NOMINATED! Lead Performer in a Play, Stephen Kennedy (Off West End Awards)
NOMINATED! New Play, Eugene O’Hare (Off West End Awards)
In March 2020 acclaimed Irish actor and writer Eugene O’Hare sent Omnibus Theatre a message of support in the wake of our first lockdown closure, generously proposing that he rally a bunch of UK theatre’s top acting talents to support our theatre, when the day came that we were able to open our doors again.
Exactly one year later, with reopening around the corner, Eugene made good on his promise and brought us two new punchy and provocative pieces of work. Larry Devlin Wants to Talk to You About Something That Happened, originally intended to premiere as part of the Barbican’s cancelled Ghost Light series, and Child 786 will kick off our first full theatre season in over a year.
Written and directed by Eugene himself and starring a quartet of fantastic actors, we are thrilled to present these two new plays as part of our Summer Season 2021.
Larry Devlin Wants to Talk to You About Something That Happened
Memory can make a fiction of reality, and in a quiet town a tiny forgotten moment from the past vividly returns to single father, Larry Devlin.
Child 786
During Lockdown, twenty-two year old Lennox leaves his deserted university campus and returns to live with his single mother, Hilary. It’s not ideal. Both of them have big personalities and both hold very different opinions on the global crisis. But Lennox has a new theory. He thinks he has been in a sort of lockdown since the day he was born. Child 786 is a black-comedy about the extremes of family life in an extreme situation.
Eugene O’Hare‘s two debut full-length plays, both published by Methuen, opened to critical and public acclaim in London in 2019, with a cast including Miriam Margolyes. He wrote the film The Music Room for BBC 2, penned the widely-performed teenage cancer play Hospital Food for National Theatre Connections, and wrote the hard-hitting play Refuge for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Several of his short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, narrated by actors including Stephen Rea. Recent poetry featured in The Galway Review and as a news piece in The Irish News. New poems will appear this summer in literary magazines such as Crossways, Beyond Words and under Anne Devlin‘s literary editorship at Fortnight.
As an actor he recently filmed a new role for season six of Outlander. Television and film credits include recurring roles in Marcella, The Fall and Dublin Murders. He has appeared in Black Mirror and Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus. Stage work includes originating roles in hit plays such as The Ferryman (Royal Court and West End) and Red Velvet (Tricycle and St Ann’s Warehouse, NYC) along with critically celebrated revivals and classic plays True West (Tricycle), Cymbeline (Shakespeare’s Globe) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (Old Vic and Broadway).
Larry Devlin Wants to Talk to You About Something That Happened will star Stephen Kennedy (22 – 27 + 29 June), a regular voice on BBC Radio 4’s The Archers seen on stage in Sweet Charity (Donmar Warehouse) and Plough and the Stars (National Theatre) and on screen in Notes on a Scandal (2006) and Braveheart (1995), and Ed Hogg (30 June – 4 July) whose recent credits include Taboo (BBC), The Wild Duck (Almeida), Woyzeck (Gate Theatre) and Our Class (National Theatre).
Child 786 will star Josh Williams, whose recent credits include Touching The Void (Duke of York Theatre and Bristol Old Vic), One Night In Miami (Donmar Warehouse) and New Views: Is There WiFi in Heaven? (National Theatre), and Ishia Bennison who has been seen in Romeo and Juliet (RSC), Missing People (National Theatre, Tokyo) and Happy Valley (BBC).
This performance will take place with a live audience at Omnibus Theatre.
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