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Boss
by Thomas Hall
- Boss! Boss! There's somethin in our Irish souls that just thrills to the sound of that word. That Boss word. Boss. Boss. A good boss. A good master.-
Jim Kielty is a man on the run - from Moriarty, from Mahon, from his dubious past, his terrifying present and Charlie Bird. Developer, fixer, stroke-puller extraordinaire, the Irish 'King of Real Estate' has fled to Spain to escape the legal and media vultures on his tail.
But the past is not another country for Kielty, and as he loiters with no clear intent in his Spanish penthouse, his crimes and misdemeanours come back to
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haunt him as for the first time in his life he has the enforced leisure to reflect on his life and the lives of those who, like him, have poured their souls into bricks, mortar and vast amounts of warm money.
This is a one-man show about tribunals, legal and emotional. A Good Boss is an intense monologue of self-flagellation cum justification. Using an interactive sound score and projection it captures the panic and confusion of a man who finds that the rules he knows don?t apply anymore.
- A man who has nothing to atone for is not a man who has lived. Well I have lived. And my sins hang on me like a suit of patches. But still I can?t name them. I can't.-
Directed by Johnny Hanrahan
Featuring Michael Loughnan
Tues April 15 - Sat April 26 (8pm nightly)
Tickets €15/€10 conc.
Granary Theatre, Cork.
Booking 021 490 4275
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The Lost Field
Raccoon and The Exit Wound
Two National Tours - May/June 2008 & November 2008
Meridian's touring package combines two plays dealing with families sundered and re-united in bizarre circumstances. Raccoon tells the story of Saoirse who is offered the chance to re-construct her past and her future as a result of a chance encounter in the café where she works. The Exit Wound creates an intense ritual of return for an errant trad singer/storyteller who has been on the run from his wife and children for over forty years.
These two plays are part of an evening, which also involves a dinner at the 30ft table where The Exit Wound is subsequently performed and audience members become eavesdroppers on the homecoming party from hell.
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 Raccoon
By Tom Hall
Featuring Julie Sharkey
When I went to him he asked for his tea in a brown voice like dust in the road.
Grey and quiet he was, gazing at his plate from under heavy brows, with his eyes far apart. So were his hands, the way he ate. You could see he was a farmer again, the way he crowded his food, hedged it with his hands, like it was livestock or something, patiently.
I said something to him. I'm so stupid. Oh why did I?
Raccoon is a poignant, lyrical tale of small town Irish life. Centring on Saoirse, a waitress in a small café, it explores the great contemporary Irish themes of children laid aside but held in the heart as a lifelong yearning, of parents named and unnamed, lost and found.
Saoirse doesn't know who she is or where she comes from but by a bizarre chance encounter in her café she is offered the opportunity to reconstruct her past and her future.
He comes out with this, soft-like, 'Why don't you wear your hair in a chignon'?
You should have heard the way he pronounced it, I'm telling you - 'chignon'. Who taught it to him, I wondered.
'Are you a beautician'? I says.
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 The Exit Wound
By Johnny Hanrahan
Featuring: Michael Loughnan & Rosie O' Regan
Hugh is an itinerant singer/storyteller, a relic of Greenwich Village, the Folk Revival and the sixties generally, who left Ireland on the day of Kennedy's assassination and has returned finally, the prodigal father, after more than forty years.
During all that time he has ruled his family in absentia, a king across the water dispensing instructions, money, advice and a series of broken promises to his wife and children.
The action of The Exit Wound is a confrontation between Hugh and his granddaughter Julia who is the only one strong enough to resist the myth and see the man.
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Touring Schedule
Summer Tour 2008
- 28 May - An Tain, Dundalk
- 30 May - Garage Theatre, Monaghan
- 31 May - Tipperary Excel Centre, Tipperary Town
- 1 June - Moat Theatre, Naas
- 11 June - The Dock, Carrick On Shannon
- 13 June - Iontas Arts Centre, Castleblayney
- 14 & 15 June - Mullingar Arts Centre, Mullingar
- 19 June - Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar
- 20 & 21 June - Roscommon Arts Centre
- 27 June - Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge.
There are several more dates to be confirmed and added to this schedule.
Autumn Tour 2008
venues and dates to be confirmed. Interested parties are welcome to contact us for further information
Raccoon
Apart from it's role in The Lost Field, Raccoon is touring constantly to community groups of all kinds (Adult Literacy, ICA, Cheshire Homes, Elders Groups, Cafes, Bars, Small festivals, Simon, Hospitals, etc)
The minimal cost and flexibility of performance spaces continue to guarantee the effectiveness of this powerful piece as a touring show for anyone who chooses to gather a group to watch it. It will tour indefinitely.
Raccoon will play a four-week residency in Bewley's Café Theatre on Dublin's Grafton Street in July/August 2008.
Exact dates to be confirmed.
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There Are Little Kingdoms
by Kevin Barry
There Are Little Kingdoms is an extraordinary portrait of contemporary Irish small town life in all its seedy glory. Adapted by the author from his award-winning book of short stories, the piece traces and intercuts delusions, dreams and disasters in the everyday lives of organic farmers and alcoholics, red-hot middle-aged lovers, kings of karaoke, chinese chipper afficionadoes, psychic taxi drivers, pool sharks, bad girls in JCBs and lost boys in the lake, to create a dystopian Under Milk Wood for the Irish badlands, circa 2008.
Framed as a pass-the-mike session, the piece is staged with audience and actors intermingled, scattered at tables in a lounge bar.
A Casio keyboard-playing MC runs the show and the multiple stories grow and fade, cut across and swirl around one another as a series of scenes, monologues and songs contributing to a night of killer "turns". Barry's inky humour creates a comedy of misfits and losers, fantasists and sexy young psychopaths, but beneath the laughter is a dark satire of the shiny Ireland where terms and conditions always apply.
This exciting new play will run from mid September to early October at Cork's Granary Theatre.
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Thailand
by Brian Desmond and Mairtin de Cogain
Thailand is about sex tourism and it is shocking. It shocks not by the sordid business it describes but by the level of unthinking violence that its gormless young Cork hero unleashes in his pursuit of the full tourist package. Blind to his own role in sexploitation, our hedonist hero sleepwalks his way from bar to bar and whore to whore as if out looking for new shoes. And then he comes home. Gets back to normal. After his break.
Premiered by the Be Your Own Banana company at the 2007 Cork Midsumer Festival, this show is a tour de force from legendary Cork storyteller Mairtin de Cogain (alias De Bogman). With nothing but a bad hairdo and a worse shirt he conjures a world of casual excess and desperate poverty, and shows how comfortable we've become in our new finery as feelgood oppressors and feckless imperialists.
It's funny too - profoundly tasteless - and makes you feel just a bit ashamed that you're enjoying it so much. As a blast of no-holds-barred satire on Irish complacency and moral autism, Thailand is as important a text as has emerged in Ireland in the last 5 years.
If you missed out last time, then don't miss it again - Thailand runs for a second time at Cork's Granary Theatre in September 2008.
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| Email: info@meridiantheatre.com | Telephone: + 353 21 4276837 | Fax: + 353 21 4279134 |
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