Within Biting Distance…

May

17,

2012

After an amazing rally the past few days, we are within biting distance of hitting our target for Night Of The Living Dead on Fund It.

With 4 days to go, we’ve just hit the €4,930 mark. We’re quietly confident that we can get it over the line in the next few days but we’re not hedging our bets just yet. And if we hit the target within that time, it would still be great to get as much funding for the project as we possible while the campaign is still live. The €50 rewards are the only ones to sell out with all the other rewards still on sale until our campaign ends on Monday.

So if you want to get an idea of what we’re offering, here’s Ken McGuire (producer), Connie Walsh (co-writer) and John Morton (co-writer, director) giving the spiel about Night Of The Living Dead and the goodies that we’re offering as rewards.

If you like any of that little lot, get your teeth into our Fund It campaign while there’s still time. And for the 116 of you who have funded us so far, thank you all so very much.

Photo by Ross Costigan (he funded us)

Phantasm Tickets Go Onsale

May

15,

2012

Tickets for our performances of Phantasm as part of Solstice have just gone onsale!

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.

5 Weeks Later

May

14,

2012

: 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!

: We’ve a lot more of this lined up

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!

Foxy Lady

May

11,

2012

‘Don’t be scared, it’s just a fox. With the bushy tail you know?‘

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.

Birthday Treats

May

10,

2012

: 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.

4 Weeks & 28 Days Later

May

2012

: 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!

: Our recent script session

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.

Announcing Phantasm

May

2012

We are very proud to announce that we will be performing Phantasm by John Kennedy as part of Solstice during Cork Midsummer Festival.

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…

2 Weeks Later

Apr

27,

2012

: 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.

: Applying some effects

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.

1 Week Later

Apr

19,

2012

This is what we look like when we're asking for money

: 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.

: This is what we look like when we’re asking for money

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.

Funding Night Of The Living Dead

Apr

11,

2012

We’ve just launched a Fund it campaign for Night Of The Living Dead.

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.

Within Biting Distance…

Phantasm Tickets Go Onsale

5 Weeks Later

Foxy Lady

Birthday Treats

4 Weeks & 28 Days Later

Announcing Phantasm

2 Weeks Later

1 Week Later

Funding Night Of The Living Dead

Play Now! Devious Theatre On Video!

Get Ticket Deals With Our Newsletter

Organisations

Devious Friends

We're On The Twitter