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In the Garden hits the airwaves


IN The Garden, a play by Mountshannon’s Siobhán Donnellan, will be broadcast on Clare FM this Sunday evening.

 

It is a black comedy involving two souls who meet unexpectedly, having found themselves caught between this world and the next.

Siobhán plays Úna, a woman who lived through a violent marriage before dying alone but who never gave up hope of ‘finding the right fit’.

Roscommon actor Ben Mulhern plays Jimmy, a taxidermist living in isolation in rural Ireland. His skills gave animals a type of immortality but he says, “The work wasn’t great for attracting women and I’m thinking the smell didn’t help much”.

It is produced by Marian Egan, directed by Aoife Connolly and the music was composed by Aisling Quinn. The production was supported by the BAI Sound and Vision Scheme.

Speaking to The Clare Champion, Siobhán said while she has been involved in drama for several years, initially she was really only interested in acting.

“I did the masters in drama in Galway and graduated in 2006. I was really interested in performance at that stage. I hadn’t really considered writing at all.

“As the years rolled on, I realised that parts were few and far between and that it’d be a great opportunity to maybe generate some work for myself if I could write.

“There was an opportunity to go up to Queen’s University. There was a pilot of a performance course there in 2009. I got a place in that, it was an intensive three-month course and we created a couple of shows during that. That was what kick-started me and I realised you can generate your own work with a bit of focus and a bit of imagination and whatever else.”

After finishing the course, she co-wrote a play with one of the other students, Jen Browne, and they brought it to the New York Fringe Festival in 2010. She followed it up with another one-act play called Chasing Butterflies, before writing In the Garden.

While she wrote that for the stage, she feels it works better on radio. “It was written initially for the stage but I always felt that it would be a better fit for radio. It was a tricky one to stage. I didn’t direct it, which I was kind of relieved about because it was a hard one. It’s a series of monologues, with a little bit of dialogue.

“When you have actors doing monologues, it’s always difficult to know what to do with them, when there isn’t interaction going on. I knew it would be a good fit for the radio and I adapted it. It took a little bit of work to rethink it.

“You’re always thinking visually when you’re writing a stage play so I just had to sit down and imagine what I needed people to hear. It just meant adapting it and thinking audio, instead of visual.”

She does some freelance performances as well and appeared in the Town Hall in Galway last year in a production by Mephisto Theatre.

While In the Garden has a relatively dark theme, she says she wanted it to be entertaining at the same time. “I do my best to try and do dark plays through humour, if I can. That’s what I intend to do. Whether I succeed or not is up to the listeners.

“It’s always more poignant when it’s funny and the darkness doesn’t hit you till afterwards. That’s how I’d attempt to do it. While it’s always nice to do a play with a message and what not, you have to be entertained as well. That’s what I’d be attempting to do anyway.”

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