SOUTHILL is warming for its first visit from an international class theatre company in the form of Argentina’s La Compania. This Buenos Aires group is staging Samuel Beckett’s classic Happy Days in Southill Area Centre on Friday September 4, at 8pm for the song of a fiver in and the hope of planting a cultural oasis.
Happy Days is appropriate launch for a 2009/2010 suite of professional plays and musicals brought to this community, and when a venue is secured, to Moyross also, by theatre promoter Richard Ryan.
It’s his mission to bring what is top class to Limerick’s regeneration zones and potentially, to Dublin communities such as Darndale and Ballyfermot that have been starved of such stimulus.
“La Compania is an internationally acclaimed company that wins prizes for their productions such as the Theatre of the World Award,” Ryan tells Arts page. “Sergio Amigo, actor and co-director for this piece with Luis Gayol, is a renowned director of Beckett and won the overall production award in the 2008 Becket Festival in Buenos Aires. This Happy Days was presented at The Cockpit Theatre in London to great success from both public and critic”.
Other parts of Ireland and indeed Limerick can see Happy Days as it opens in the Mermaid Theatre, Bray, then moves to Friar’s Gate on Thursday September 3, 8pm before arriving at Southill Area Centre. The tour closes in Galway’s Town Hall after the 24th and 25th of this month.
It is hoped that the strength of box office at other venues will subsidise the miraculous 5 euro ticket (first come, first served) night for 100+ seats at Southill Area Centre. Theatre is an expensive dice for any promoter so what drives Richard Ryan, a Dub from the Liberties?
“I believe that business lost sight of its responsibility to society,” he states carefully. “Now the time has come for change to take place. I didn’t like the Celtic Tiger or what property developers were doing, going around and buying up and mouthing and wanting fame like rock stars. We lost the run of ourselves”.
Not all business is blunt to the needs and aspiration of a wider world. Hats off to Limerick Strand Hotel for rowing in promtly with sponsorship and accommodation to facilitate this pioneering gamble in Limerick.
Over at Southill, it’s all hands on deck for the play’s prescribed presentation in the area centre. Manager Jennifer O’Brien is fanning public interest:
“As a community centre we are excited at being able to offer it and the quality of this production, to host it here, it’s just fantastic. We are circulating posters and flyers locally and beyond to other centres like ourselves in the city.
“People seem to be interested and are intrigued that a play like this and from such a theatre company is taking place in our community centre. It makes going so much more accessible, with no bus or taxi fares, much less the price of a ticket to a show in town”.
Beckett would have a happy day of his own at the reality of his allegedly elitist work placed squarely in the well of the people who have least materially.
