Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co Cavan Oct 9 8pm €18 046-9092300; Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow Oct 10-11 8pm €18/€16 01-2724030; The Helix, DCU, Dublin Oct 13-17 8.15pm €18/€16 01-7007000
“From the horror has come something wonderful,” wrote the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness of
An Evil Cradling
, Brian Keenan’s first-hand account of his four and a half years held captive in Beirut. Keenan, McGuinness wrote, was not letting the world forget. Nor would the playwright.
McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Meis an imaginative depiction of life in captivity and how the human spirit manages to prevail. The hostages in this play are deliberately national emblems: an Irishman, Edward; an Englishman, Michael; and an American, Adam. The friction generated by three men shackled to the wall in a windowless basement is as much personal as cultural, with Edward and Michael reviving their national antipathy through a double- act of often-comic acrimony.
Less interested in the specifics of political context than in spiritual sustenance, McGuinness grants his characters relief through poetry, family, God, music and, ultimately, each other.
This touring production from Irish-Japanese company Blackwater Productions is buying into McGuinness at a time of intense interest in the great writer's work – a new production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Sommeis on the horizon. We are hardly shackled to him, but right now there's no getting away from Frank McGuinness.
CAN’T SEE THAT? CATCH THIS
One is Not a Number,
Wexford Arts Centre.
