Eamon Morrissey & ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!’

The first week of the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1964 was largely a bleak affair. Reviews in the English papers were mostly negative, and Irish theatre faced “a scramble to survive”, warned the playwright Eugene McCabe.

Street poetry in Ballymun

A century ago, at the Abbey, a young writer mentioned women’s underwear in a new play, and the audience rioted.

Fifty years ago, in the Dublin Theatre Festival, a young director staged a play that involved a condom being thrown on stage, and the director was arrested.

Then, last year, in the Dublin Fringe Festival, a young theatre maker wrote a play about casual sex and hard drinking. She won a new writing award, and has been busy visiting schools to talk about it.

Grace Dyas is a college drop-out, a youth theatre veteran, a theatre company founder, a producer, a director, an actor and a playwright. She’s 20. She talks too fast to take notes and, to judge by her script, has no idea how to use an apostrophe. But she can write like a fallen angel.

Dyas’s play, Rough, gets a welcome revival at the Axis in Ballymun next Thursday and Friday (tickets from (01) 883 2100 and www.axis-ballymun.ie). It’s a gutsy piece of street poetry, a litany of confessional insights into what people older than Dyas (like me) would call “youth culture”, and what Dyas and co would likely call “life”.

The pornographer who invented Wanderley Wagon

This is re-posted here to tie in with next week’s column, on the forthcoming production of Rough by Grace Dyas at the Axis Ballymun. Originally published in Village, 2007.

On the evening of May 21, 1957, a Garda Inspector arrived at 18a Herbert Lane, an old coach house on a laneway off Baggot St in Dublin. The coach house had been refurbished and opened as the Pike Theatre a few years before. The Inspector asked for the co-owner and director of that evening’s play, Alan Simpson, and read to him from a document issued by the Deputy Garda Commissioner. It had been brought to the attention of the police, read the document, that the play being produced that evening contained “objectionable passages”. These passages were to be removed if the performance was to proceed. If the play went ahead without cuts, Simpson and the co-owner of the theatre, Carolyn Swift (also his wife), would be liable for prosecution. The Inspector would not identify what passages were to be removed, and Simpson and Swift went ahead with the performance.