Month: June 2015

Midsummer Night’s Dream with Ruby in the Dust at The Arts Theatre in London’s West End launches!

Moonlight and Sweet Confusion. Delicious.This is already such a special project, you can feel it in your bones just watching the promotional vid:

This having been released today, my experience of it gave me goosebumps, literally.
It is a well-crafted promo trailer and also captures the spirit of the piece and of the values of the production team and company.
I was particularly touched by the care given to acknowledge the whole company including cast, even extending to naming the company in the end credits.
Such generosity of heart belies the confidence of Director Linnie Reedman and Musical Director Joe Evans in what they do.

I feel huge gratitude to be an actor in this production of the Midsummer Night’s Dream that is already weaving its magic.

The McGowan Trilogy

I have been meditating on my personal response to the piece, for the purposes of finding a quote for the programme.
What the piece means to me today is as follows:
¨For a large part of my early childhood in the 1970’s I lived with my actor mother, Annie Balfour and stepfather, Dublin-born actor Derrick O’Connor in Shepherds Bush, West London, at the heart of a then thriving community of actors, theatre makers and filmakers passionate about their identity as people of Ireland settling in Britain. At the same time, the IRA bombs exploded in and around the areas I frequented. Fear became an ever-present norm.
I could never have imagined then that I would one day find myself discovering and empathising with the humanity, sufferings and struggle of the people responsible for those bombs. And yet, on reading The McGowan Trilogy and through the research that has followed, this is what I have experienced.
A people brutalised and made desperate by the intolerable oppression they had endured, since far beyond the uprising of 1916, sincerely believing theirs was a just and necessary life-and-death struggle for freedom. Discovering, as we all invariably and inevitably do, that in a war of violence there can be no victors. That following a path of violence can only lead to the corruption of our humanity.¨