‘Big Maggie’ - with a twist - coming this autumn

THEATRE patrons can expect an exciting new production from the award winning Shoestring Theatre Company director Kevin O’Shea, who will stage a unique and unusual presentation of John B. Keane’s ‘Big Maggie’ at the Schoolyard Theatre, Charleville in the utumn.

“We intend going into rehearsal at the end of July for the first production by a Charleville group of this Keane play, which was written by the Kerry playwright in 1969 and is set in sixties Ireland, when women were kept strictly in the background and had no voice,” said Kevin.

“We will have an expanded cast and will open the show with an outdoor scene, which will necessitate the creation of a cemetery at the back of the theatre and will include the ritual of a wake, funeral and burial, and all that that entails, prior to the first scene on stage,” he said.

The play is on the Leaving Certificate course this coming year and so should be of particular interest to Leaving Certificate students in the secondary schools in the area and indeed beyond. There will be an after-show question and answer discussion on the play between the director, cast and audience on the night that students are in the theatre, to give them a deeper insight into the theme of the play and its interpretation by the director.

The last play staged by the Shoestring was the one-man show ‘After Sarah Miles’ by Michael Hilliard Mulcahy which featured William Lyons, and which was staged at Writer’s Week in Listowel last month.

If anybody would like to get involved in this new project the Shoestring they should get in touch with Kevin O’Shea, who will be delighted to talk to them.

The last time there was an outdoor scene in a Shoestring play at the Schoolyard Theatre was in another Keane play, when the murder scene in ‘ The Field,’ which featured John Kenny as the Bull McCabe, was enacted. The play ran for 33 nights and Kevin says that his version of ‘Big Maggie’ should be another spectacular success.

He is presently assembling what will be an outstanding cast for the production, which is expected to begin its initial run at the Schoolyard between the middle and end of September.