REGARDED as one of the leading turks of theatre (Ireland and UK) Conall Morrison will direct Bottom Dog Theatre Company’s big show of 2020.
‘Gravity (a Love Story)’ is a work by Neil Flynn, a playwright with whom this Limerick based group has previously engaged publicly. Never done before, it will stage for four nights in Belltable next November. Thereafter, another run in Tralee’s Siamsa Tíre will acknowledge the Kerry based writer’s antecedents and his local audience.
The spur to this creativity is the €65,000 of Arts Council funding for this Limerick made project.
Bottom Dog producer Liam O’Brien tells the story. “It was on our 25th application to The Arts Council that the grant came through. In our previous 14 years we had had only one previous grant and that was a small one, for Myles Breen’s play ‘The Book of Joe’ for which we did a public professional reading in Belltable.”
The moiety was not enough to create a full production on a paid-for basis.
Our theatre-going world is long aware of the visible and voiced struggles of Bottom Dog (Liam, Myles, Mike Burke; John Murphy is retired) to continue creatively with the company. “That 25th application was about giving it one more shot. It was make or break time for us.”
Their most recent original work, again by playwright and actor Myles, was November 2019’s ‘A Wilde Fan’. The paeon to Oscar Wilde did well over three houses but was not box office glory. Liam O’Brien looks at the big picture:
“What I am most proud of with Bottom Dog is our touring success. Of the 14 productions we have done in our 11 years, we toured with eight of them – the last one being ‘Small One’ [by John Murphy]. Our touring was done with the support of venues such as Galway’s Town Hall Theatre and it was those venues who made it possible.”
Of this year’s grant, which makes them eligible for a further 10 per cent from Limerick City and County Council, he says fervently, “sometimes I think it was written in stars. What is nice about this, Neil’s production, is that it came originally from the work that we were doing.
“The beginning of the process was the 44 ‘read plays’ we have done over 11 years, four plays annually united by a theme. The four political plays were curated by me and included another by Neil.”
Such individual theatre works are conducted with animation by guest actors and directors in No. 1 Pery Square, over consecutive winter Sunday nights. They pack out.
A chance meeting with Neil Flynn in Siamsa Tíre resulted in him sending in another script, ‘Gravity (a Love Story)’. “It is a hard one to define because at its heart is a very simple love story between an Irish woman and an English man in contemporary times. It emphasises the connections they had previously, right through the centuries and invoking characters such as Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut, Tony Benn, Joan of Arc. We have these people appear through the play and all the variety of characters are played by the principals, two men and two women.
“There is a political feel as the theme has also to do with the Anglo-Irish dynamic, which has become quite fraught again between the two countries. But no, ‘Gravity’ is not a history lesson, it’s much more esoteric and of theatrical interest.
“A huge part of the funding is to try and create new ways to stage this play. The people we will have working on set, on lighting, on sound will be integral to forming it, to create something that has not been seen before.” Mighty stuff. Interested parties can look forward to auditions staged in Limerick, Kerry and Dublin. A last word: casting is at the behest of Conall Morrison only.
Keep an eye on bottomdogtheatre.com
€65,000 to Bottom Dog heralds world premiere
