View from the Green Room: Freddy and The Screamers
Portlaw Players
Porlaw’s Freddy Kelly loves comedy and it shows. Three short sketches upstairs in the Cotton Mill Bar in Portlaw has a full house screaming with laughter. Each sketch is funnier than the last and the cast clearly love the humour of the evening.
D M Larson’s ‘Pity the Fool’, directed by Dermot Keyes, sees George (Dermot Keyes) as an art installation hanging on a gallery wall as a piece of living wall art. Two visitors – May (Lauren Humphries) and Mag (Niamh Doherty) – decide on its merit. It’s either innovative and imaginary or pure sh*te.
When George comes to life and sinks down a rabbit hole of self-pity, interesting romantic possibilities arise with Frank (Frank Cullinane) delivering the killer exit line.
Hannah Carbery’s ‘Silver Lobster Inn’, directed by Freddy Kelly, hosts more eccentrics than an odd-ball convention. Desk clerk Roderick (Jamie Power) has just served a crab salad to the latest Presidential candidate staying in the hotel, who is dangerously allergic to crabs… "we’ve poisoned the President".
When hotel owner Jackson (Gavin Keyes) discovers he has a corpse on his hands, all manner of madcap plans – assisted by hotel employees Noreen (Katie Coughlan) and Katherine (Dervla Walsh) and trendy influencer Clarissa (Alyssa Flannery), to hide the body, end in disaster. And when a Bean Garda (Stephanie Maguire) – on a nodding acquaintance with cast and audience that is simply hilarious – shows up, the plot becomes more bizarre by the second.
Robert Scott’s ‘Charlie to Checkout’, directed by Lisa Kelly, sees beleaguered and terrified Riley (Dermot Sullivan) manning a supermarket checkout for the very first time and he’s as terrified as a mouse crossing a tiled floor.
Every customer is an enemy with impossible demands. There’s a lad returning a tin of chickpeas because "they’re not green" and nothing will convince him that peas are not always green.
"I know peas…I have a PhD in peas…I support green Peas…all I want is peas in our time," says he with knowing nods on the puns to the house.
A posh lottery ticket customer is taking crazy phone calls. One begins with a cat that’s still not dead although he’s just been struck by lightning for the fourth time and careers along with a pond and an electrocuted goldfish that strikes a postman that falls in front of a car that crashes into a church under the organ loft with the organist finally snuffing it in a hail of debris. Phew!
Throw in another exasperated customer being flirted by an old flame who holds up the supermarket with a water pistol and a succession of ‘Bing Bong’ announcements as each customer pursues his own storyline. Cast is Dermot Sullivan, Alan Ronayne, John ‘Squelchy’ Walsh, Kieran Laffan, Emmet Cullinane and Mary Rose Sullivan.
Great craic at the Cotton Mill.
