For this year's Dublin Fringe Festival, Theatre Lovett stage an exciting new family show that features a blood-loving character that helps a talented maestro see the realities of how life should be conducted.
Award-winning playwright Carmel Winters introduces The Maestro And The Mosquita below...
I loved watching Laurel and Hardy with my father. I loved hearing him laugh alongside me, loved knowing we were sharing the same delight at the antics of this classic comedy duo.
My father was deaf in a hearing family of twelve children. He had no contact with deaf culture. He cupped his hand around his ear, leaned in close to decipher whatever was shouted at him but otherwise remained apart. Watching Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin together was a revelation. We had at last a shared language, a shared experience. I knew what made him laugh. And it was the same things that made me laugh. That search for experiences that bring us together across whatever divides us guides me in the making of plays and films.
The Maestro and the Mosquita was inspired by a trip to Malta with my wife. We went to visit the Hypogeum, an ancient underground city of the dead that lay undiscovered beneath the homes of the living for many centuries. At the centre of the structure is an "Oracle Room" where any sound you make reverberates throughout all the other interconnecting chambers. I remember sounding whispers into a carved hollow in the stone and hearing strangers in other chambers whispering and singing back. Magic.
One night in our Airbnb I was awoken by the whine of a mosquito on the hunt for blood. When burrowing under the sheet didn't work, (it was in there with me), I ended up chasing my tiny nemesis around the room with a flip flop, dragging heavy furniture away from the walls to try and get at it. When I returned to bed shortly before dawn, (without the stain of a successfully squashed mosquito on my sandal), I marveled that this tiny creature could be the most deadly enemy known to humankind. With the prospect of sleep banished, I googled to find out more about my tiny torturer and discovered that it is only the female mosquito who bites us. The male is a vegetarian but the female needs blood to nurture her babies. So, she’s not trying to torment us, she’s just trying to survive.
In that 'aha’ moment The Maestro and the Mosquita was sparked.
I lay in bed for the rest of the short night imagining a brilliant Maestro intent on making music to please the Gods, only to be sabotaged by this teeny tiny creature, devilishly intent on extracting his blood to feed her babies. In the days that followed the spectre of this quintessential odd couple continued to entertain me with their antics and when I got home I contacted Stephen Warbeck.
Stephen collaborated with me on my feature film Float Like A Butterfly and, as well as being an Oscar-winning composer (for his score for Shakespeare In Love), he’s a truly lovely man with a great sense of mischief. The Maestro and the Mosquita appealed to him as much as it did me so that emboldened me to find the actor through whom the play would either live or die.
In my mind’s eye, I saw one person immediately – Louis Lovett, the Buster Keaton of our times, endlessly inventive and audaciously delightful to audiences of all ages, makes and sizes. I’d written my play B for Baby especially for Theatre Lovett, the company he runs with his wife, the director, producer and my dear friend Muireann Ahern.
Muireann not only ‘got’ The Maestro and the Mosquita, she set about bringing together a dream team of creative artists to realise it. I was delighted when Louis read the play and said he felt like he had written it himself. Through workshops since, I thrill to watch him improvise and elaborate the play in collaboration with myself, Stephen, Muireann and the team. We are making family to make theatre for other families to come together to laugh and cry and laugh some more together. How magic is that?
The Maestro and the Mosquita runs at Project Arts Centre as part Dublin Fringe Festival 2024, from September 12 – 15th - find out more here.
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