The Can’t Players, Won’t Players

The cast of our production of Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!

From left to right: Hazel Fahy (Margherita), Ross Costigan (Luigi), David Thompson (Sergeant/Inspector/Undertaker/Old Man), Ken McGuire (Giovanni), Angela Barrett (Antonia)

The play will open on Wednesday March 10th in Set Theatre, Kilkenny and run until March 14th. Tickets are 13 Euro and can be booked on 056 – 7765133. They are also available from Rollercoaster Records, Kieran Street.

A Victimless Crime

Someone once said ‘Shoplifting is a victimless crime. Like punching someone in the dark’. That person was wrong, wrong, wrong!

Did you know that shoplifting effects 1 in 4 familes? Did you know that shoplifting is considered a ‘gateway crime’ and that shoplifters soon progress onto stealing from banks and baby snatching? Did you know that shoplifting has been identified as the cause of 3 major wars?

This ’self reduction’ movement isn’t about ‘empowerment’ ‘freedom’ or ‘repression’ it’s about crime! Committed by criminals! A criminal that could be lurking in YOUR family!

Don’t be afraid to rat them up! Whistleblower is a more honourable profession than shoplifter! Shoplifter’s are the very fleas of Satan! Let’s swat them TOGETHER!

So please, let us eradicate the greatest scourge in our society, victimes unite! Report all shoplifters! TODAY!

Don’t come crying to us when they descend on YOUR supermarket!

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! will run from Marc 10th – 14th in Set Theatre, Kilkenny. Tickets can be booked on 056 – 7765133. They might be shoplifted from such places as Rollercoaster Records, Kieran Street and Set Theatre Box Office, Langtons, John Street. And above here, on this very page. Buy now! Ignore touts!

Mmmmm…. Supermeat For Dogs!

Is your man like a dog when he gets in from a hard days work? Is he tired of wolfing down the same old tripe? Is his fur lacking a quality shine?

Don’t fret girls, you won’t be in the dog house anymore! Just give your man a tin of our best Supermeat and he’ll be a slobbering mess!

If it’s good enough for dogs, then it’s good enough for your best friend! Loyal husbands deserve some royal treatment when they return to the kennel so let him sink his canine’s into our juiciest Supermeat!

It’s like a pate for rich cats and dogs! And if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for your breadwinning pet!

The superest of meat for the lowest of prices, our special wholesome brand Supermeat is entirely affordable within your tight household budget! And if those hounds at the supermarket tinker with prices, then just howl your protests our way!

So ladies, give your man a treat, fork him out some Supermeat!

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Step 3: Put In The Oven

Once everything has been fully blocked, then reblocked and the script has been discarded and the costumes, make up and props have been put in place, we doublecheck that we got the ingredients right and then we put the whole shebang into the oven to bake for, oooh, roughly 3 weeks. Buns in the oven being an operative theme of this play of course.

David Thompson got completely up to speed with the script and the blocking and slotted in perfectly. We were lucky not to lose a lot of steam at such a crucial point. And he’s such a lovely chap too! But the scripts have been discarded and the actors are working their ways into the really fun part of the rehearsal process: Slapstick. Commedia Dell’Arte. Pratfalls. Clowning. Whatever name you want to put on it, the actors are getting to play around with the most physically comedic style of theatre there is. Aided by the heightened costume and make up, they’ve been exploring the lazzi like situational comedy of Dario Fo’s work, the large caricatures and the heightened style of playing. It’s been a real joy for me to see the transformation in their performances once the script have been discarded. The hands are no longer restricted and suddenly they’re everywhere! It’s been great to watch.

Hopefully in our final two weeks of rehearsals we’ll make the physicality clearer, snappier, funnier and yes, bigger. There are no doubt some moments and gags in the play will be discarded and more will be created in their place. This is my favourite part of the process. This is the part where we really get to see what the play is like. The actors are as enthusiastic as they are talented and rehearsals seem to be full to the brim with new ideas and gags every day. We’re still talking about the topical themes in the play and examining the socio-political elements to make sure that there’s still a sharpness there, weeks after we began. That most of all this play will cut deep and hit a nerve.

That is probably our greatest concern in the next two weeks. Making sure that there is a resonance, that the play voices a very real anger and can tap into the collective disenchantment of the masses. With Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, we went in with all guns blazing and hit some pretty obvious bullseyes: Church, Police, State. I don’t think people really knew what to expect with it. We’re hoping that this time people are more attuned to our intentions with this season and the style of playing we’ve adopted. And the topics in Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! are narrower in their focus: unemployment, not being able to make ends meet, unions and strikes. These themes are more relevant on a local level and they, we hope, will allow the audience to join in the anger and the outrage that Dario Fo so expertly voices in his plays. We hope it provides a real catharsis, as all good communal theatre experiences should.

And of course, we hope they laugh. No better release than that. But if we’re going to achieve that, we’re really going to have to turn up the heat over the next two weeks.

Mmmmm…. Millet For Birds!

Is your man tired of the same old dishes? Are mammy’s home grown recipes lacking a certain amount of pizzazz? Things need spicing up in the kitchen?

Well don’t fret girls, the answer is here! Buy our new range of Millet and your man will go cuckoo every dinner time!

It’s not just for the birds you know!  Every seed is full of delicious good stuffs and wonder supplements that will make your man spread his wings after a hard day at the nest!

So if your man demands feeding after a day caged up at work, wet his beak with a good dose of our trademark Millet!

And don’t you girls worry your pretty heads, our fairly priced Millet is completely within your household budget! And if the bosses jack up the prices? Well, why not act the magpie?

Your man is guaranteed to trill it for his millet!

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! plays the Set Theatre, John Street, Kilkenny from March 10th – 14th 2010. Book your tickets online at tickets.devioustheatre.com, or Rollercoaster Records, Kieran Street and Set Theatre, John Street.

Kilkenny Theatre, National Stage: Christ Deliver Us!

It’s not often that a Kilkenny based play by a Kilkenny playwright hits the national stage but that’s exactly what’s happening this week with the opening of Thomas Kilroy’s Christ Deliver Us! in The Abbey Theatre. In fact, I got a letter from the Abbey Theatre only 3 weeks ago informing me that a Kilkenny writer was being performed on the Abbey stage so what better reason for me to go and visit the national theatre? Bang on. It’s nice to see how geographically on the ball the Abbey’s mailing list is!

Kilroy was born in Callan, Co. Kilkenny in 1934 and has written many popular plays including The Death And Resurrection Of Mr. Roche, Talbot’s Box and Tea and Sex and Shakespeare. He gave a fantastic talk last August in conversation with Fintan O’Toole as part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Amongst other topics, Kilroy talked at length about the themes he would be covering in this play. And now, 7 months on, it’s arrived under the direction of Wayne Jordan with expectations riding high. The fantastic ensemble cast features such notables as Aaron Monaghan (tutoring one of the upcoming Artlinks workshops), Eamonn Owens, Laurence Kinlan, Tom Hickey, Peter Hanly, Michael McElhatton, Cathy Belton and Kilkenny native Seamus Brennan.

His latest play is a reworking of German playwight Frank Wedekind’s 1891 classic Spring Awakening and depicts the trials and tribulations of growing up in provincial 1950’s Ireland, a place ruled with an iron fist by the Catholic Church.

The play opened this week and has already received some fantastic reviews, mostly notably from Peter Crawley of The Irish Times, in a review that can be read here.

Christ Deliver Us! runs in the Abbey Theatre until March 13th.

Writing For Stage & Screen at the National Library

The National Library announced details of their new Library Late series which runs from this month through May, the theme for the coming season being that of writing for stage and screen. Admission to the talks at the National Library in Kildare Street (that’ll be in Dublin, folks), is free. For the four nights, the library have lined up John Carney (Once, Bachelors Walk), Mark O’Halloran (Adam & Paul, Garage), Paul Mercier (Homeland, Down The Line – Abbey productions) and award-winning writer Mark O’Rowe (From Both Hips, Terminus, Intermission).

The theme of Writing for Stage and Screen highlights the Library’s vast collection which is an indispensable source for the history of Irish film and theatre production – from photographs of stage productions to first night reviews in newspapers, unique portrait drawings, rare theatrical ephemera and outstanding collections of manuscript papers of notable playwrights and papers relating to famous theatres.

John Carney (he who brought Once to the world), who began his career as a bassist for the rock band The Frames, is one of four leading Irish stage and screen writers to feature in the Spring Library Late series. Winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival (2007), the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film and the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Carney also co-wrote and co-directed the highly successful RTÉ drama series Bachelors Walk. In his interview with Sophie Gorman, arts editor of The Irish Independent on Wednesday, February 24th at 8pm, John Carney will talk about his craft.

Writer/actor Mark O’Halloran will be the Library’s guest on Wednesday, March 24th at 8pm. O’Halloran’s screenplays include Adam & Paul and the screenplay for the film Garage which was awarded the CICAE award for best film Cannes Film Festival 2007. On Monday, April 26th at 8pm television and radio broadcaster John Kelly will interview writer/director Paul Mercier. Mercier’s twelve plays include Studs, We Ourselves and Spacers in addition to Homeland and Down The Line for The Abbey. Among other work, he has also written and directed three short films including Before I Sleep, Lipservice and Tupperware.

Playwright and film writer Mark O’Rowe brings the Library’s season of stage and screen to a close on Wednesday, May 26th at 8pm. An award-winning writer his work for theatre includes From Both Hips, Howie the Rookie, Made in China and Terminus and screenplays Intermission (2003), Boy A (2007) and Perrier’s Bounty (2010).

Kick off is February 24th, again, admission is free and details are available on the National Library’s website.

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Step 2: Mix It All Together

So you’ve got your ingredients and what you do is throw them all together, block out the play, let the actors try out different things, work on the physicality, learn lines, learn lines, bigger, bigger, biiiggggerrrr! Reduce the heat, let it simmer for a bit. See is it working? Is it working? It’s really starting to work. Okay, now we need the dressing.

So you try out the costumes and make up and see if they work. Paddy and Lucy actually managed to get a design that we could put on both the clothes and the wallpaper. It’s pretty damn impressive. And cohesive, because we need everything to be cohesive, right? This season has been all about cohesion. The devil is in the details. The costumes are looking great so far. Like everything, it’s working in progress. It’s so much more colourful than Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, definitely the Technicolour vibe for which we were aiming. To be honest, it kind of fucks your eyes a little. It’s loud. It’s bright. But it’s good. The play is loud. The play is bright. Makes sense.

Because of the huge intrusion of colour, Linda now has a palette to work with that isn’t dreary blacks, whites and greys. She experiments with greens, oranges and pinks in the make up. It all looks great, a really natural extension of the style from the last play. We’re still arguing over the orange make up though so that’s up in the air. We’re still mixing, we’ve got time, it’s okay.

The shoot for the poster went exceptionally well. However, as you’ll notice above, green costumes on a green screen does not an easy job made. Paddy cursed a little but he did a hell of a job with it. Myself and Paddy plotted the poster out, Paddy and Ken shot it and Paddy went off and turned it into magic, absolute eye fucking magic. For the final result, check out the below post. We’ve all been delighted at how much the idea worked and how well it fell in line with the Accidental Death Of An Anarchist poster. It’s been our plan all along and we were really hoping it wouldn’t bomb. Both plays are fixated on windows and the threat of truth so these were the elements we brought to the forefront of the designs. We had the idea that both posters could seem like one image if put side by side and that’s come to pass. Two sides of the same street. An apartment block and a police station. A variety of different characters, all in the world of Dario Fo.

All was well… then, suddenly, we lost one of our crucial ingredients. Just as we had wrapped on a slew of promo photos, Paul Young, one of our principal cast members got nominated for an Oscar. A freaking OSCARRR! The Secret Of Kells by Cartoon Saloon (Paul’s company) gets nominated for Best Animated Feature. What an achievement. Despite scratching our chins, the obvious thing is that Paul has to go to the Oscars. Angela and Hazel try to get his plus one. They fight, it’s not pretty. Paul is gonna take someone else anyway. Not David Thompson though. David Thompson is the man who replaces Paul at short notice. And thus, replicates the Madman like feat of playing multiple characters in the same play. It’s a piece of piss for him after Accidental Death Of An Anarchist and anyway, he actually gets some time off the stage this time. He slots in like a dream. Pity we have to do reshoots for all the photos… they were looking so good! Paul was looking so good! Ah well, there’s always next time. Now, it is David Thompson who is the one looking good.

So right now, we’re just under 4 weeks off opening night and after a few minor (and one major) hiccups Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! is blending together in tasty fashion. Now we just gotta warm up the oven and pop it in. Hmmmm… needs more olives.

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! runs from March 10th – 14th in the Set Theatre, John Street, Kilkenny. Tickets are 13 Euro and are currently on sale in Rollercoaster Records, Kieran Street, Kilkenny and the Set Theatre Box Office in Langtons. You can also buy them right above us here!

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! – Final Poster

We’re exactly one month away from our opening night of Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and as we edge ever closer here’s the first peek at our cast in all their Technicolour glory! This will be the second part of our Dario Fo Season which last December saw us bring Accidental Death Of An Anarchist to the stage at Set Theatre in Kilkenny. Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! is a madcap marital meltdown from Italy’s master of farce. Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! was written by the Nobel Prize winning playwright in 1974, inspired by the self reduction movement which saw working class Italian women take what they wanted from supermarkets, only paying what they could afford. Another of his trademark political farces, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay saw Fo tackling issues of inflation, unemployment, workers’ strikes and the unions, once more tied up in the framework of a wild, slapstick comedy.

Following on from our teaser, this latest poster has the entire cast present: Housewives Antonia and Margherita (Angela Barrett, Hazel Fahy) stand in a window frame, desperately attempting to rid themselves of some stolen groceries. Unbeknown to them, a police Sergeant (David Thompson) has scaled a quite unsafe and unsteady drainpipe as a hail of carrots, tin cans and olives rain down. Meanwhile, husbands to the housewives, Giovanni and Luigi (Ken McGuire, Ross Costigan) scale a broken washing line in an effort to aid in the commotion.

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! will run from Wednesday 10 March to Sunday 14 March and tickets currently available from the Set Theatre box office in Langtons in John Street and Rollercoaster Records in Kieran Street. Tickets are also available to purchase online at tickets.devioustheatre.com For all details on the play and the full Dario Fo Season, stay tuned to this here website…

Get ‘Em While They’re Hot!

Tickets for Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! have just gone onsale in a number of establishments for those of you looking to get your hands on them.

They can be bought in Rollercoaster Records on Kieran Street and at the Set Theatre Box Office in Langton’s, John Street.  Tickets for the show are a pocket friendly 13 Euro.

For those of you clutching a credit card, tickets for the show are still available to buy online.

The second part of our Dario Fo Season is currently deep in rehearsal and will play Set Theatre, John Street, Kilkenny from March 10th – 14th 2010.

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