Shenanigans - the play
On opening night they were pulling out old dusty rusty seats from the cellar to fit in every corner of the theatre, seats on top of seats, and when they ran out of seats, people crammed in the sides and behind, and still people were turned away disappointed from the door. Schadenfreude for the ones who made it in. They were beating down the door to get in but there was just no more room. Must have been the outstanding publicity piece which had been written beforehand.
I felt like I was in the bar. I practically was, with a beer in my hand and sitting beside the jukebox as the play got underway with Colum (David Masterson, another Brayman lost in Berlin) sheltering a frantic Jimmy (Paul Salamone) under the bar from the rampaging big brother Mickey.
"There's a lot more going on here than meets the eye," said Mickey when he barged in. "A great deal more!" He was right. There feckin' was. I didn't know where to look half the time despite the happenings happening right in front of my eyes. Mickey, played by Belfastman Stephen Hanna, roared and bellowed, paced and prowled, and let his frustrations loose on the theatre, as the pipes trembled under the bar.
Nuala, played by Anna Tkach, brought some rare glamour to a country bar, but even she was powerless to stop the escapades of the "two boyos", played by Alan Glen (right) and Kevin McKinnon, from scaring the beJaysus out of everyone. Violently funny or funny violence, the audience couldn't decide as the tension built up and up. Quentin O'Tarantino.
"Sometimes you need to be diverted in life," they were told. Well, there was no end to the diversion here! A tragic comedy, a black poem, a trick and a triumph, this was a plotty plot which loses the plot but then finds it again as everything threatens to go to pot. A dark comedy in which you're afraid to laugh, but you laugh all the same. Who said Schadenfreude was German?
More pictures of can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/faheyc/Shenanigans#
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