I found this tonight. It’s the closing speech from Lost Voices, Ballyfermot Festival’s 1916 centenary production, in collabration with the now sadly defunct Ballyfermot Theatre Workshop. The play was based on Joe Duffy’s book Children of the rising.
theatre
Lost Voices
Lost Voices is a show I was in in 2016, I also did some work on the script. The show is about the children who did during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. I’m very proud to have been a part of this production. If memory serves we did only three performance at the Ballyfermot Civic and Community Centre. As well as members of the local community theatre, we also brought in local schools. I played three parts, one on film and two on stage. That’s me at the beginning announcing that the republic has been declared.
Story
The joy and frustration of writing! I started a short story to put out some new material while I work on the next novel. But it turned into a long and now I’m tempted to make it even longer. It’s the story of how I wrote my first play: Trial of the Living Dead. I hope to have it finished this week, but deadlines and me are on very bad terms.
True Story
Finally she gave up, and looking at him, exasperated, she said, ‘You can’t be an actor. There has never been an actor called Fergus.’
GODOT
The wait is almost over. On the 20th and 21st of February the most burning question of the 20th Century will finally be answered. Why didn’t Godot show up? Two lifelong pals, Godot and Bosco, attempt to go on a roadtrip.
From the first time I heard the story of Waiting for Godot I wondered why he didn’t turn up. That’s basically the end of the similarities between my play and the other one, (I haven’t seen it so who knows? Not I!) About a year ago I started to write the story. I could picture these two guys on their way somewhere, and I knew they didn’t get there. Godot and Bosco – Godot, because he’s always late, or never turns up at all; Bosco, because he’s really annoying but people love him.
Anyway, I wrote it as a movie for the Dublin Filmmakers Collective One Year Challenge, but not knowing enough about directing, and not finding anyone else to direct it, I turned it into a play. Paul Winters, who directed my last play, Examine Your Zip, submitted it to scene + heard, and that settled that, more or less.
You can get tickets here.
The Dublin Filmmakers Collective Youtube channel is here.
And my Amazon page is here.
The Plan
The plan was to write reems of poetry which I would then put aside for a while, and then edit each page down to absolute essentials, or at least what a non-poet like me considers essential. The plan was abandoned when I started working with Wildream Theatre Company on truning my one man show – Examine Your Zip – into a two man show. I’m not precious about these things and both Paul and Blaise are more skilled than me. We put it on in April and had a great response, and when I think of it, I still find it odd that it’s my play.
While we were working on that I did a small role in The Passion Project, a community theatre project in Ballyfermot. I also wrote a screenplay for the Dublin Filmmaker’s Collective One Year Feature Film Challenge, which is halfway through now. My film is no longer part of that. Nobody wanted to make it and,never having directed anything, I don’t feel qualified to direct it myself. I was also too busy with theatre stuff to properly pursue it as a movie. Now I’m back working with Paul and Blaise, and we’re looking at adapting the screenplay into a stageplay. So if all goes well, we start drilling down into it on thursday, then we rip it apart, find what works, discard what doesn’t, and put it on. And the thing is, I’m happier about that than if it had become a movie. Still, it would be nice to do something in movies, if only to raise my profile enought to sell a few books. A goal to be achieved.
