Theatre Kilkenny and Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire in February and March 2016. See our Tour Dates page for more information. 

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