Collins, a man of contradiction and complexity

The Chief by Jimmy Murphy, a new play about Michael Collins, runs at the Town Hall Theatre Galway from Sept 8-17, 8pm, before transferring to Westport and Longford. It explores Collins’s dream for a United Ireland, his guilt about the civil war and his relationship with Kitty Kiernan. Murphy says his play looks at the contradictions and complexities in the man. ‘The closer you look [at] the things that were hiding in plain sight in the weeks leading up to his death, the more revealing they are as to what happened.’ The Decadent Production has Ryan Donaldson as Michael Collins, Maeve Fitzgerald as Kitty Kiernan, and Liam Heslin, Kyle Hixon, Shane O’Regan and Jarlath Tivnan.

■ Mespil in The Dark Live, which runs at The Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, from Sept 5–10, 7.30pm, is a dark comedy by Eugene O’Brien about the hell of making theatre. A Pan Pan production, it started life as a series of short films around the actor/writer residents of Mespil flats in Dublin. The audience will sit around the three sides of a bare stage in the Samuel Beckett Theatre. Central to it all is Bill O’Malley, who has brought three actors along to perform a play he has written. We are brought into the painful process of rehearsal and hear stories of life in the theatre. It’s described as a show for anyone who has ever loved or hated the theatre, the hell of rehearsals and of those who spend their lives as understudies, waiting hopefully in the wings, with all the rites, observances and peculiarities of the acting world. There are occasional surprises, including a pantomime horse. Centre stage in it all is the splendidly voiced Robert O’Mahoney, an actor with all the panache and presence of an oldtime actor-manager, along with Pan Pan regular Andrew Bennett, recently seen in the film An Cailín Ciúin, Pauline Hutton, and Ahmed Karim Tamu.