Photo: Sarah Bradley
‘FALLING’ is a play written first a couple of years back by Limerick man Liam McCarthy. It has continued in development right up to the world premier at No. 69 O’Connell Street this Thursday 17 to Saturday 19 at 8pm.
Fear not an amateurish effort: McCarthy, a Drama graduate from Trinity College, was selected for workshop placement by none other than Enda Walsh on foot of an extract submitted from ‘Falling’. Arts page hears that the “disarming” Cork master playwright with a “right combination of confidence and being so modest about success” was encouraging to the point that a revision led to a better script and prospects.
Lime Tree Theatre is part of this conduit.
Octopus Soup Theatre is Liam McCarthy’s production company with several other creatives. They have impressed professional critics with original work staged in London, and ‘Falling’ went on to merit a nomination by Billy Roche for Best New Play in Listowel Writers Week 2015.
Now Sarah Bradley from the Bristol Old Vic academy directs and has been dramaturg over five drafts, Eoin Lennon is on lighting with Anna Orton on design for ‘Falling’. The four actors are hired in this unusual dark-light comedy of friends who meet on a building rooftop some years after Alya, an admired close friend of theirs, falls mysteriously to her death.
It is the introduction of fiancée Clara to this group of smart professionals, beau Aaron, Mattie and Orlaith, who is catalyst for the wake for the mythical Alya who died a decade ago in 1996.
“At its root, the deepest interaction is between the ability – or not – of individuals to love and to accept,” is McCarthy’s observation. “Hopefully it’s a black comedy”.
He has had an immersive upbringing in theatre himself, his solicitor father Paul shouldering lead roles for 30 years in local drama, his mother Mary, a nurse, as committed.
Collaboration emerges as a key to this playwright’s approach, praising Orton and Bradley “for looking at the ‘game’ element and the characters from different tactics. The set is like a Cluedo grid on this same rooftop where the girl died.”
There’s a nod to Nat Yonce on sound for recreating noises that made the noughties such as Rihanna and Béyoncé against a background riff of the city as feelings and probabilities are piqued in this love triangle, or quartet or quintet.
‘Falling’ premiers at No. 69 O’Connell Street, September 17 to 19. Book online at venue manager www.limetreetheatre.ie or directly at box office.
