2009 – A Year In Review

2009 proved to be quite an eventful year for us folks at The Devious Theatre Company. In previous years, we had set a template of one large scale show during the summer in June and a smaller scale show, usually following in late August. This year however, being the devious chaps and chappettes that we are, it’s fair to say we shook things up significantly…

STAGS AND HENS – 21-25 JULY
Things kicked off in May with a launch party at the Watergate Theatre for our production of Willy Russell’s Stags and Hens. The show itself is a viciously funny study of working class attitudes to marriage, love and ambition in dead end Liverpool of 1978. It also marked the first time the show was performed in Kilkenny and we were thrilled to be bringing it to the stage at the Watergate. The launch party got the ball rolling on our comprehensive promotional runup to the show with the release of a teaser poster and the announcement of our cast. We were delighted with the addition of some fresh faces to the cast as well as the return of some familiar ones. Along with the usual slew of promo photos and posters, we ventured into the realm of online video content, specifically a trailer and a handful of weblogs. We even made a brief appearance on Newstalk with Tom Dunne to talk about Kilkenny’s steadily growing hen party problems. Capping off the parade of promotion, was a seventies themed fundraiser night in Cleeres wherein everybody put their flares and platform shoes on and boogied the night away to some good ol’ disco, funk, glam and soul.

We set up camp in the Watergate Theatre on 19th of July and having constructed our set, ran tech and dress rehearsals and drank copious amounts of red bull – we were good to go. The show itself was a wonderful success. After the insanity of Trainspotting and the quirks of Smitten in 2008, it was nice to perform a conventional play – one that relied on the camaraderie of its cast of characters and the wit and humour of a man as renowned as Willy Russell. The feedback (both positive and negative) was superb, further helping to shape the company and give us an insight into our audiences.

Related Blog Posts:
Stags and Hens (and the rest of the summer)
Stags and Hens – Final Poster
The Stags – The Hens
70s Nite – Fundraiser Event
Stags and Hens Video Diary 1
Kav and Frances – Dave – Carol and Maureen – Robbie and Billy – Bernie and Eddy – Linda – The Roadie – The Blood Brothers
Stags and Hens Trailer
The Big Day Is Approaching
Follow Stags and Hens on Twitter, A Day Off
Settling Into The Theatre
Stags and Hens Interview (Listen)
Reaching the Midway Point
And So We Face The Final Curtain
Stags and Hens Wraps, Thanks
Some News Pics from Stags and Hens

SHAKESPEARE IN BITS – JUNE/OCTOBER/NOVEMBER
A slight deviation from the usual Devious output as we performed not once, but twice the works of the great Bard himself. Shakespeare In The House was a successful event that was held at Rothe House in collaboration with Young Irish Filmmakers, Dreamstuff Youth Theatre and Kilkenny 400. With production on Stags and Hens taking up all free time, it wasn’t possible for us to stage a full on Shakespeare production so we decided to do something to complement the fine work that will no doubt be done by the good thespians of Dreamstuff Youth Theatre.

The production was made up of various Shakespeare related sketches (Shakespeare’s editor and a 16th centruy version of the Bale rant with William Shakespeare walking in front of the ‘cantelbras’), some Shakespeare based works (The Reduced Shakespeare Company, Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead), some devised Shakespeare pieces, some monologues and a whole lot of nice little bridging devices between. It’s going to be a crash course in Shakespeare for the ADD generation. Overall it was a great success for us. So much so that we returned during the Rockfall Festival in October to perform a limited run in Cleeres over three nights all in aid of Enable Ireland and The O’Neill Centre.

Shakespeare In Bits returned to the stage once again in November. Not on a Kilkenny stage however, but on the stand-up stage at the Ha’Penny Bridge Inn in Dublin for one night only. Hopefully we can return to the capital soon for further Devious antics.

Related Blog Posts:
New Show: Shakespeare In Bits
In Bits – Stephen Colfer – John Doran – Eddie Murphy
Shakespeare In Bits this weekend
Shakespeare In Bits Trailer
Shakespeare In Bits – Day 1
Shakespeare In Bits – Day 2
Shakespeare In Pictures, Media
Shakespeare In Dublin

Dario Fo Season and ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST – 2-6 DECEMBER
Directly off the back of the Rockfall Festival performance of Shakespeare In Bits, we made our announcement that we would be performing a Season of plays by Italian playwright Dario Fo at the newly opened Set Theatre. Set had just opened during the Arts Festival and it was thrilling for us to be performing in such a new and exciting venue. Two of his most revered plays would make up the season: Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!

His best known play Accidental Death Of An Anarchist opened the season on December 2nd to Sunday December 6th. In the aftermath of the apparent suicide of an anarchist from a fourth floor police window, the policemen involved are having difficulties remembering the details of the event. That is, until a nameless, deranged madman shows up and proceeds to tie the authorities around his fingers in a master class performance of utter logic. In the runup to the show we once again bombarded local media with promotional imagery, did live readings of portions of the script on radio and gave our cast members a good interrogation or two.

The run went incredibly for us and we were ecstatic with the response that it received. Audiences were immensely enthusiastic about the show with consistent belly laughs and an equal amounts of applause. The audiences were very generous and very receptive to something that looks so starkly different from anything they’ve seen before in Kilkenny. Local press too were impressed with very kind reviews from Kilkenny People and with The Munster Express even saying it was a “furious tour de force of biting satire and a comedic rant that dazzled with daring” and saying of David Thompson that he impressed more than Tom Vaughan Lawlor in Arturo Ui! Marvelous stuff.

The Dario Fo Season will continue in 2010 with Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Further details will be available on this site very, very soon

Related Blog Posts:
Presenting a Season of Dario Fo
Accidental Death of an Anarchist at Set Theatre
Accidental Death of an Anarchist – Final Poster
Director’s Blog: Adapting The Text
Chasing The Madman
Final Week Rehearsals
Interrogating – David Thompson – Ken McGuire – Alan Butler – Sean Hackett – John Morton – Simone Kelly
Who Is Dario Fo? (And why does he stick it to the man?)
Accidental Death Opens
Through The Square Window

ACCOLADES FOR DEVIOUS THEATRE IN 2009
Just to briefly touch upon some nice recognition the company received in 2009 – The year opened with an article by John Cleere in the Kilkenny Advertiser saying of us that a Devious show is a “Guaranteed good night out” and that Devious was the only word in Kilkenny theatre in 2008. We had a lot to live up to in 2009! In February the good people at the Irish Blog Awards shortlisted us for Best Arts and Culture blog. Unfortunately we lost out on the night, but it’s still a mighty fine accolade nonetheless. Here’s to next year! Speaking of mighty fine accolades, our radio broadbasted podcast of War of the Worlds was nominated for Best Drama at the PPI National Radio Awards. The Devious crew put on their swankiest of gladrags and tipped along to Lyrath Estate Hotel for the glitzy ceremony. In the end, we brought home the Bronze award and were utterly thrilled with such recognition which will hopefully give us and KCLR a fantastic boost and the impetus to continue creating further radio dramas.

Related Blog Posts:
A Guaranteed Good Night Out
We’re Off To The Irish Blog Awards
We’re Nominated for a PPI Award for Best Drama
Bronze Award for The Devious Theatre Company, KCLR

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS FOR 2010!!!
Tomorrow marks the first day of the new year. A new decade even! As we here at The Devious Theatre Company work away on pre-production for Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! we’re shuffling around our schedule for the year. Who knows what other tricks we have in store? Stay tuned to this here website for all the news and be sure to follow us on twitter. We tweet like madmen, so we do.

In conclusion, it’s been an incredible and productive year for us. There’s been some downs but mostly ups. We seriously could not do it without you, our lovely lovely audience and we hope to see you all again real soon.

Thank you sincerely from the very bottom of our hearts for all your support and see you in the new year!

From all of us at,
The Devious Theatre Company

The Sword In The Stone

More excitement on the Kilkenny theatre front as our old alma mater Dreamstuff Youth Theatre are this week launching their annual December production in the Watergate Theatre. (Dreamstuff Youth Theatre is kind of a Hogwarts for theatre types in Kilkenny… with more owls)

This year it’s a new comic reinvention of the classic Arthurian legend The Sword In The Stone. My own involvement in this is the pen, which is not mightier than the sword contrary to popular opinion. You’d probably just have your pen hand chopped off. This is the fifth play I’ve written on my lonesome for Dreamstuff Youth Theatre and the seventh overall that I’ve been involved in writing. But this one is different in that there’s a brand spanking new cast of young actors speaking the words and doing the awkward pauses and gratutitous fart gags.

This version reimagines Camelot as a dreary run down place full of disillusioned youth, ASBO’s and a poor tourist trade. An abandoned sword lies lodged in a stone where it is said that one day someone will pull it out and reign supreme as the King of Britain. But no one has. So on drudges life. Until two knights of the deceased monarch Uther Pendragon, decide to hold a joust to crown a new king and reinvigorate Camelot! And then things start to get interesting… and villains show up, including a certain Lady Of The Lake. The leads are reinvented as a surly, hormonal teenage bunch: Arthur is a bored, unmotivated school boy with ambitions to do… something. Merlin is a brainfried, potion experimenting wastrel. Lancelot is a dumb as a pancake, wannabe jock who proudly brandishes his provisional horse riding licence. And thrown into the mix is the new (and only) girl in town, Guinevere who attracts all sorts of unwanted, horny teenage boy attention.

Directed by the lovely Miss Angela Barrett who previously directed The Three Musketeers for Dreamstuff (our last collaboration as it turns out) this one has a strong cast of Kilkenny’s finest, funniest crop of new actors. So come along for a laugh and a chortle and support the youth theatre movement. And it’s a much more family friendly since they cut out all the drug and sex gags. I was writing ‘em when I was 17 and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna stop now. (Plus the cast reliably informed me they’ll stick em all back in this week anyway)

The Sword In The Stone by Dreamstuff Youth Theatre opens up tomorrow night December 15th and runs until December 19th at 8pm nightly. Tickets are a recession busting 8 Euro with a 6 Euro concession and can be procured on 056 – 7761674. For more details check out www.yifm.com/dreaamstuff

Stags and Hens: The Gents

With Accidental Death Of An Anarchist winded down, we’ve time to update a few other bits and bobs from this year. Over the next week or two, we’ll be releasing a selection of clips from our 2009 production of Willy Russell’s 1978 tragi-comedy Stags and Hens.

The first which takes place in the gents bathroom as Kav, Billy and Robbie get themselves and the drunken Dave together before the impending arrival of the feared Eddy.

Stags and Hens, directed by Kevin Mooney, ran from July 21st – 25th in the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

Through The Square Window…

In the parlance of Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, we’ve jumped through the square window, cleared the fourth floor and there’s three more floors to clear before we hit the ground. That’s a fairly over elaborate metaphor but hey, it works. So we’re 2 nights down on the play with 3 more to go.

The run has been great so far, enthusiastic (if not modest) audiences who have been whooping and hollering throughout. It’s a great validation of the hard work pumped into this play that the laughter is so consistent. It’s like a sitcom being filmed in front of a live studio audience. The audiences have been very generous and very receptive to something that looks so starkly different from anything they’ve seen before in Kilkenny. Coupled with the Set Theatre (which has proved to be a very comfy theatre going experience), it provides a very unique evening’s entertainment so we’re delighted with that.

The actors (not including myself here, as it’s quite hard to critique something you can’t see) have been on the ball. And as I said to Ken last night while we were waiting at the bar for a much needed post show sup, it’s great to see the characters getting a laugh just because they’ve said something, not because of what they said. These characters are so heightened and exaggerated that they’re getting a laugh just for opening their mouths. Which is a pretty good sign I think. So all in all, it’s going good so far.

But as our good old friend Bertie Ahern would say ‘A lot done, a lot more to do.’

We’re running tonight (December 4th), tomorrow and finishing up on Sunday night December 6th. Tickets are available at the Set Theatre box office, Rollercoaster Records and right here on www.devioustheatre.com

Accidental Death Opens

So, we’ve finally done it.

We’ve gone and opened our latest show, Dario Fo’s Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, at the Set Theatre in Kilkenny. We opened last night which means today, we’re a little bit more relaxed.

I’ve never seen a group of people try to do so much in one day as we did yesterday to get the show open, between moving the set back into the theatre, re-lighting, finalising props, costumes, decorating and dressing, makeup – the whole nine yards. We’d been flat out for about 10 hours straight, getting a breather at 7:40 to open the doors, finish makeup and finally put the show to the public.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Standing backstage before my own first scene, the laughter from the crowd indicated we might well be off to a good start on this one and as it continued throughout the show it certainly put our own minds at rest as we ripped through the first act (well, time certainly did seem to fly) and made our way through a quite different second act (different in terms of contrast to the first).

Social commentaries, political rants, jumping, falling, slapping, kicking, singing, big mustaches, police corruption, chases, dancing, bombs, detonators, handcuffs – the show has it all.

So, with the show up on its legs and at the mercy of the public, we invite you to come along over the rest of the week. Tickets are available for each night by calling and collecting at Langtons prior to 7pm each night, calling and collecting at Rollercoaster Records on Kieran Street prior to 6pm each night, ordering online via our online ticket sales or purchasing tickets on the door. Tickets for each night’s performance cost just €12. Online bookings incur a €1.05 booking fee per ticket.

No more painting, drilling, hammering, sawing. It’s time for acting, and plenty of it. And we’ll be doing it again tonight at 8pm right up to Sunday night.

Do join us, let us know what you think and if you’re at the show and a Twitter user, why not use the #adoaa hashtag and let us know what you think?

Thanks also to Rita Tobin, who was in attendance last night, for sending us on some photos of the show. If you’ve anything you would like to share, you can email us to info@devioustheatre.com. We’ll be getting our own show, promo and rehearsal photos online following the run. A few hours to spare before heading back to the theatre, strange to have that additional time in the day

Who Is Dario Fo? (And why does he stick it to the man?)

Born in 1926 near the Lago Maggiore in North Italy, Dario Fo has been Italy’s foremost dramatist and satirist in a career that has spanned 50 years.

The man is a legend in theatre. Raised in a village of storytellers, Fo has excelled as a master of narrative all his life.  In 1997 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

A multi tasker if there ever was one, Fo has written, directed, acted, designed costume and composed music for the majority of his dramatic works.

In 1954, he married Franca Rame, a beautiful actress of a strong theatrical lineage. Together they created a body of work that shook Italy up for over 30 years, bothering church, government and justice systems alike.

He first made his mark on radio with a series of comic monologues based around Biblical characters and stories. These would later form the basis for his famous work Mistero Buffo in the late 60’s.

His plays are farces, comedies about the absurdities of the institutions that govern us and satirical critiques of the boots that tread upon us.

Throughout the late 50’s and early 60’s, Fo produced the most popular works in Italy, both critically and at the box office. However, he wasn’t satisfied with how his country was being run and the forces that oppressed the people. His work soon began to lean towards the political.

The late 60’s saw Fo and Rame set up the co-operative Nuova Scena company and produce a series of works that were politically charged and upset the establishments greatly. Branching out in the 70’s on their own, their work became even more politically charged.

One of the most popular (and controversial) of these plays was 1970’s Accidental Death Of An Anarchist which condemned and satirised the behaviour and conduct of Milanese police officers in the wake of the 1969 death of an innocent anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli.

Performances of the play were routinely attended by police who followed the pre-submitted script with torch pens to watch out for the insertion of any inflammatory remarks.

Inflammatory is one word that can describe Fo’s work and he has seen tours of his plays invaded by the Italian Communist Party, police and fascist groups.

He is Italy’s most translated author, published in more than 50 countries and translated into 30 languages.

Why does he stick it to the man? Because his work, wherever it is performed, whenever it is performed, however it is performed, speaks volumes about justice, truth and equality in the world. It gives a voice to the voiceless. It is critical of all those who oppress, dominate and terrorise. As long as there is a man to stick it to, the work of Dario Fo presents one of the greatest sticks to beat them with.

Our production of Accidental Death Of An Anarchist is the tip of a big iceberg that constitutes his body of work. We hope in some small way to present it and Dario Fo’s intentions in the best way possible, as suits our current climate in Ireland. But if you’re looking for intro into his work and his world, then this is a good place to start and we’re very proud to be your guides.

Accidental Death Of An Anarchist by Dario Fo, opens tonight, Set Theatre, John Street, Kilkenny, 8pm.

Interrogating Simone Kelly

Simone Kelly has previously appeared for us in Heart Shaped Vinyl, Cannibal! The Musical and Trainspotting. In the last of our interviews with the cast of Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, we turn the questions on the lady who asks the questions in the play.

You play Maria Feletti. Tell us a bit about her.

I’m a journalist, a wee bit of a ballbuster, a wee bit obnoxious but with good intentions at heart.

What’s been your favourite part of working on this production?

Besides getting smacked on the ass, the general banter on stage is great!

What’s been the toughest thing about the rehearsal process?

The warm up. I popped a button on my skirt trying to high kick earlier.

What’s going to be the most memorable thing about this play?

David Thompson hopping on one leg with a fake woman’s hand.

What are your thoughts on the Set Theatre?

I want to live there, it’s beautiful!

How do you think the audience are going to take the play?

At first the bizarre make up might throw them a bit but they should sit back and have a laugh after that.

Describe the play in 5 words.

Banter. Random. Fun. Make -Up. Farce.

How relevant is the play to Ireland at the moment?

The play is designed to be adaptable for different cultures, and it’s all about corruption, so yeah, fairly relevant!

What are you most looking forward to when the play opens?

The seisuins at the Set’s swanky bars!

Nerves?

Hopefully sitting in the teeny box room side stage for 2 hours will kill any nerves!

Accidental Death Of An Anarchist opens tomorrow night December 2nd in Set Theatre, John Street, Kilkenny. Tickets can be bought in Rollercoaster Records, Set Theatre box office and here on this very website!