BOTTOM Dog Theatre Company reels out its fourth year of Four (read) Plays on Sunday September 2 next at Belltable Arts Centre, 8pm. This year the theme changes again, this time to New plays – works not hitherto seen or heard in production in Ireland – and September Sundays 2, 9, 16 and 23 are the rehearsed reading dates. Each of the plays, sequentially ‘Honour’, ‘Front Row Seat’, ‘Under Pressure’ and ‘Celtic Cross’, was selected by its director and was cast from an unpaid roster of 30 actors.
As before at Loft Venue, there is no ticket charge but the audience can donate what it wants to, before or after the production.
“We have never charged for Four Plays,” co-producer Liam O’Brien makes clear. “It is an opportunity for people or may or may not have been to theatre or indeed the Belltable to try it out.”
And while Mike Finn may have left the Bottom Dog fold to work in Dublin, core members Mike and Amy Bourke, O’Brien, Myles Breen and Pius McGrath continue with this theatre company, combining artistry and vision with technical, production and marketing skill. Busy acting in Marina Carr’s play ‘The Mai’ in Galway’s Townhouse Theatre, Liam O’Brien gives a preview of what lies ahead:
“Sunday 2’s play is ‘Honour’, written by Australian Joanna Murray Smith and directed by Marie Boylan, who is directing Limerick Youth Theatre’s ‘The Miser’ as I speak. The play is a four hander based on the troubled marriage of a couple aged late 50s, early 60s, when a third wheel comes into the relationship. It was first read publicly in 1995 by Meryl Streep, played in Broadway, the West End in 2008 and is well known internationally, but not here at all”.
Boylan herself picked the play and not Bottom Dog Theatre Company. That selection process is true of other directors this September – Pius McGrath for ‘Front Row Seat’, Helena Enright who directs her own play ‘Under Pressure’ and Simon Thompson directing ‘Celtic Cross’.
Bottom Dog makes special acknowledgement of the Belltable for giving its venue free of charge and to the unpaid actors: “We are back to core community and want to work with and show a display of this talent locally”.
Walk in on Sunday 2 to 69 O’Connell Street for 8pm play.
