IT WAS once said of the Abbey Theatre Co that its actors were the best fed in Ireland due to the proliferation of plays which featured scenes of dining.
However Cork’s Meridian Theatre Co have gone one better by laying on a full meal for the audience as part of their production The Lost Field which comes to Galway next week.
The Lost Field comprises two one-acts; Tom Hall’s Racoon and Johnny Hanrahan’s Exit Wound. Both plays deal with families sundered and re-united in bizarre circumstances.
Racoon – featuring Julie Sharkey - is a poignant, lyrical tale of small town Irish life. Centring on Saoirse, a waitress in a small café, it explores the great contemporary Irish themes of children laid aside but held in the heart as a lifelong yearning, of parents named and unnamed, lost and found.
Saoirse does not know who she is or where she comes from but by a bizarre chance encounter in her café she is offered the opportunity to reconstruct her past and her future.
Exit Wound, featuring Michael Loughnan and Rosie O’Regan, creates an intense ritual of return for an errant trad singer/storyteller who has been on the run from his wife and children for more than 40 years.
The central character, Hugh, is a relic of Greenwich Village, the folk revival and the sixties generally, who left Ireland on the day of Kennedy’s assassination and has returned finally, the prodigal father.
During all that time he has ruled his family in absentia, a king across the water dispensing instructions, money, advice, and a series of broken promises to his wife and children. The action of Exit Wound is a confrontation between Hugh and his granddaughter Julia who is the only one strong enough to resist the myth and see the man
These two plays are part of an evening, which also involves a dinner at the 30ft table where Exit Wound is subsequently performed and audience members become eavesdroppers on the homecoming party from hell.
Ahead of Meridian’s Galway visit, company director - and Exit Wound author - Johnny Hanrahan spoke about this intriguing double-header.
“Both plays have had their own independent lives so to speak, but we got the idea of putting them together for this tour and they work very well,” he says. “The idea for the meal came from audience reaction to the initial performances of Exit Wound which was done at this bare table and it somehow seemed too stark so we decided to incorporate a meal into the evening. Audiences have really enjoyed the novelty of that.”
Hanrahan goes on to talk about the individual plays.
“Racoon is by Tom Hall who’s an American expat who’s lived here for the past 15 years. He has an extraordinary ability to use a recognisably Irish idiom that is somehow heightened and stylised in a way that gives it a real theatrical quality.
“My own play Exit Wound is about a storyteller/singer and storytelling forms a huge part of the play’s action – Hugh tells stories to his daughter and she responds to those. It’s basically about the ways in which we all tell stories of our lives. The two plays are each substantial dramas in their own right but taken together the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”
The Lost Field is on for one night only at Tara restaurant at 38 Lower Dominick Street on Tuesday at 8pm. Tickets are €30 – which include price of a meal – and are available from the Town Hall (091 569777 ). Early booking is advisable and numbers are limited.
