A new podcast in which two writers attempt to develop a film in real time, with no preparation.

Featuring Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal.

Download: Let’s write a film – Episode 2.

Previous episodes.

A new podcast in which two writers attempt to develop a film in real time, with no preparation.

Featuring Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal.

Download:  Let’s Write A Film.

Love and Money is a little known play from 2006, an early work by Dennis Kelly, the London Irish television writer who would go on to create controversial British television series Pulling & Utopia. The play debuted at the Manchester Royal Exchange, before moving to the Young Vic. It was recently staged in Dublin by the La Touche Players, in a production directed by James O’Connor. The play has been called variously ‘one of the best new plays of the year’ and ‘beyond doubt the most self indulgent drivel I’ve ever reviewed’.

Our protagonists David & Jess, live their lives backwards, moving from horrific conclusion to existential conundrum – by way of addictive shopping and sexual harassment. Thematically, Love and Money is a contemporary piece – concerned with the impact of debt and the crushing phenomenology of the bureaucracy on families and marriages. Tonally it’s a pitch black comedy, with aspirations to social criticism. We take two hours to explore this timely piece of modern theatre.

Download: Episode 16 – Love & Money

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Image – Rude Guerrilla Theatre Company production 2009.

A satire of the Southern potboiler in the form of a beauty pageant, The Miss Firecracker Contest was first performed at a tiny LA theatre in 1980. Later moving to an off Broadway production directed by ubiquitous character actor and storyteller Stephen Tobolowsky. Tobolowsky’s childhood experiences served as the inspiration for this story of narcissism and loathing at the Mississippi Rose of Tralee. The part of rakish Brontesque lead Delmount was written with him in mind. Miss Firecracker Contest was later adapted into a film starring Holly Hunter. Beth Henley’s script has been praised for it’s ‘quirky characters’ and ‘strong messages’, but is this a profound comedic examination of the lives of Southern women? Or merely a message in a bottle – a didactic wafer thin work, constrained by form and inhabited by shadows?

The play centres around one aspiring firecracker Carnelle Scot, raised by her cousins – the glamorous Elain Routledge and the roguish sex offender Delmount Williams. Carnelle’s efforts to win the contest are aided by her goggle-eyed, underclass seamstress Popeye Jackson, and deterred by her reputation as a floozy. Despite having cleaned up her act and treated her syphilis, Carnelle is haunted by the neglect and abandonment of her parents and her years as the town’s good time. Meanwhile Carnelle’s lush cousin Elain has left her wealthy husband, and her hated brother Delmount has returned from his imprisonment in a mental asylum – where he was committed due to his penchant for broken bottle fights, devirginations and attempted strangulations – to sell the family mansion.

Download: Episode 15 – The Miss Firecracker Contest

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Martin McDonagh’s 1996 play ‘The Cripple of Inishmaan’ is the first in a loosely defined and as yet unfinished Aran Island Trilogy. Set on the most banal of the islands, Inish Maan, in the early 1930s, the play is a violently farcical examination of family, social exclusion and the noble lie. Cripple of Inishmaan was recently revived on Broadway in a production starring Daniel Radcliff, and Pat Short, winning six Tonys. Another sterling success for a playwright who once said “Theatre isn’t something that’s connected to me, from a personal point of view, I can’t appreciate what I’m doing.”

Download: Episode 14 – The Cripple of Inishmaan

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play:

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

A family history entwined with the legacy of slavery. Black urban poverty in 1930’s Pittsburg. Criminality and working class aspirations. Intersectionality and the patriarchy of the poor. August Wilson’s Piano Lesson is an issue play, and winner of the Pulizer prize. Does this relentlessly grim parlour drama descend into stereotyped kitsch, or lend it’s denigrated characters a nobility transcending their circumstances?

Download: Episode 13 – The Piano Lesson

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Play Breakdown

The Title: The Piano Lesson

Title taken from the Matisse painting, which in turn depicts a painting of woman on a high stool looking down on a child learning piano. The painting contrasts the soft image of the child with the harsh painted viewer and a stiff sculpture in the foreground, evoking ‘sensuality and hard work’.

The title obviously also refers to the fable like nature of the narrative, which contrasts elements of social realism with an extremely broad tone, reminiscent of the Uncle Remus stories of the African American South.

Similarity to Brian Friel

The Piano Lesson is thematically reminiscent of Brian Friel in the Irish context. Like much of Friel’s work, it’s a historical drama about the dignity and indignity of working class people. Again, like Friel, Wilson seems concerned with the power of education and the legacy of colonialism. As well as the desire for land as route to respectability – colliding with modernity and the rise of the city.

“You’d be surprised how many people trying to go North get on a train going West. They think the train’s supposed to go where they going rather than where it’s going… If everybody stay in one place I believe this would be a better world.” (Doaker).

Both playwrights are concerned with the value of land: Land as a continual form of oppression, and as a possibility of reparation.

Numerology and the role of three

The number three is used repeatedly in the play. Lymon’s truck broke down three times. It’s been three years since Boy Willie has seen his sister. Crawley was 3 times 7 (a southern term for 21, i.e.: a grown up), at the time of his death. Bernice’s husband died three years ago. Sutter died three weeks ago. There were 3 hobos and 3 doors in Avery’s dream. We speculate that these may be references both to the frequent two on one interactions in the play, and to the oedipal triad evoked by the many missing fathers in the play.

Literal Deux et Machina

Sutter’s ghost and it’s connection to the piano is an example of magical realism animism and the storytelling of subjugated people.

This ties into the fusions of spiritualism and evangelical religion: As a way out of the mental trap of poverty and violence.

The ‘Ghosts of Yellow Dog’: The story of the purchase, carving and theft of the piano and murder that followed. The ghosts provide a manner of redressing injustice from the afterlife.

But spirituality also represents the danger of that connection to past. E.g.: Berniece’s mother whispering to the piano.

The argument over the value of the piano is one of economics and utility vs family and history. Berniece is aware of the human cost of the piano, and it’s importance as a symbol in the cycle of violence.

Missing Fathers

The constant absence of dead or fled fathers, and the broken family at the heart of the story, are contrasted with the power of family, religion and community, to stand against poverty, facilitating a foothold in communities.

Slavery

In the world of the play, the history of slavery is almost a living memory. The character’s family (whose surname we never hear), were literally owned by the Sutter family. Repeatedly we hear of brutal white punishment of minor crimes. E.g.: Crawley (benieces husband) killed for stealing wood. E.g.: ‘Boy Charles’ (Father of berniece / boy willy) burned alive for stealing piano. Thus the legacy of slavery continues in the intergenerational transmission of violence and criminality.

Aspiration and class conflict

At one point in the play, Bernie leaves Maretha at the ‘settlement house’.
These were mixed income housing and social services for social improvement. A paternalistic 19th C British movement to reduce social exclusion. In the US settlement houses were less charitable and more service orientated.

Here they represent an avenue for internalised racism. Berniece tells Maretha ‘Don’t be going down there showing your colour’.

The ambitions of Avery, an elevator operator seeking to gain respectability through his ministry; are contrasted with noble, almost class conflict driven ‘hustler’ archetype of Boy Willie.

Internalised Racism

The plays characters (particularly Boy Willie), make constant use of racial epithets like ‘nigger’.

Berniece straightens her daughter Maretha’s hair with hot grease & tells her if she were a boy she wouldn’t have to. Boy Willie gives out to Berniece for her child rearing technique and neglect in not telling Mareta the history of the piano. He’s not going to be like his father, who had no access to land and worked all his life for someone else. For him land represents parity with white people, respectability. For Berniece – she has to be realistic about her lowly status.

Intersectionality / Patriarchy

The conflict between Berniece and Boy Willy demonstrates the repression of women in poor African American communities at this point in history. The bullying nature of Boy Willie’s entry into the house. His patriarchal refusal of Berniece’s request to leave – and assumption of ownership of piano. No man ultimately defends Berniece, not Lymon nor Doaker nor Avery. But it’s her peaceful appeal to their ancestors that ultimately saves the day.

Other examples: Wining Boy slept with Lymon’s mother in return for helping to get his father out of jail. This wasn’t compulsion exactly, but it was certainly exploitation.

The Use of women by Lymon & Boy Willie. E.g.: Boy Willie’s pursuit of Grace (irony) ‘My grandaddy used to take women on the back of horses’. Both see women as a comfort and an object. While Lymon claims a desire for a more meaningful relationship he in a sense betrays his moment with Berniece by chasing Grace at the end of the play.

The Hustler archetype

Wining Boy & Boy Willy.
Both desire to get theirs in the face of unfair world, although Wining boy is ‘burnt out’ from the fast life. Wining boy suggests that the difference between white and black is white have ability to bend the law to their will.
Boy willy – initially seems like manipulative trickster. Later we see that, at least in his own mind, he is a class warrior.

Towards the end of the play Berniece threatens him with a gun. But he’s not scared of dying. He relates the story of trying to raise his dog from the dead and killing a cat when Jesus wouldn’t bring him back. The event taught him learned he has the power of death too. “Nigger that ain’t afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man”.

Songs of the oppressed

Several songs are sung by the men in the play. Most notably, the prison song sun by all the men (all of whom served time at the same forced labour farm). ‘O’Berta’ is about telling your love to move on while you’re imprisoned, which ties into the theme of the legacy of slavery in the breakup of families. And it’s connection to urban poverty.

Some peanuts are eaten, some water bottles empties, some hotel rooms vandalised. Outside of that Neil LaButes ‘Some Girls’ is a less than action packed look at relationships. Love through the eyes of an immature ‘every guy’ whose self absorption drives his quest to reexamine a history of failed relationships. There are plenty of plays featuring assholes, but this is perhaps the first play we’ve read primarily about one. Instead of seven dwarves this sleepwalking beauty has four girls, each of whom seem more than happy to meet a self satisfied ex-lover unbidden in an anonymous hotel room.

The version we read of the play – the printed piece, is as written – but not as performed at first run (starring David Schwimmer of all people) – when it was ‘streamlined’ to make the protagonist a little more palatable. A film version of the play, starring the OC’s Adam Brody premiered last year at South by South West.

Download: Episode 12 – Some Girl(s)

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: The Piano Lesson by August Wilson

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

His autobiography boasts that Steve Martin began working at age ten in the newly opened Disneyland, graduating to study poetry and philosophy and spend 18 years performing as “America’s best loved stand up comedian”. Martin has in addition managed a career an accomplished banjo musician and movie star. He writes “I was not naturally talented… though working against that made me inventive”. The open question is whether inventiveness is enough to moderate a lack of dramaturgic ability.

Picasso at the Lapin Agile recounts an imagined meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, while both are in their early twenties, yet to make their mark on the century. The play is a sweetly antique ribald sex comedy set in a real Montmartre cabaret immortalised in Picasso’s painting ‘At the Lapin Agile’. It was first staged at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1993, and won the 1996 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off Broadway Play.

Download: Episode 11 – Picasso at the Lapin Agile

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Some Girls by Neil LaBute.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Arriving at the end of the nineteen nineties, at exactly the time Martin McDonagh was exploding the Irish national theatre with the first of his Leenane trilogy, Disco Pigs articulated a radical new vision of Irishness. An Irishness deracinated of nationalism, appalled by republicanism, raised on television and clubland. A dissolute Irishness – frozen in the decaying embrace of the still powerful church. Our soi-disant twin protagonists Pig and Runt are, like the nation, awakening just before the dawn of the 21st century: Becoming self aware in a final desperate defence against perpetual inferiority. The plays ostensibly simple dialogue takes us deep into an expressionist teenage universe, where sex, violence and imagination dissolve the surface of a mundane world.

First staged in 1996 at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Disco Pigs moved on to the Dublin and Edinburgh festivals. The first production starred Killian Murphy and Eileen Walsh. Eileen would go on to star in the Magdalene Sisters and win best actress award at the Tribeca Film festival for her performance in the 2008 film Eden. Although she was to replaced in the role of Runt for Kirsten Sheriden’s film version, by Elaine Cassidy.

Download: Episode 10 – Disco Pigs

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Quantum Physics, synchronicity, English mustachios, it has to be Eugene Ionesco’s ‘The Bald Soprano’ (La Cantatrice Chauve). This is a play for which context is essential: Beckett’s growing reputation in France at the beginning of the 1950’s. The efforts of dramatists who became known as the ‘theatre of the absurd’ to acknowledge the horrors of fascism. The birth of post-modernism with it’s portrayal of the fragmentary nature of subjective reality. And Ionesco’s own inspiration – bizarrely banal English language learning tapes. In attempting to recreate the imaginative truth of these unheimlich lessons, Ionesco engaged with some of the most complex intellectual problems of his time.

The play begins as a parody of urbane English parlour comedies, spearing every convention from obtuse bon-mots to farcical misunderstandings, from trite social commentary to ironic contradictions. Out of this meta-humour, brilliantly trivialising the trivial, develops a slow horror, as identities dissolve, time disappears, life and death become confused and disorder reins.

The Bald Soprano was Ionesco’s first play, originally written in his native Romanian, before being rewritten in French. Since it’s first performance on May 11th 1950, the play has become one of the most performed works in France. We read the 1964 translation by Donal M. Allan.

Download: Episode 9 – The Bald Soprano

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

We conclude our discussion of JP Shanley’s classic play, doubt.

Download: Episode 8 – Doubt (Part 2)

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: ‘The Bald Soprano‘ or La Cantatrice Chauve by Eugène Ionesco.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

We interview the cast of the recent Smock Alley production of ‘Welcome to the Ethics Committee’.

The play was based on the collaborative fiction project, The SCP Foundation, and was written and directed by Katherine Farmar. We spoke to some members of the cast – Elitsa Dimova, Libby Russell, Jack Beglin, Liam Hallahan, and Declan Gillen.

Download: Interview – Cast of ‘The Ethics Committee’

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

In the introduction to his already classic play ‘Doubt: A Parable’, JP Shanley writes ‘we are living in a culture of extreme advocacy, of confrontation, of judgment, and of verdict’. In the decade since the publication of the play, as the culture wars have expanded, his words have seemed ever more prescient. Doubt is a work with uncertainty at its heart. The play deals with a monstrous allegation and it’s consequences, but its theme is really the consequence of ignoring such allegations. Shanley challenges us to acknowledge in doubt, the possibility of growth, to chose a shared illusion a little less distant from reality, to sacrifice the vestments of perceived virtue for robes of uncertain good. Doubt was awarded the Pulizer prize for drama as well as a Tony Award for Best Play, and has been adapted into both an opera and an academy award nominated film.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 7 – Doubt (Part1)

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play: We continue our discussion of Doubt by JP Shanley.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

The titular Arcadia is Sidley Park, Estate of the earl of Croom. We enter Sidley park at the dawn of the 19th century, and today, as two parallel storylines converge to resolve a literary mystery. Arcadia is a Wildely brilliant farce, which examines the spirit of an age and it’s relationship to time, the mathematics of chaos and it’s relationship to determinism, and whether knowledge is ultimately discovered or created. The play was written in 1993, and first staged at the Lyttelton Theatre in London, starring Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendal and Bill Nighy. It was awarded the Lawrence Oliver award for best new play, and the Tony for best play. Today we discuss whether the work achieves its aim of marrying rapier wit to intellectual rigor, or merely orders the chaos of half understood ideas to don a costume of regency verbiage.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 6 – Arcadia

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play

Doubt by JP Shanley. We’re actively soliciting suggestions for what plays to read in the coming weeks and months. If there’s a play you’d like us to discuss – especially if it’s less well known, or if there’s a production of it coming to Dublin soon, let us know in the comments below.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

The Misanthrope (or the ‘The Cantankerous Lover’) by Moliere, is a comedy first performed at the Theatre du Palais-Royal in 1666. Despite its age the play deals with modern concerns, like the nature of friendship and the choice to embrace cynicism over solipsism. Although absent the careful plotting, dynamic staging or linguistic experimentalism of modern theatre, Moliere’s wit remains alive and entertaining. The influence of his barbed dialogue and high society brinkmanship can be seen in writers from as Oscar Wilde to Whit Stillman.

In life Moliere (born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) was a controversial figure. Arguably one of the first literary celebrities, he was accused of numerous villainies, including having illegitimately fathered his much younger wife.

He once wrote ‘Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths’, and it is this ambiguity that lies at the heart of The Misanthrope. Moliere writes ‘one cannot look into the heart’. Thus we vacillate between paranoia and pronoia, never certain in this life of the nobility of our actions, or whether moral pragmatism is ultimately more valid than holding a steady course. Is it true, as the cynically flirtatious Celimene says, ‘It is easy… to blame or praise everything and everyone may be right, according to their age and taste’. Or is there a moral centre to life, we may avoid or obey, according to our character.

We read the Henri Van Laun public domain translation of the play from the university of Adelaide.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 5 – The Misanthrope

Next weeks play

Arcadia [PDF] by Tom Stoppard. We’re actively soliciting suggestions for what plays to read in the coming weeks and months. If there’s a play you’d like us to discuss – especially if it’s less well known, or if there’s a production of it coming to Dublin soon, let us know in the comments below.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

Death of a Salesman is perhaps Arthur Millers best known play. A seminal work of twentieth century American theatre, it touches on themes as diverse as the death of masculinity, family dysfunction, the role of women, and the changing nature of work in a rapidly advancing, materialist society.

The play was written shortly after the Second World War, in a time of triumphalism and economic assent in the United States. Yet it is a tragedy, that concerns the impossibility of intergenerational communication, of escape from a life of failure and of the American dream itself.

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 4 – Death of a Salesman

Next weeks play – The Misanthrope by Moliere. We’re actively soliciting suggestions for what plays to read in the coming weeks and months. If there’s a play you’d like us to discuss – especially if it’s less well known, or if there’s a production of it coming to Dublin soon, let us know in the comments below.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

This weeks play – The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel. The play was recently produced by Acting Out at the Harbour Playhouse in Dublin, and we’re joined by the cast Michael J. Kunze, Niamh Denyer and Brian Graham Higgins.

The Baltimore Waltz was first produced off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Company in 1992, and first published by dramatists play service that same year. It was awarded Obie awards for Best New American play, Best Performance, and Best Direction.

The play is an allegory about the aids crisis, and the death of the playwright’s brother. Despite the heavyweight subject matter Baltimore Waltz is a highly stylised, cinematically referential comedy with an unconventional structure. Three actors, Anna, her Brother Carl and a chorus ‘The Third’ (playing a variety of roles), travel across an imaginary Europe, tracing the trip the playwright regretted never taking herself. The play tackles the tragedy and impossible uncertainties of the very early days of the aids crisis with a lightness of touch, and a playful approach to symbolism that creates a space for poignancy to naturally emerge.

Anna is ill with Acquired Toilet Disease, a sly wink to Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), the original diagnosis for HIV / AIDS. She leaves her job as a grade school teacher, as does her brother, fired from his position as ‘the head librarian of literature and languages at the San Francisco Public’. Together they cross Europe, in search of a cure, pursued by a mysterious ‘Third Man’ trafficking something in stuffed rabbits, and finally meeting ‘the doctor’, an eighty year old urologist Strangelove type figure, who ‘uriposia’ therapy is based around the enthusiastic collection and imbibing of urine .

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 3 – Baltimore Waltz

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play – Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

This weeks play – Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh.

Lonesome West is part of Connemara triology, along with Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Skull in Connemara. Published 1997, Methuen Drama. First performed Jun 11th, 1997 at Druid Theatre in Galway, in a coproduction with London’s Royal Court Theatre. Went on to Broadway in 1999, where it was nominated for Tonys for Best Play, and Best Actor.

Set in the post-apocalyptic town of Leenane, with the apocalypse in question being the destruction of the mythological Irish West, and its explication on stage in particular.

McDonagh’s play captures something of the grim reality of the gravity hole of Ireland. This is a desecrated space, a world in which the rare old characters of post colonial Ireland, collide with a Tarantinoesque modernity drenched in stylised violence, substance abuse, and sexual possibilities both intriguing and forever denied to it’s protagonists.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 2 – The Lonesome West

‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play – Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel.

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.

This weeks play – Oleanna by David Mamet.

First produced 1992 (stage), 1994 (film) starring William H. Macy & Rebecca Pidgeon. Oleanna was controversial on release and remains so, as it deals with issues of sexual harassment and rape. Mamet’s interest in these themes arose out of the media circus surrounding the nomination of American Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. The play features two characters John and Carol – a university lecturer and his student, whose mutual misunderstandings and power plays descend into dark accusations and violence.

This is the first in a new series for Radiomade.ie. ‘Reading Plays‘ is a discussion show, featuring Gareth Stack and James Van De Waal. Each week we do a close reading of a modern play, discussing it’s merits, themes, issues raised, and so on. You can play along by reading or watching a production of the play before you listen to the show.

Next weeks play – ‘The Lonesome West‘ by Martin McDonagh.

Download: Reading Plays – Episode 1 – Oleanna

Music – Amor & Psyche – by Bitwise Operator.