RADIANT reviews followed the staging of Liam McCarthy’s first play ‘A Talent for Lying’ in Dublin’s Chancery Lane in March last year. This response was backed by further approval to August 2015’s run in Camden Fringe Theatre Festival; London Theatre Review purred.
Then this actor/ playwright’s first professional production ‘Falling’ had a three night jig at No. 69 O’Connell Street, which led to Torch Players’ Maurice O’Sullivan soliciting of ‘A Talent for Lying’ for the coming run at Loft Venue.
This is one of three short plays scheduled. The others are ‘Please Take a Seat’ by Garth Wingfield, and ‘Plaster’, running together from Wednesday October 21 to Friday 23, 8pm at George’s Quay.
McCarthy is delighted to be one of, especially as this time he is actor in the two-part challenge with actress Sinead O’Brien.
Sarah Bradley of Bristol Vic Theatre School directs for their company Octopus Soup, as she did for ‘Falling’. The scene is a man and woman in a café, people of uncertain age and timeframe, despite vintage-y attire. Now playing the interested male to female interest, what’s is like to flip being the playwright?
“Suddenly it’s a play I’ve never seen before and never read before,” this likeable Castletroy man admits.
He relates a setting whereby each agent on stage is putting the wind up the other. It’s a sexual tease and one for the audience who cannot pin time, purpose, era to it. “We are not quite sure what the relationship is. Is it a memory? Is he a widower?”
Trinity trained in drama, Liam McCarthy as both actor and writer is feeling optimistic as to ‘A Talent for Lying’s local impact. “It feels good. For me, and I’ve been writing since I was 13, for the first time it feels finished. Some of the feelings that I get when I get I right, it’s as I want it to be”.
For Torch Players, Maurice O’Sullivan drafted in Dan Mooney (air traffic controller by day) to direct the television writer Richard Harris’ ‘Plaster’. Mooney came back into stagelife having left MIDAS a decade ago, showing out with aplomb as Capt. Molyneux in ‘The Shaughraun and as ‘Hardy’ in Torch’s stunning ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.
Directing is new but ‘Plaster’ proved a game choice and casting obvious when Tim Cusack – better known as Dame for Limerick Panto Society – and Antoinette Portley presented.
“It’s one in a series of six small tales told from visiting hour in a hospital. Some are quite moving and poignant. ‘Plaster’ is not. It’s hilarious, there’s no room for poignancy here but this is a funny play from start to finish”.
Mooney credits assistant director Jen Ní Mhaoileoin and actors with momentum in their fast-moving rehearsals of this 20-minute ‘exploration’ between a wayward husband emerging from a coma, and his suspicious wife: “I’ve rarely laughed so much. We are enjoying the giggles and have bought into the suspense and the characters”.
Tickets on door October 21-23 at Loft Venue, over Locke Bar are €10, 8pm shows.
