The play, which is written by John Kennedy and directed by John Morton, will open in Cork at midnight on Thursday June 28th. The second performance of the show at Solstice will take place on Saturday June 30th at 4.30pm. The show has a running time of 30 minutes. Both performances will take place in The Eylsian which is the main venue for this years festival.

Tickets for Phantasm are €5 and can be bought on the Solstice website, right here: http://solsticecork.com/devious-theatre/

It’s as simple as that! The line up for the festival is looking fantastic and we’re so excited to be a part of one of the best new arts events in the country. Believe us, if you’re considering coming down to Cork for it, it’s a trip well worth making. Solstice have, like us, just launched a Fund It campaign, check it out here.

And keep an eye on this here website for more updates on Phantasm. She’s rolling.

Coming To Get You…

7 days left…

With 1 week to go on our Fund It campaign for Night Of The Living Dead, we’ve been amping up all of our publicity in an attempt to get people to come on board and increase our funding. Right now, that funding is exactly €1,740 away from hitting the target. If we can raise that much in the next 7 days we will secure a much needed €5,000 for our big production of 2012. With the wheels of production having started full time last week, it’s funding that is crucial.

We finished the script in the (very) early hours of this morning, ahead of our first cast read through this week. There’s a new poster shoot happening this weekend. We’ve just seen the model of our set from Harry Harris of Nefarious Design (we’re keeping it under wraps until opening night but suffice to say, it would make Romero proud), we’ve a week of production meetings lined up and yes, rehearsals are starting to loom! It’s all happening on the Night Of The Living Dead front!

With so much happening, we are absolutely depending on this chunk of funding coming through and allowing us to move ahead with all of our plans to make this show. If you haven’t, please check out our Fund It page and see if any of the rewards tickle your fancy. If you’ve already done so, please spread the word and get it out there! We are planning on this show being quite the zombie bashing spectacle and your support will make a huge and crucial difference to us.

Although we should really stop using the ‘Z’ word. Romero wouldn’t do that.

Thanks to the wonderful and supportive people who have come on board in the past week to help fund Night Of The Living Dead. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you all. They are: Carol Bradley, Eszter Nemethi of the good ship Solstice, Medb Lambert, Ann Mulrooney, Aine Connellan, our neighbour Tomm Moore, Alice Kiernan, Ingrid Dunne, Hannah O’Reilly, Nate Reinig, Luke Harris, our lovely soundtracking chum David Sheenan, Hounds Hollow Productions, Mark Grace, Terry and Jeanne Christle, Patricia McQuillan and our own Amy Dunne, Anne Cody and David Thompson.

5 weeks down. 1 to go! Fund It!

Allow us to introduce you to Frankie and Adam. They are the lead characters in our next production Phantasm, as played by Hazel Doyle and Colin O’Brien.

Written by John Kennedy, this ghost of a play has a bit of romance, a bit of comedy and a 50 bag of AK-47. It might just blow the head off you when it opens at midnight on June 28th at Solstice as part of Cork Midsummer Festival.

Watch this space for more updates.

Work And Cake On Our Birthday

We’ve just hit the grand old age of 6 years old! Devious Theatre was set up on May 9th 2006 over breakfast and many cups of tea in the Marble City Tea Rooms on Kieran Street, Kilkenny. And we’ve had a great run so far.

We celebrated by having a lot of tea and a cake and having a great big production meeting for Night Of The Living Dead and a photo shoot for Phantasm. It felt great to be so busy on two exciting new productions as we hit our sixth birthday.

We’re writing this blog to remind people of all the work we’ve done in these 6 years. If you’re not too familiar with our work, here’s a look!

We’re also writing this blog to remind people that we need funding in order to keep making new work. It’s not a good time for young theatre companies to get new funding and that’s why we’ve turned to sources like Fund It to gather budget for Night Of The Living Dead. If you’re feeling that maybe you’d like to give us a birthday gift, you can purchase a series of rewards on our Fund It page that will ensure you tickets for Night Of The Living Dead amongst many other treats.

Also, if you’d like to benefit of our friendship all year long, you can buy yourself a slot on our Friends With Benefits programme. Check out our different offers here.

Generally, the older you get, the less presents you get. But this year, we want presents that we can keep playing with for a very long time.

We’ve been brushing up on zombies again…

It’s an apt time to put up a post like this. We’ve just hit the four week mark of our Fund It campaign for Night Of The Living Dead so it makes sense to give a nod to Danny Boyle’s zombie movie (although many will debate whether it was a true zombie movie or not… we don’t, we like fast zombies)

So far we’re approaching the halfway funding mark for the campaign with two weeks left to hit our target of €5,000. We’re hoping that an intensive push now in the next 14 days will comfortably send us home and get to the target on time.

We’re keen to hit our target as the wheels of production are already in motion. Last weekend we had a major script session where we battered around the third draft of the play and nitpicked every last detail over lots of cups of Devious fuel (or tea if you like). The final draft is now being written and is starting to look like what should be the finest Irish zombie horror ever made!

There’s been a lot of activity on the production front with costume, design and set meetings taking place on top of the script meetings we’ve been having. Everything is slowly but surely starting to come together and we’re getting very excited about the first cast and crew meet up and read through which will be taking place on May 20th before rehearsals kick off that week. It’s an early start we know but with our recently announced involvement in Solstice with Phantasm, we’ll need a lot more spacing out of rehearsal time. Plus, the cast need to get in really good shape for this one… right guys?

In short, your contributions to the play are going towards a wide spectrum of our production. The Fund It campaign will help us ensure that we hit the highest standards possible with this play and do it justice. We’ve got big ideas and grand plans and your support will help us realise them. All we need is for people to keep spreading the word, pushing the campaign and help us hit our target in the next 14 days! The link to our campaign page is here, so please help us get the word out and push this one over the line.

Thanks so much to the people who have funded us over the past 10 days: Niamh Smith, Enya Kennedy, Kendall Butler, Patrick Keane, Niamh Finn, Eithne McKenna, Anna O’Sullivan, Tom O’Neill, Roisin McQuillan, Ethna McQuillan, Sarah O’Farrell, Evil Little Genius Productions, Richie Cody, Christine Matthews, Eat My Noise, Event Media, Tricia Hogan, Neil Shirran and Deirdre Kinahan.

Drugs. Porn. STD’s. Foxes. And all the empty spaces in between. Phantasm is a comedy about new perspectives. Frankie and Adam are a girl and a boy who don’t want to be here. They’re going to smoke their way into a somewhere new. Even if it is just in their minds. Frankie likes the idea of Cork. Adam likes the idea of Spain. As long as it’s not here, they don’t mind. This is the beginning of their travels.

Phantasm has a bit of romance, a bit of comedy and a 50 bag of AK-47. Most of all, it’s a snapshot of people in a situation we can empathise with: being on the verge of moving forward while threatening to fall backwards.

John Kennedy previously wrote Shifting which performed as part of our In The Future When All’s Well residency in April 2011. It was a huge success. Phantasm was selected as part of Fishamble’s Young People’s Tiny Plays For Ireland. It was performed as a rehearsed reading on March 24th in Project Arts Centre with Don Wycherely and Kate Stanley Brennan as Adam and Frankie. This is its debut performance.

The cast for the production are Hazel Doyle and Colin O’Brien. This is Hazel’s debut performance with us. Colin has previously appeared as Mark in Shifting. The play will be directed by John Morton whose previous directing credits for us include Trainspotting (co-director), Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! Scratcher, Shifting, Smitten (co-director) and medea redux in bash.

Phantasm is a short play, about 30 minutes all in all. It will have two performances as part of Solstice on Thursday June 28th and Saturday June 30th. You can check out the entire programme of events for Solstice here.

After the fantastic experience we had performing Smitten as part of Solstice last year, we are extremely excited about returning to the People’s Republic to perform a brand new piece work. It’s one of the most exciting events we’ve been part of and we can’t recommend it enough. Ticket prices are all extremely agreeable so check out what they’ve got on offer!

Get ready to roll…

We’re getting ready to do more of this…

It’s the second week of our Fund It campaign for Night Of The Living Dead and here we are again, writing some updates and dishing out some thank you’s.

This week has certainly seen a slow down in pledges towards the campaign but that’s always inevitable after the first week splurge of activity. We’re anticipating that next week will be even slower BUT it’s not like that’s all bad, by no means at all! We hit the €1,000 mark this week which means we are officially 1/5th of the way there! So that’s a great thing!

To have those pledges and to hear how much people are looking forward to it has been amazing for us. We’ve been trying to spread the word in as many ways as we can in a slow and steady way. One of the nice ways we were able to promote it was when I (John) got to take part in the Rise Production’s Irish Theatre Podcast. I had a great interview with Aonghus Óg McAnally where I could quite unashamedly plug both the show and the campaign. You can listen to it here, if you so wish. (By the by, just subscribe to the podcast anyway, it’s an indispensable resource for any self respecting Irish theatre fan.) So that was nice! Connie was also on the Arts Show on KCLR96FM and despite being mostly there for her contributions to the Poetry Broadsheet, she managed to get in a plug for the play. The presenter in question (a certain Mr. Ken McGuire) did a damn good acting job of pretending he wasn’t the producer of said play! So we’ve been finding our ways to get the word out there. We might need to find more ingenious ways of promoting the campaign in the next 3 weeks, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something. (Zombie flash mob anyone? Zombie flyer run? Zombie mugging?)

As I write this, we are 2 days off of starting on full time pre-production for the play (more on that during the week) and it’s really nice to go into it with a lot of support for the Fund It campaign ringing in our ears. It makes all that script polishing, set designing, make up testing, prop building, stage managing, promo plotting a whole lot easier knowing that as it stands, there’s definitely an audience for the play.

How do we know there’s definitely an audience? Well, a good chunk of them have already bought their tickets here!

Thanks to all of our second week funders for coming on board. And those blessed and sainted souls are: Alan Cliff, Chloe O’Connor, Eilis Ni Bhroite, our brilliant stage manager Aidan Doheny, the folks at Counter Productions, Peter McGann, Michael Murphy, Liam Murphy of The Munster Express, Aidan Crowe, and some lovely and talented ladies who have worked with us: Aoife O’Reilly, Hazel Fahy, Lucy McKenna and Liadain Kaminska.

Behind the scenes at the first poster shoot

It’s been a week since we’ve launched our Fund It campaign for Night Of The Living Dead.

So far it’s been going slow but steady. We realise that it’s a marathon not a sprint so we’re steadying ourselves as best we can with the campaign and hoping to build on it as we get closer and closer to the deadline. I guess you can consider this the first of our weekly updates. Which inevitably means that as we approach the end of the remaining 32 days we’ll publish another 4!

The great thing we’ve discovered about having a Fund It campaign is that it brings the project in question to a whole new audience. So in that way alone, it’s made a lot of people aware of Night Of The Living Dead who mightn’t already have been. At this point in the production, it’s invaluable to have an increased profile for the play before it has even hit the rehearsal room.

Another great thing is that it harnesses the good will of a lot of lovely people towards something positive and creative. For us, it’s great to see the investment and enthusiasm people are placing in Night Of The Living Dead at this stage. It makes us all the more eager to deliver the best goddamn Irish zombie play ever.

For anyone looking to contribute, you can see all of our rewards here at this link: http://www.fundit.ie/project/night-of-the-living-dead

Check them out and see what might suit you. No one has bitten (no pun intended) for the €250 join the cast reward… it’s a lot of money to donate, sure, but it’s also gonna be a lot of fun! Please spread the word, get on board and help us make something terrifyingly beautiful this summer.

Thanks to everyone who has come on board to fund us so far, you guys are officially our patrons and we are in your debt. Thank you all for your funds, support and kind words. The people we are indebted to in our first week are Ronan Mac Raois, Margaret Leonard, Paddy Dunne and Annette O’Shea (both of this parish), Aoife McMahon, Helen Walsh, Mephisto Theatre Company (also rocking a hot campaign), RichArt, Dawn MacAllister and Shirley Somers (both of Solstice), Neil Curran of No Drama, our forever friend Darragh Doyle, Katie Kelly, Bunclody Academy Of Dance and our beloved twinkle toes Gemma Grant, the esteemed Aonghus Óg McAnally of Rise Productions, Vibrant Ireland, Rob Cumiskey, Stephanie Francis, Roxanna Nic Liam (extra thanks for all the retweets!) and Eoin Winning.

Fund it is a fantastic crowd funding website that has been integral to so many great Irish projects getting off the ground in the past 12 months. We always waited until we had a really special show to utilise Fund it and the Irish stage premiere of George A. Romero’s classic horror is that show.

We’ve lined up a series of unique rewards for the various funding levels, where you can pitch anywhere between €5 and €250 towards the production. The latter price range is our top one and for a very good reason. It lets you join the production as part of the credited cast and spend one night onstage playing one of the living dead. A half day in rehearsal, with the cast and crew before you hit make up and effects (and there will be a lot of that!) and then get ready to take your bow. It’s a unique way to fund a show and get involved and we hope that we’ll find 5 enthusiastic people to join our cast for each night of the debut run.

Your contributions will help us with the production design, set, effects, costumes and promotion of this play. It’s going to be a big show and we want to do our utmost to ensure that we do it justice. Fund it has become a great platform for growing theatre companies not in receipt of regular funding to seed their shows and we are very thankful of the opportunity to get our project up on the site and engage with potential funders of Night Of The Living Dead.

We’ve got 41 days to hit our target of €5,000. Please take a look at our rewards and if there’s anything tickles your fancy then please consider funding what we plan on being our biggest and best show yet. You’ll find all info, our pitch and our rewards right here.

Thanks to the people who have funded so far: Dawn MacAllister and Shirley Somers of Solstice, Paddy Dunne of this parish, Aoife McMahon, Darragh Doyle, Stephanie Francis and Vibrant Ireland.

We’ve just launched the teaser trailer for our new version of Night Of The Living Dead.

It gives a small taster of what to expect from the play when it opens on July 24th in the Watergate Theatre. We haven’t given too much away in terms of our version of the story but it does give an idea of how we’re approaching it from an Irish perspective, playing up on the ‘You are not responsible for this crisis’ tagline from the teaser poster. We’re also utilising the famous ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’ tagline, which the zombie lovers amongst you will recognise as coming from the sequel Dawn Of The Dead. It’s just too good a line not to use.

Speaking of famous lines, the most famous line from Night Of The Living Dead gets an airing here for the first time. ‘They’re coming to get you Barbara!’ is spoken here by Stephen Colfer, who we can now safely announce as playing the part of Johnny in our production. Being a teaser, it also confirms that yes, we have other trailers lined up for the next couple of months. Keep the eyes peeled!

So check out the video, spread it around, I suppose if anything we’ve done deserves to go viral, the videos for Night Of The Living Dead are probably going to be the most theme appropriate.

Night Of The Living Dead plays the Watergate Theatre from July 24th – 28th 2012.

For a variety of reasons, we figured it was about time we put a compilation of clips together of our shows. It’s a handy way of showing people what we’ve done in a short period of time as well as providing a handy online archive of 5 years of work. It’s also concise, zippy and got a lot of, well, deviation. The accompanying track is called Sonata Ta and it’s by David Sheenan who operates under the moniker of Supernova Scotia. He originally composed it for our production of Smitten and here it gets another airing.

So have a watch and enjoy our various wares. We called it NOW That’s What I Call Devious Theatre! Volume 1. That’s what you should call these kinda things right?

Babs: What’s happening out there?

Ben: Whatever it is, it isn’t good…

Zombies have always held a special place in my heart. True, that place used to be a terror filled horror zone that made me sleep with a light on until late 2011 but that‘s not the point. They were always in my mind, an omnipresent fear of being killed by something so undignified and unsanitary. Eventually I decided the best way to beat my fear was to charge at it, head-on with a rusty machete, ready to sever the cerebral cortex. Or, you know, just start reading zombie books. And what a fortuitous decision this was. Several months after I had overcome my previously lifelong phobia (which in retrospect probably stemmed from helping my dad play Alone in the Dark on the ps1 at the tender, yet bloodthirsty age of six) I was reading my very first pieces of zombie literature, starting with the wonderful and terrifying World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide. It was as I was reading the latter during a long ago Shifting rehearsal that I was apparently picked as a worthy connoisseur of the undead to have aboard.

John Morton quickly got in contact with me, asking if I’d be willing to assist in a brainstorming session for an upcoming production. He’d seen some of my previous writing and wanted to see what I could come up with. Before I knew it, I was asked to be co-writer on what was possibly the perfect production for me. Funnily enough, I think the very first thing I said when asked if I wanted to co-write it was “no”, uttered in a moment of sheer panic and terror. I didn’t think I had it in me, writing something that people would actually see. Of course this quickly turned to a yes within a matter of seconds, despite all my fears. And I had many. How will I think of ideas? What if I’m actually secretly a terrible writer? What if all my jokes do nothing more than bewilder and disgust the audience? And the biggest one of all, how the hell am I supposed to do rewrites? As a stubborn, one draft lady I thought I’d never make it past the first act. Luckily, I didn’t have to as I got the job of writing the second act. Aside from a few minor setbacks (me yelling at the script, me sticking my fingers in my ears and telling the script it wasn’t there, etc) I wrote it, and learned a lot about the craft on the way. It was hard, I won’t pretend it wasn’t, but it was worth it. Not only have John and I managed to create what I believe is a rather smashing story out of the admittedly bare bones of the original film, my own personal writing has improved greatly since I started writing Night of the Living Dead. And we’re not done yet, far from it. Ahead of us are many more hours and days of writing, trailer shooting, rehearsing and of course, actually performing it in all its blood spattered glory on the Watergate stage. So you all better be ready for us. Book your seats and practice your screams. We’re coming to get you.

Connie Walsh

Night Of The Living Dead plays from July 24th – 28th 2012 in The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

We’ve just launched a website for Night Of The Living Dead.

Since we’ve already got this lovely website, you might think we’ve sufficient room here to do our thing on the internet, and you’d probably be right. But for a theatre company who put a lot of emphasis on social media, it makes sense for us to create a website for a show we want to build into a solid brand. We want everyone to come see this show. And if you want to attract non traditional theatre goers, the name value of the company is not sufficient enough no matter how well developed your theatre brand is.

Night Of The Living Dead is a big show. And right now in Ireland, there’s not a whole lot of big shows being made. The reason for this is that the people with the money are (understandably) reluctant to fund big productions in these belt tightening times. However, we want this production to shuffle, groan and live for a long time so it’s important to give the show a base where we can push it hard, appeal to wider audiences, attract programmers and create a brand for a show that we really think has massive mainstream appeal outside of our initial week long run. We want this show to be the must see production of the latter half of 2012. So that in a nutshell is why the website exists.

And yes, it’s very like movie promotion methods but that’s the point. That’s how you appeal to wider audiences. And as an emerging company that’s how we compete, that’s how we carve a name for ourselves. In fact, we’ve always embraced movie style promotion. It’s been a big part of our development and yes, it gets bums on seats. In fact, we can’t understand why more companies don’t embrace it (although the proliferation of theatre trailers in the past year suggest that it’s catching on). It’s just ironic that our first show specific website is for something that’s best known as a movie.

It also gives us a platform to keep audiences up to date with the production, design, rehearsals, writing, promo, cast, crew, world of the play and general behind the scenes goings on. We realise this is a show that may appeal to a non traditional theatre audience who are not interested in the ins and outs of actors warm ups and they may just want to see how we do the blood, gore and destruction. And vice versa! So it will hopefully cater to everyone with an interest in both horror and theatre. And of course, anyone with an interest in how a young theatre company are going to pull off a horror classic for the first time on an Irish stage.

Whilst the main concentration of new content generated will be housed on the Night Of The Living Dead website, we will still be offering coverage of the play here and of course, we’ll be throwing tweets out left right and centre.

So keep an eye for further developments here but make sure to keep the other eye here.

It’s always been our priority to make our productions affordable for younger people. This is simply so that more young people will come see our show. It’s a practice we started with Heart Shaped Vinyl in 2006 and we’ve done it since, despite continued pressure and friendly advice from all quarters that we charge more for our shows. We’ve put a €1 mark up on our tickets since 2006 and that was so we could give programmes away for free. This practice has benefitted us hugely as it has encouraged more young people to see our work and subsequently has grown us a loyal, returning audience over the past 5 years.

So if you’d like to see Night Of The Living Dead on the cheaper side, €8 tickets are now available for the opening night in The Watergate Theatre on July 24th. We received word from the box office at the weekend that the first tickets have started selling for the opening night of the show (first ticket as usual was bought by Mr. Eoin McDonald, who is young at heart and consistently first in line for our work) so we’d recommend getting your hands on them while they’re still there.

The phrase ‘cheap seats’ was coined for the cinema. There needs to be more of them in theatre at large. We’re hoping that bodies will flock to ours on July 24th.

Tickets for Night Of The Living Dead can be booked on 056 – 7761674 and at WatergateTheatre.com.

Photo by Ross Costigan.

John Kennedy and Eleanor Walsh, with Paddy Dunne, John Morton and Ken McGuire in January 2011

After partaking in Fishamble’s New Play Clinic last week, we got word that two of our up and coming members have had their writing recognised by the same company.

Fishamble also selected short plays from writers John Kennedy and Eleanor Walsh, for their Young Person’s Tiny Plays For Ireland rehearsed reading, which takes place in the Project Arts Centre on March 24^th. It will run alongside the full production of the massive Tiny Plays For Ireland project that Fishamble launched in conjunction with the Irish Times in late 2011.

Both John and Eleanor joined Devious Theatre for the In The Future When All’s Well residency in Kilkenny Arts Office in January 2011. John Kennedy started working with us in 2010 as a writer, developing the play Shifting which was produced in April 2011 as part of the residency. He is currently writing a new play for us and will next appear in Night Of The Living Dead. Eleanor joined as a trainee director and worked on Shifting in this capacity in 2011. She also contributed writing to the Shifting promotional stories on KCLR96FM at this time. She is currently working with Barnstorm on the Kilkenny Youth Theatre production of Gormenghast.

They developed their Tiny Plays with John Morton late last year in Devious HQ and both writers are delighted to have been selected by Fishamble. Eleanor’s play The Moneylender and John’s play Phantasm will be performed alongside short plays from other young writers aged 18 and younger from around Ireland.

We’ve put a lot of effort into developing new writing, particularly from young writers, since 2006 and it’s great to see the fruits of our labours being recognised by the preeminent Irish company for new writing, Fishamble. The development of Punctured on the New Play Clinic was a massive step forward for us and it’s underlined our commitment to seeing new, young writers creating new work in Kilkenny.

We have been developing new writing from young Kilkenny writers since our first play Heart Shaped Vinyl in 2006. That was followed up with Smitten and Scratcher, both by John Morton, and a PPI Bronze Award for Kevin Mooney and John Morton’s adaptation of War Of The Worlds in 2009. John Kennedy’s Shifting played to packed houses and rave reviews in 2011. Another new writer, Connie Walsh, is currently working on our new version of Night Of The Living Dead.

We’d be very interested in hearing from young writers 18-30 in the Kilkenny area who might be interested in sending us some of their work. We can be contacted at info@devioustheatre.com. The future’s still looking well.

But if you do want to sit in the front row, and indeed any row, you’ll be delighted to hear that tickets have just gone on sale for our upcoming July production of Night Of The Living Dead. For the horror/theatre/Devious fan in your life tickets for this show would make a great present or a declaration of your intent to scare the hell out of them.

Tickets can be bought at the Watergate Theatre Box Office, booked online at the Watergate website or booked over the phone on 056 – 7761674. Tickets for the show are €13 but on opening night July 24th, you’ll pick up your tickets for the knock down rate of €8. Night Of The Living Dead runs until July 28th. Get ‘em while they’re hot!

If you’re sitting in the front row, don’t wear white. An unfortunate young lady found this out the hard way during the toilet scene in Trainspotting back in 2008.

PS. The person who flung fake shit at her was Ross Costigan. He also took this photo.

Gavin Kostick and John Morton

We had a very productive and very enjoyable weekend working with Gavin Kostick of Fishamble this weekend on John Morton’s play Punctured.

The New Play Clinic allowed us to avail of Gavin’s wealth of experience and get a first hand glimpse at why Fishamble have been at the forefront of the development of new writing in Ireland over the past 20 plus years.

It was great to hear Brendan Corcoran, Gus McDonagh, Ken McGuire, Annette O’Shea and David Thompson breathing life into the characters in the play. It was even better to be able to slowly dissect the entire script in gruesome detail! An enormously beneficial weekend for John, the actors and the company as a whole.

Now, it’s all back to the writing board as the next draft of Punctured is drawn up. We’re aiming to go into production on the play later this year but we’re still subject to that pesky funding ladder so we’ll bide our time and see how it goes. We’re staying optimistic though!

Our thanks to Gavin Kostick, Marketa Dowling, Jim Culleton and everyone at Fishamble for giving us the opportunity to work with them and providing yet another emerging playwright and company with assistance as they develop their practice. Also, a huge thanks to our actors for coming on board and working on the script. For us, it’s been hugely beneficial and gives us a real spring in our step going forward.

Fishamble have won numerous awards, accolades and acclaim since forming in 1988. They have consistently toured internationally and have given opportunities to countless new writers over the years. And now we’re very happy to be amongst those receiving their mentorship. Their current project Tiny Plays For Ireland gives a strong representation of the opportunities they provide for up and coming writers along with the calibre of talent they attract to their projects.

The New Play Clinic was set up by Fishamble to provide dramaturgical support for new Irish plays and in recent years has assisted a lot of plays in getting in front of an audience. Considering the reputation of the company, we are obviously very excited about taking part in the initiative as we prepare a new work for production in the coming year.

The play in question is Punctured which has been written by John Morton (Heart Shaped Vinyl, Smitten, Scratcher). It’s another deviation from our previous work and will see us approaching new territory, thematically and geographically. Punctured is a Dublin set urban western about a farmer from down south who rides into the city looking for answers about his daughter’s death. It’s a twisted take on the western packed with good guys, bad guys, stand offs and showdowns. We’ve assembled a great cast for the clinic this weekend and if we’re lucky, they may just stay on board for the final production. They are Brendan Corcoran, Gus McDonagh, Ken McGuire, Annette O’Shea and David Thompson.

We will be working in depth with Fishamble’s Literary Manager Gavin Kostick and we’re looking forward to knocking the script about for the weekend. It’s a massive opportunity for us and a great initiative that we’re very proud to be part of.

We’ll have more on how the clinic went next week. Right now, we’ve to go do the hoovering and get the good china out.

And with the refrain of the most iconic line from George Romero’s 1968 horror classic we introduce you to the first character poster for our new stage version of Night Of The Living Dead. Over the next 5 months, there’s going to be another 5 character based posters for our biggest, hungriest play yet. They’re all being shot by Ross Costigan and designed by Ken McGuire and both fellas have some very tasty plans afoot.

Babs (Barbara) is our version of the Barbra character played by Judith O’Dea in the original 1968 movie. In the film she’s very easily scared, mildly catatonic and generally quite useless when it comes to surviving. In our new version, she’s a mouthy, opinionated, politically conscious 17 year old student, who’s just finished school and is planning to get out of the hell out of this country when a crisis hits and Ireland goes into lockdown. After her brother Johnny is killed while they visit their parents grave, Babs is forced to run for her life as she tries to escape the hordes of ravaged, hungry, walking corpses that have besieged our countryside. They’re coming to get her. They’re definitely coming to get her.

Babs is played by Connie Walsh who previously appeared for us back in 2011 in our production of Shifting. A hugely talented actress and writer, she’s also been co-writing this play with John Morton for the past year. It marks her first produced work for the stage.

Night Of The Living Dead plays The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny from July 24th – 28th. For all details on the show keep an eye out here, but also cast an eye on nightofthelivingdead.ie … it’s going to go live very soon.

A lovely crowd of company, friends, members, associates, sponsors and family gathered in The Watergate Theatre on Saturday night for the launch of our first big production of 2012, our new version of Night Of The Living Dead. To help set the scene, we had the original movie screening in the background for any curious heads who weren’t already familiar with the Romero classic. You can read all about the show right here.

We also took the time to announce some new goodies, like a new play Punctured which we are delighted to be developing under Fishamble Theatre Company’s New Play Clinic (more on that later this week), we dropped some hints at our (still developing next play), a new commission from John Kennedy and a relaunch of our Friends Of program which now goes under of the innuendo laced title of Friends With Benefits. That was also quite deviant.

The main focus was on Night Of The Living Dead which we launched with the help of a huge spread of aptly themed baked goods. Thanks to everyone who was lovely enough to make goodies for us but a special piece of thanks has to go to our art director Niamh Moyles who produced this beautifully horrible looking cake in the shape of a severed hand. Gruesome? Yes. Tasty? Hell yes.

It was also great to be back in the lovely, warm ready made confines of the Watergate Theatre to launch the show. It’s like coming home for us in a lot of ways. We haven’t done a play there since  2009 so it’s lovely to be back in Kilkenny’s biggest and best theatre for the first time in three years.

We drank, ate, made merry, talked up the show, talked up the cast (they’re all brilliant) and talked up the rest of what we hope is going to be a very busy, productive and fun year. It was a great night, not a living dead one, but we’re getting there.

There’s still left over buns if anyone wants some.

Photos by Ross Costigan.