View from the Green Room: Stagemad celebrates 20th anniversary
Five plays from original authors premiered at Tramore’s Coastguard Cultural Centre.
Five plays from original authors and premiered tonight in Tramore’s Coastguard Station seems the perfect way for James Power’s Stagemad theatre company to celebrate 20 years of dramatic productions in Waterford, Tramore and surrounding areas.
James is no stranger to innovation and has produced site specific plays in places such as the Kilmacthomas Workhouse, the Japanese Gardens in Tramore, along with traditional venues such as the Royal, Garter Lane, Bank Lane and here tonight in the confined space of the Tramore Coastguard. Quite an achievement.
There’s a full house tonight for the eclectic mix of short punchy scripts that are unrelentingly heavy on drama.
Róisín Hackett’s “Post Mortem” is a grim and violent account of life with an abusive husband, who is now in gaol for the offences. The details of the abuse are placed before the audience in graphic detail…fists…temper…boiling water…pushed down stairs.
Reasons for the abuse are teased out…psychopath…misogynist…bully…learned behaviour. The path towards acceptance of this abuse is well trod…always sorry…promises to stop…flowers…blaming myself…ignoring family advice. The reasons why the victim (Clodagh Kenny) is now confronting the culprit (Dean Sullivan) in his prison cell are disguised until the climax but are pretty obvious. Strong performances and an intensely dramatic script characterise this opener.
I have no idea what joined up the dots in Seán Kelly’s “Q Here” – performed by Seán – but it provided fun and comic relief on a night that badly needed it. “Lily the Pink” introduced it and there was a rambling exposé on the need for Irish nicknames with multiple generations of his own that all end in O’Sullivan. There’s a chap nicknamed “Gatsby” for obvious reasons who plays soccer and another lad who goes on a moosehunting holiday with dire results. Darby O’Gill also features and provides the ultimate exit line… ”I’m away with the fairies”! Puzzling but fun and the audience warms to it.
Ellen Harrison’s “800” included a staged suicide by overdose and an announcement should have alerted the audience to seek counsel if anyone was affected by the dramatised suicide. For anyone reading this article, it’s well to know, although suicide by overdose is rarely successful (97% failure rate), that the resulting liver, kidney and brain damage is often permanent.
Ellen’s play deals with the complex consequences for a young woman who is the only child of a radical, right-wing politician and a kind but ineffective mother. She suffers mental health issues that are never addressed due to her 800th place on the consultant psychiatrist’s list. Writer Ellen Harrison directs her own script with an experienced cast of Jamie Power, Jodie Cooper, Fergal O’Neill and Katie Chance.
Writer/director Derek Flynn is surely Tramore’s guru of crime and punishment. Along with a dollop of good humour because Derek’s villains would usually struggle to steal a pea from a blind man’s plate. When a jewellery heist he’s planned goes pear-shaped, Frank retreats to his safe house. There’s more twists here than on a misshapen corkscrew and the laughs follow as everything goes wrong for the most gormless robber in Christendom. Clodagh Kenny and Derek Flynn combine to knock some good fun out of this botched robbery.
“Smear” by Christa De Brún tells the end-of-days story of Vicki Phelan. The play tackles the ideas of what it means to be alive and what it means to die – big theatrical themes that sometimes scare people off. “Smear” is a blunt, no-holds-barred powerful monologue from actress Nicola Spendlove that moves through all the failings that led up to the needless death of a young mother and wife and amazingly resourceful woman.
“Everything looks good” Vicki was told in February 2015 and a year later it was “put your affairs in order” because the cervical smear test was incorrectly read.
Vicki doesn’t mince her words and is as blunt as an overused spade. “The bleeds…being dragged through the courts…marriage breakdowns that couldn’t cope with the court actions…despair and depression…and the demands for a non-disclosure agreement.”
Spendlove’s quotations from Vicki explode across the Coastguard stage.
“They were expecting a sick woman; they weren’t expecting me!...they wanted me to stay quiet about it…not a hope”.
Vicki had friends in the same floundering lifeboat and she had to be a champion for all of them - especially the ones that had already shaken hands with the inflexible doorman.
Sacks of letters of support came. Freedoms of cities. Awards. “Accolades and honours?...I never really wanted them…I just wanted action and legal accountability” because no compensation in the world will repay Vicki’s stolen moments with her young children and husband.
Vicki was an ordinary woman caught in a storm of extraordinary circumstances. No one could have navigated that tide except Vicki Phelan. We are so proud of Vicki and are privileged to have known her.
God bless you, Vicki Phelan. One of our own.
