Theatremaker Lianne O'Shea introduces PLAY, a site-responsive, promenade theatre experience using selected text from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, coming to the Moat Theatre in Naas this August.
Hamlet was my Leaving Cert play – I didn't love it and I didn’t love Shakespeare.
It took a series of workshops with director Michael Barker Caven and voice director at the Abbey, Andrea Ainsworth to open my eyes to the heart-stopping beauty of this work – and I was hooked, though I still didn’t want to work on Hamlet!
So, in 2022 when I began to plan a show that would become This House is Elsinore for the Kildare Culture Night Commission it surprised me that Hamlet is what became its core. Hamlet was the play of the Covid Leaving Certs – a bunch of students who wouldn’t have gotten to experience it together in a theatre – indeed a group of people isolated from their peers unable to head to university… was it this resonance with the character Hamlet that set me down the path? Or just that I felt the echo of my own experience with the play?
My ambitions had been lofty: an immersive promenade performance of the entire piece! Realism prevailed and in that first year we explored Hamet's relationships with the two women in his life at the same time as we considered how an actor copes with the weight of a role like this in the shadow of so many acting greats. However, the magpie in me had loved the idea of the armature group based in the theatre taking part as the travelling players in Hamlet – I couldn't leave this shiny thing behind… and it became a jumping off point for PLAY.
PLAY is a celebration of what we do together in a rehearsal room.
The Moat Club was established in Naas in 1954 – a vibrant part of their community and a home for many creative souls across the years. I first met them when I moved to Naas while still in college – it was an immediate link into a new town and a sense of kinship which has all the positive (and negative) associations of family. They massively supported my progression through my training, providing time and space for my transition to a professional artist. After lockdown what had been a vibrant hub of activity felt somehow diminished – not least because age and illness had caught up with so many of the older members.
The grief I felt at what was lost and what was being lost became another pillar to the work. I started recording interviews with members – their recollections of times in the club, their experiences on shows, stories of their travels around the country on the drama festival circuit including to the Peacock theatre as winners of the competition. Beyond this they started to tell me of friends who had already gone, and about what a place like this had meant in their lives. Honouring that, honouring what we do in making work, the various stages from rehearsal to performance became important to the fabric of the new show.
As I thought about the aspects of Hamlet that would run in tandem with this, I reached out to Pat Kinevane – an actor who I knew had a connection with the Moat Club. When he initially came from Cork to the east coast of the country it was to work in the post office in Naas and through that had formed a connection with the club (going on to devise and direct an All-Ireland winning one-act play with them). In our initial conversation about his coming on board, he spoke about what it meant to him to have the support of the club members when as a young man he lost his own father and might otherwise have felt isolated and alone in a strange town but they wrapped around him and looked after him – like family. Inevitably PLAY began to look at the father son relationship and the centre of Hamlet, about how a young man deals with grief, and the place that community and theatre have in offering solace and comfort in the face of despair.
PLAY is a celebration of what we do together in a rehearsal room, it is a communion with so many other actors who have moved through the theatre and left an echo of themselves behind, and it is a love letter to the Moat and the friends that we made there.
PLAY is at the Moat Theatre, Naas from August 20 - 23, 2024 - find out more here.
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