Playwright Kate Heffernan introduces her new play, Guest Host Stranger Ghost - the story of three people living in someone else's home, it is designed to be performed on the sets of other people’s plays.
This unique show will criss-cross the city this October, 'borrowing' the stages of other Dublin Theatre Festival productions.
As a renter, I always swapped housing horror stories with other renters. A bedhead covered in black mould. An electric shower that gives electric shocks. A landlord who lets himself in to leave ominous binbags in the locked garden shed. A kitchen drawer filled to the brim with elastic bands from supermarket chickens. A mystery odour. So many mystery odours.
The invisible line that connected these horrors was always precarity: in a city crippled by its lack of housing, desperate renters fit themselves into any available gaps, accepting unsound and unstable solutions out of sheer necessity. Short leases, broken leases, no leases at all. The only thing scarier than living in a haunted house in Dublin? The landlord of the haunted house not renewing your tenancy.
When I began thinking about this play in 2018, after more than a decade of renting in the city, I realised that the abiding feeling was of keeping my boots on, of having flattened cardboard boxes neatly stacked under my bed, ready to be reassembled and repacked at a moment’s notice.
(Pic: Senija Topcic)
I became interested in the psychology of this, in what it means to not have your own space, in how a life of transience becomes embodied, shaping decisions, paths, relationships.
The story centres on a mismatched trio who rent a house owned by an elderly woman now living her last days in a nursing home. Set in an ageing 2-up-2-down built in Crumlin during Dublin’s twentieth century housing boom, the play has as its backdrop the Nursing Home Support 'Fair Deal’ Scheme, a financial support for people needing long-term nursing home care.
With lightness and the humour, the conversations are the kinds of ones you overhear in the communal spaces of all house shares, seemingly mundane exchanges about rent, responsibilities, work, life—toilet paper. But the banality belies an intimacy, as people who haven’t chosen to live together attempt to find connection in the short time they’re here—and a space for themselves amongst the stuff of the woman’s entire life.
The only thing scarier than living in a haunted house in Dublin? The landlord of the haunted house not renewing your tenancy.
The form for the play, in which our story would become a ‘guest’ performance on a ‘host’ set, emerged from the explosive pressure of this idea. Where the story and the characters explore how transience becomes embodied, the play itself confronts in real terms what it means to not have your own space.
In rehearsals (led by director Eoghan Carrick), the usual certainties were off the cards. ‘Blocking’ - the process by which actors’ movements are established in relation to stage, set, audience - was impossible. When you come along to one of the performances, actors Finbarr Doyle, Shadaan Felfeli and Maeve O’Mahony will not have rehearsed on that stage. They will be finding their way through in real time. And they will not perform the play on that same set ever again.
From the intimate studio-sized surrounds of Project Cube to the theatrical expanses of The Gate, each iteration offers the possibility of a completely new set of movements, connections, meanings.
It is in this unrepeatability that the real energy of the play lies: the ephemerality of theatre at its most extreme.
I hope you get a chance to experience it. At least once.
Guest Host Stranger Ghost runs at Project Arts Centre, Smock Alley Theatre and the Gate Theatre from 3rd – 13th October, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2024 - find out more here.
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