Latest news with #playwriting
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘It takes a week to learn the rules of whatever office you're in. Some of the things, I was, like, what the f**k is this?'
Caitríona Daly originally wanted to be an actor but fell into playwriting at the age of 10 out of necessity – 'because even at that age,' she says, 'I knew there weren't good parts for women'. She first made waves in student theatre, with Sluts, a biting, fast-talking comedy about the labels women throw at each other and the double standards that let men off the hook. Its combination of righteous anger, whip-smart intellect, unexpected tenderness and lacerating humour has become Daly's trademark. The 37-year-old Dubliner has written for stage and screen, including a stint on the long-running BBC daytime drama Doctors, for which she won a Writers Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award. Soap, she says, taught her a huge amount about story and structure, and its role as a tool for public empathy and education deserves more respect. 'It's the most accessible art form we have,' she says. 'Its reach is huge. I remember the storyline about Todd being gay from Coronation Street in the early 2000s – that was huge. I don't think I ever really knew what being gay was before that. Similarly, with the teenage pregnancy, it can take a topic that is divisive in society and help society to understand it a little bit better.' READ MORE What unites all of Daly's work, whether on a BBC soundstage or in a black-box theatre, is her commitment to moral ambiguity, emotional nuance and sharp absurdity of modern life. In her breakout play, Duck Duck Goose , which ran at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021, Daly tackled the social impact of sexual violence from a rarely seen angle: that of the bystander. Loosely inspired by the nine-week Belfast rape trial of 2018, it features a protagonist, Chris, who is neither accused nor accuser but a friend of the accused, slowly unravelling under the weight of what he knew, what he didn't and what he refused to see. 'I felt very strongly that if every story we see around rape culture is from a survivor's perspective, we begin to think it's the survivor's problem. And it's not,' Daly says. 'We have to be having the more difficult conversations.' The play became an international success, with acclaimed productions in Bulgaria, Australia and New Zealand. But at home the reception was more complicated. 'We were very well reviewed, which was great,' she says. 'But I found some of the reactions quite held back.' [ Duck Duck Goose: An uncomfortable, insightful portrayal of sexual violence's social impact Opens in new window ] Part of the unease, she suspects, came from its proximity to the real-life case – the four defendants were acquitted – and the discomfort of unspoken social truths. 'It brings in the question of doubt and the question of redemption, or whether you want to believe in it,' she says. 'I left the play ambiguous, because I wanted there to be space for conversation. If we're to take men on the journey with us, we need to have room for their voices in it too.' Daly's latest play, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4, strikes a different tone – chaotic, comedic, full of noise – but the questions at its heart are no less urgent. Set at a bland corporate firm, it centres on three employees spending the company's social-responsibility budget. Their lunch hour becomes a warped gameshow of points, prizes, dress-up and one-upmanship. Water pistols are drawn, spinning wheels spun. Wrestling matches unfold on a boardroom table. The play quickly unfurls from office dramedy into a satire about power, survival and the rituals we invent to endure capitalism's grind. The absurdity is deliberate, but so is the recognition. Daly first seeded the play in 2010, during the economic crash. 'I was working in an office that was pretty much abandoned,' she says. 'It was on St Stephen's Green. This entire block of offices being used by the company I worked for. Such a desolate place. And I had this idea where a load of workers re-enact The Late Late Toy Show . 'It was about millennials and how we all grew up being told we could have anything, and we could do anything we wanted, because the world was such a rich, plush place in Ireland in the 2000s. And then the crash happened, and all those dreams of Barbie cars just went out the window.' Daly has always been drawn to that collision between expectation and reality, between the self and the system. Lunch Punch extends that, exploring coping mechanisms, language games and power plays that flourish when actual power is scarce. 'The play's really trying to explore the things we do to feel like we might have some power over something,' she says, 'even though most of us don't have much power over the structures in place.' The setting is Gresham Professional Services. It's entirely fictional but also a recognisable kind of nowhere, with rigid structure and absurd stakes. The rules, Daly says, are familiar to anyone who has temped or worked in an office. 'It takes you a week to learn the rules of whatever office you're in, and they're not the written ones. Like, you can't do this, or say that. Some of the things I had to do in offices, I was, like, what the f**k is this?' A receptionist named Jess becomes the audience's entry point. She's a smart, curious outsider with a PhD in anthropology and an interest in the individualistic construction of western identity, who is both underestimated by and quietly threatening to her colleagues. Daly, who has temped in countless offices over 15 years, brings a lived-in authority to Jess's role as observer. 'I love reception work. I've done it in so many places: doctors' offices, cement companies, law offices. The receptionist is always a silent observer, rarely noticed. I used to love going into new worlds and figuring out how people work together. The pettiness is incredible. Like, in one office, at least once a month a woman would come out and tell me there was poo in one of the toilets.' If Duck Duck Goose dealt in silence – what isn't said, what isn't acknowledged – Lunch Punch is awash with language: jargon, acronyms, appropriated anthropology, and pop culture. Daly took inspiration from the choreographed fights of professional wrestling and the conflict-heavy theatrics of reality TV. 'I worked with people who thought they were in a video game or in The Real Housewives ..., by how they spoke. You can feel someone doing a dramatic pause. Nobody knows how to do office culture naturally – it's performative. 'There's a line in the play where Jess asks about a no-uniform day, and they say, 'We don't have a uniform.' But of course they do. Office culture is performance: costumes and scripts.' The scripts extend beyond offices to modern life. 'The play's littered with references: The Real Housewives ..., Come Dine With Me, Father Ted, Arrested Development. They're not obvious. They're diluted, so you don't really know where they came from. But that's where we're at. TikTok is this stream of references. We're living in a Jenga tower of weird meta existence.' Despite its satire, Lunch Punch resists cynicism. 'I didn't want it to be cynical,' Daly says. 'The world is difficult enough. If you wanted to die by cynicism right now, you could. I want this to be semi-uplifting, while being truthful about the world we're living in.' The play shares thematic echoes with The Good Place , Mike Schur's TV series, which explored ethical complexity in a broken world. Daly welcomes the comparison. 'You've nailed it,' she says. 'What I wanted the end to feel like was the end of the first season of The Good Place. It's an empowering ending. They won't be shut down, you know?' [ Why we love 'The Good Place' and its star Kristen Bell Opens in new window ] That instinct for resistance, both political and emotional, pulses through Daly's work. She cites Ursula K Le Guin's idea of the artist's treason: that we've been taught that only pain can be intelligent, that joy is naive. 'I see joy and playfulness as everyday resistance. That's what I was trying to get across with Lunch Punch – just finding pockets full of joy. We're taught that happiness is stupid, and artists often deny us the banality of evil and the boredom of pain.' Resistance has limits, of course, especially in Dublin. Daly speaks frankly about the precarity of making art in Ireland: the economic hostility; the shrinking opportunities; the cultural ambivalence. The play touches on this and on the often-forgotten struggles of those outside the capital. 'I'm very seriously concerned about our country,' she says. 'Everything is entirely Dublin-focused. We've left most of the Midlands without an industry. With the closure of Bord na Móna's ESB plants, a lot of young people had no choice but to leave. I used to mention that to people in Dublin, and they'd say, 'Oh, did they? What's that?' We can be in a bubble – myself included.' What keeps her hopeful? Daly doesn't hesitate. 'We're very resilient. I'm hopeful for some kind of creative revolution. Bureaucracy is killing theatre. I'm looking for punks. I'm looking for some punk stuff to happen soon, because it's important.' She smiles, the conviction steady beneath the humour. 'The win is getting to do what you love,' she says. 'That's it. That's the whole thing.' In a world built on distraction, exhaustion, productivity and profit, choosing to keep making art and telling stories might just be radical. The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre , in Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
The Guardian
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Consumed review – mothers and daughters clash in Women's prize for playwriting winner
Karis Kelly's drama won the Women's prize for playwriting in 2022 and you can see why. Set amid a family reunion dinner in Northern Ireland, only the women are present here. And in the way of many such theatrical reunions, it leads to an almighty blow-up, yet there is no hint of cliche. Kelly is a talented playwright navigating between black humour and pain. At the head of the table is Eileen (Julia Dearden), a foul-mouthed matriarch whose 90th birthday they are celebrating. Gilly (Andrea Irvine) is her daughter and the mother of Jenny (Caoimhe Farren), who left long ago for a life in London. Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin), the youngest, is Jenny's London-born-and-raised daughter. Slickly directed by Katie Posner, it is horribly, humorously, gripping: reminiscent of Beth Steel's Till the Stars Come Down at its best, with flecks of Martin McDonagh's mother-daughter drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Daughters cyclically blame their mothers for the pain and harm they've inherited, while letting their fathers off the hook. Eileen appears, at first, like a cartoonishly drawn battleaxe, but she is perhaps best at hiding vulnerability. Gilly has comical spurts of rage despite her cultivated, singalong calmness. Jenny is full of blame towards her, pointing out maternal shortcomings like a stroppy teen, and is superbly played by Farren. Muireann is the flattest character, satirised for her gen Z talk of gluten and environmental harm. She has an eating disorder but it is too briefly broached and appears to fit the greater scheme of a play in which each woman is grappling with suppressed trauma, passed down and ingested as their own. The play travels from dining table realism to the baroque. The rumbles in Beth Duke's sound design foreshadow this turn into lyrical and symbolic new ground. Talk of Northern Ireland's past peppered the early scenes but it now becomes clear that this cross-generational family represents a bigger history of violence. The play's shape-shifting is part of its audaciousness, but this late turn is brief and leaves much hanging. It is a lot to grapple with in 70 minutes and you feel as if Consumed could be developed into a bigger play at a longer length, or streamlined for this shorter one. Either way, its potential is clear. At the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 24 August. Then touring from 3 September. All our Edinburgh festival reviews
The Guardian
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Consumed review – mothers and daughters clash in Women's prize for playwriting winner
Karis Kelly's drama won the Women's prize for playwriting in 2022 and you can see why. Set amid a family reunion dinner in Northern Ireland, only the women are present here. And in the way of many such theatrical reunions, it leads to an almighty blow-up, yet there is no hint of cliche. Kelly is a talented playwright navigating between black humour and pain. At the head of the table is Eileen (Julia Dearden), a foul-mouthed matriarch whose 90th birthday they are celebrating. Gilly (Andrea Irvine) is her daughter and the mother of Jenny (Caoimhe Farren), who left long ago for a life in London. Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin), the youngest, is Jenny's London-born-and-raised daughter. Slickly directed by Katie Posner, it is horribly, humorously, gripping: reminiscent of Beth Steel's Till the Stars Come Down at its best, with flecks of Martin McDonagh's mother-daughter drama The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Daughters cyclically blame their mothers for the pain and harm they've inherited, while letting their fathers off the hook. Eileen appears, at first, like a cartoonishly drawn battleaxe, but she is perhaps best at hiding vulnerability. Gilly has comical spurts of rage despite her cultivated, singalong calmness. Jenny is full of blame towards her, pointing out maternal shortcomings like a stroppy teen, and is superbly played by Farren. Muireann is the flattest character, satirised for her gen Z talk of gluten and environmental harm. She has an eating disorder but it is too briefly broached and appears to fit the greater scheme of a play in which each woman is grappling with suppressed trauma, passed down and ingested as their own. The play travels from dining table realism to the baroque. The rumbles in Beth Duke's sound design foreshadow this turn into lyrical and symbolic new ground. Talk of Northern Ireland's past peppered the early scenes but it now becomes clear that this cross-generational family represents a bigger history of violence. The play's shape-shifting is part of its audaciousness, but this late turn is brief and leaves much hanging. It is a lot to grapple with in 70 minutes and you feel as if Consumed could be developed into a bigger play at a longer length, or streamlined for this shorter one. Either way, its potential is clear. At the Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 24 August. Then touring from 3 September. All our Edinburgh festival reviews
Geek Girl Authority
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
David John Phillips on Writing OH! I MISS THE WAR and Its Hopeful Message for the Queer Community
Sometimes, all it takes is one monologue to awaken the muse. Actor and playwright David John Phillips, whose acclaimed new play Oh! I Miss the War is poised to take the Toronto Fringe Festival by storm, penned his latest work after finding inspiration from a monologue by Matthew Baldwin that features an older gay man. Recently, I had the privilege of chatting with David about bringing Oh! I Miss the War to life, the impetus behind writing it, how it's a love letter to queer elders and more. RELATED: Agape Mngomezulu Talks Bryon and Bracia's Relationship in Ginny & Georgia Season 3 This interview is condensed for length and clarity. David John Phillips Pictured: David John Phillips Melody McCune: We at GGA love a good origin story. How did you get into the arts? David John Phillips: I have always been an actor, actually, since childhood. I did my undergraduate degree at NYU Tisch School back in the '70s. Getting into the arts was pretty organic. Then, I fell out of the arts. After my undergraduate degree, I spent a few years as a professional actor, but found it impossible. I left acting and went into a career in academia. About 15 years ago, I thought that I needed to have fun. So, I started acting again, and it was fun. That's briefly how I went in and how I came out and how I went back again. Of course, there's a lot more detail there. That's the general outline. Oh! I Miss the War MM: Let's talk about Oh! I Miss the War . Can you tell me what it's about and the impetus behind writing it? DJP: Let me go with the impetus behind writing it first. Let me give you a bit of an origin story. That's a fascinating origin story. I was in the library of the National Theatre in London. I saw a volume entitled Queers and thought, 'I have to buy that one,' so I bought it and discovered it was a collection of eight monologues commissioned by the BBC to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of sodomy in the UK. One of the monologues was for an older gay man. Good monologues for older gay men are not common. RELATED: Revival 's Romy Weltman on Becoming Em and Working With Melanie Scrofano At that point, it became my COVID project to work on the monologue. That monologue features an old queen in a bar in London in 1967, during the week that sodomy was decriminalized. He's watching all the youngsters celebrate this, and thinking, 'What do they want to do? Get married next?' He laments the loss of the outlaw pleasures he had. He doesn't put it this way, of course, but he's concerned about creeping heteronormativity. He speaks Polari, an underground argot common in most of the first half of the 20th century among the gay subculture. Embracing the History That's the first part. I performed it and really loved the monologue, but it was 20 minutes. I thought I would like to make an evening out of this. So, I wrote a companion piece set more or less in the current day, but with a similar structure to the older queen. This time, a leather queen sits in a leather bar in the current day, looking at the youngsters and wondering where he fits in. Why doesn't he understand what they're saying? Both of them come back to really embracing the history they're looking at — the past they have been a part of and the future they're uncertain of. But there's a real sense of hope and love and compassion for the people in front of them now. That's where the piece came from and what it's about. RELATED: 5 Horror Movies With Queer Representation A Sense of Hope and Reassurance MM: What can audiences expect when they watch the show? DJP: They can expect to be moved. It's very funny. Jack, the queen from 1967, is an entertainer and is very funny. Matt, the leather queen of today, has a more wry sense of humor, but is also very funny. They each enjoy finding the humor in the situation. People can certainly expect to laugh. People can expect to appreciate the past, present and continuation of the project of queer world-building we've been engaged in for hundreds of years. Jack remembers back to 1932, and Matt talks about life today. People can expect to enjoy a sense of hope and reassurance that we've been doing this and we're still doing it. Life sucks, but that's fine. MM: Describe Oh! I Miss the War using three words. DJP: Queer. Sexy. Compassionate. RELATED: Sapphics With Swords: 6 Books Featuring Queer Lady Warriors Multitasking MM: I love that. What was it like for you getting to wear multiple hats as a writer and actor, from the inception of this show to getting it on its feet? DJP: I have really enjoyed the writing part. It was difficult, but the most difficult part of writing was done for me because I knew what I wanted to write about. I knew I wanted to write in response to Matthew Baldwin's piece. Matthew Baldwin is the playwright of I Miss the War . It was a lot of fun, very evocative and very moving to write the companion piece, called Oh! . That's the title of the second monologue. It was fun to perform a piece that I had written. I had to be careful to say, 'No, David, say the lines as you wrote them. There is a text here, and you can't make it up just because you wrote it. You decided with good care how this line would read, so read the line you wrote.' That was interesting. For the first several iterations, I directed it myself, which felt a bit like it was not directed. Now, for this iteration, I have hired a director. Very glad for that. It just looks more professional, more together. It's a much tighter and more theatrical show than it had been. I do not enjoy producing. I know that. The payoff from the producing, though, is that I get to do the show I want. RELATED: 10 Books With Queer Protagonists to Read All Year Round We're Doing Fine Pictured: David John Phillips MM: What have you taken away from this experience? DJP: I'll give you an anecdote. As I said, in Jack's piece, I Miss the War , a significant part is his concern that the subculture will die. That with this greater acceptance, with this openness, people are going to get married and move to the suburbs. What's the point of being queer if you're going to do that? I was performing in Toronto at Glad Day Bookshop, the oldest surviving gay bookstore in the world. As I was doing the show, I was looking around at the staff of this bookstore, looking around at the people frequenting the bookstore, and thinking, 'We're doing fine. We are plenty queer.' That's the main thing I have taken away from it. More prosaically, the other thing I'm taking away from it is a good show. A good show that is in my back pocket and that will travel. Influences and What's on the Horizon MM: Who are your influences as a playwright? DJP: Joni Mitchell is the first that pops into my head. The second piece, the piece I wrote, is pretty autobiographical. Looking at Joni Mitchell's work and her ability to take a very precise moment in life, explore that reverberation into history — into the cosmos — and then bring it back to that moment. It is the structure of many Joni Mitchell songs. That was really helpful to me in terms of the structure of the play. I often said, 'Look, if Joni can be this honest, I can be this honest. If Joni can talk about her life like this, I can talk about my life like this.' RELATED: Max Parker Gets Musical as Benvolio in Juliet & Romeo That courage in self-disclosure was really valuable to me. Matthew Baldwin, the playwright, said, 'Sure, write about yourself. The more specific and honest you can make it, the more universal it will be, the more people will resonate with it.' Those were really valuable precepts that I came back to again and again in writing it. MM: What else is on the horizon for you, career-wise? DJP: I will continue to shop this play around festivals. Also, I have this fantasy, which I don't think is completely unrealistic, but we're pursuing it. I think that universities and colleges with queer student groups, theater departments, queer studies or just queer student groups with a bit of a budget would love to bring me in for a weekend and perform this show and talk about it. I would like to try to do that. Oh! I Miss the War premieres at Native Earth's Aki Studio as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival on July 2, 2025, and will conclude its run on July 13. To keep up with David, check out his site. 5 Queer YA Retellings of CINDERELLA Contact: [email protected] What I do: I'm GGA's Managing Editor, a Senior Contributor, and Press Coordinator. I manage, contribute, and coordinate. Sometimes all at once. Joking aside, I oversee day-to-day operations for GGA, write, edit, and assess interview opportunities/press events. Who I am: Before moving to Los Angeles after studying theater in college, I was born and raised in Amish country, Ohio. No, I am not Amish, even if I sometimes sport a modest bonnet. Bylines in: Tell-Tale TV, Culturess, Sideshow Collectibles, and inkMend on Medium. Critic: Rotten Tomatoes, CherryPicks, and the Hollywood Creative Alliance.
New York Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Play About a Breakdown Was a 2000 Hit. What Do Audiences Say Today?
When the British playwright Sarah Kane died by suicide in 1999, at age 28, she left behind the manuscript for an unperformed work. 'Just remember, writing it killed me,' Kane wrote in an accompanying note, according to Mel Kenyon, the playwright's long-term agent. Just over a year later, when the Royal Court Theater in London premiered the piece — a one-act play called '4:48 Psychosis' that puts the audience inside the mind of somebody having a breakdown — it received rave reviews. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Matt Wolf said it was 'arguably Kane's best play' and compared it to the work of Samuel Beckett. Yet despite the praise, a question hung over the production: Was it possible to honestly critique a play about depression so soon after Kane's tragic death? The headline on an article by the Guardian theater critic Michael Billington suggested a challenge: 'How Do You Judge a 75-Minute Suicide Note?' Now, 25 years later, theatergoers are getting a chance to look at the original production of '4:48 Psychosis' afresh, and see if passing time brings a change in perspective. The show's cast and creative team is reviving the production at the Royal Court, where it runs through July 5, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Other Place Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, where it will run from July 10-27. This time around, critical reception has been mixed. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, praised the production and said the play 'still feels raw,' but Clive Davis, in The Times of London, argued that ''4:48 Psychosis' isn't a play at all, rather the random agonized reflections of a mind that has passed beyond breaking point.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
