HIT plays from 23 year-old out of work actors are scarcer than pink diamonds but since Stefanie Preissner delivered ‘Solpadeine is my Boyfriend’ to the world, well, the world just can’t get enough.
She acts alone in this short (60-minute) play set in the milieu of disenfranchised twenty-somethings. Reared in the boom years of expectations, earnings, credit and spend, they now find themselves at sea like flotsam, if not already overseas looking for work.
It’s a dark comedy that sold out when premiered at the Dublin based 2012 Absolut Fringe theatre festival. ‘Solpadeine is my Boyfriend’, directed by Gina Moxley and produced by With an ‘F’ Productions, was nominated for two awards.
“No, I did not expect that much success when I wrote it,” Preissner admits. “So much work goes into writing a play that it is great to get life out of it and two years is just great.”
Success is all the more surprising as this creative stopped writing for five years after her début work ‘Our Father’, again with an autobiographical element, failed: “It was gloriously awful, overly sentimental.”
Preissner continued training and working as an actor and had proper expectations – “drama school can give one a false sense of worth” – but reality and the crash bit.
She explains the appeal of ‘Solpadeine is my Boyfriend’, downloaded in countries everywhere from the RTE podcast, as “people really connecting with it. It’s hard to know the demographic of each audience but people from aged 13 to 90 have seen the play”.
The play is built on the poles of depression, immigration and addiction, following the journey of a girl from Cork to Dublin in search of work and love.
At Lime Tree Theatre, Thursday November 21 only, at 8pm.
