WITH funding from Art Council secured, the script finalised in July, Mary Coll has been “sitting like a hen on a well hatched egg” with her new play. The egg is Anything But Love and it’s the opening show for Belltable Arts Centre’s new look. Still, her work has been three years in the making, a gestation in line with the expensively delayed makeover of our municipal theatre.
“I showed the script to (director) Joan Sheehy, who had worked with (project manager) Monica Spencer on Buck Jones and The Body Snatchers. Joan applied to Arts Council for funding as it was a particular package, combined with the event of the opening of the refurbished Belltable. The feeling was the play would have a resonance with a Limerick audience”.
Funding was confirmed in early 2010. Prof. Mícheál O’Súilleabháin is on board as composer of the score – the male lead character is a concert pianist (actor Malcolm Adams). Cathy Belton, lead actress, cut her death with Island Theatre Company, as did Spencer. Director Joan Sheehy is a Limerick woman and actress and director of national note. Belltable director Joanne Byrne was another early backer to whom the ever-changing script was circulated.
Coll, whose first play Excess Baggage sold out at Cecil Street’s Belltable last year, describes the new writing as “a play about a family on the Ennis Road, set in 2010.
No, it’s not in any way autobiographical. It is a drama of relationships within ‘the family’, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. Anything But Love is inspired in some part by events that occur to characters in Kate O’Brien’s novel The Ante Room, elements of that story were at the back of my mind.. as if I’d taken a jazz riff from it”.
She’s quick to clarify that Anything But Love is not an adaptation and indeed, the O’Brien estate felt the same when asked to inspect her final script.
All in all, the making of this production has much to do with Limerick and its women for whom Mary Coll has long been advocate and champion. More anon on the drama that is “serious but not bleak, and there will be moments when we laugh.”
Anything But Love opens on November 26 and runs to December 11, 8pm show.
