Solpadeine is my boyfriend

Solpadeine
HIT plays from 23 year-old out of work actors are scarcer than pink diamonds but since Stefanie Preissner delivered โ€˜Solpadeine is my Boyfriendโ€™ to the world, well, the world just canโ€™t get enough.
She acts alone in this short (60-minute) play set in the milieu of disenfranchised twenty-somethings. Reared in the boom years of expectations, earnings, credit and spend, they now find themselves at sea like flotsam, if not already overseas looking for work.
Itโ€™s a dark comedy that sold out when premiered at the Dublin based 2012 Absolut Fringe theatre festival. โ€˜Solpadeine is my Boyfriendโ€™, directed by Gina Moxley and produced by With an โ€˜Fโ€™ Productions, was nominated for two awards.
โ€œNo, I did not expect that much success when I wrote it,โ€ Preissner admits. โ€œSo much work goes into writing a play that it is great to get life out of it and two years is just great.โ€
Success is all the more surprising as this creative stopped writing for five years after her dรฉbut work โ€˜Our Fatherโ€™, again with an autobiographical element, failed: โ€œIt was gloriously awful, overly sentimental.โ€
Preissner continued training and working as an actor and had proper expectations โ€“ โ€œdrama school can give one a false sense of worthโ€ โ€“ but reality and the crash bit.
She explains the appeal of โ€˜Solpadeine is my Boyfriendโ€™, downloaded in countries everywhere from the RTE podcast, as โ€œpeople really connecting with it. Itโ€™s hard to know the demographic of each audience but people from aged 13 to 90 have seen the playโ€.
The play is built on the poles of depression, immigration and addiction, following the journey of a girl from Cork to Dublin in search of work and love.
At Lime Tree Theatre, Thursday November 21 only, at 8pm.

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