Moon Cut Like a Sickle in Dundrum

Boy, what a day-out I had yesterday!

My little play 'The Moon Cut Like a Sickle' which Castlebar's own wonderful DoYou Playhouse took on, enlivened and made real.. well, it packed it's bags and moved off to Dublin.

I went up to The Mill Theatre in Dundrum yesterday to see how it was getting on.

It's a play for young people,- teens, like. But what I had expected from yesterday was that the excellent adults who had done the first Dundrum reading a few months back would be returning to do a rehearsed reading.

And I was looking forward to that - although it's really a youth play, the adult actors had read it with entusiasm and understanding and no small measure of venom in places. I knew they'd do something good and I was dead keen to see it.

But what a surprise waswaiting when I got there.

The adults weren't reading it.

No. Here was a new group of young actors who had been quietly working on the text with their director, Oran, for some weeks previous and they were ready and able to deliver their reading.

This was like several of my Christmas's had come together.

The adults would have been great but I wrote this thing for young people and to see a bunch of them arrive as if from nowhere, fully prepared for the performance was exciting, fun and a great great honour.

Yesterday went so well that a new production with this new group - Balally Youth Theatre - is now on the cards for early 2008.So to Tomas Hoyne, Patrick Dexter, Shane Murphy, Matt Powell, Rachel Fitzpatrick, Laura Byrne, Niamh Holland, Amy Morrison and director and actor Oran O'Rua, I just wanna say thanks, you did great!

And this week, as we start into an exciting new theatrical escapade with my beloved friends in DoYou Playhouse, I just want to say again what I've always said - 'The Moon..' didn't come to you guys at DoYou Playhouse in the shape it is now - you nurtured it and grew it and any future performance will always owe a debt to the work you did - because much of that work is there on the pages of the script.

I feel lucky today.

Thanks for that.

No comments: