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After 6 months, 3 shows, nearly 50 cast and crew, over 1,000 audience members and endless cups of tea, we at Devious Theatre have completed our residency in Kilkenny Arts Office.
It’s been an amazing, fantastic and hugely enjoyable ride and we’ve loved every second of it. It has really helped push us as a company and given us a platform from which we can engage with the next few years of our work.
The get out of No. 76 was a tough mistress and we were very sad to be packing, painting and rebuilding. But it was made all the sweeter by the news that we’ve acquired our own fulltime base in The Maltings off James Street. So we won’t be returning to our old homeless, guerrilla ways!
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Mary Butler, Niamh Finn and Kilkenny Co. Council for all the amazing support and opportunities that they’ve given us over not just the last 6 months but the past few years. We couldn’t have done this without ye.
To the future, when all is well!
Here’s a look at another of the shows from our In The Future When All’s Well residency here in No.76. This shows one of the more popular scenes from Shifting by John Kennedy wherein the characters at the party take part in a little bit of late night Bohemian Rhapsody. Par for the course at most parties isn’t it? If you missed the show, it gives a good indication of the set for the play and how we changed the formation from Scratcher.
Shifting played April 18th – 23rd this year in Kilkenny Arts Office.
As part of her time here at the Arts Office, we’ve asked Rhian Gibson (who played the role of Hillary) to give you an insight into life on Shifting and what she got up to during her time working on the production. Rhian is one of the very new faces to the group having never previously auditioned for a Devious production or having worked with Dreamstuff Youth Theatre as the majority of the cast had done in the past. Rhian was also responsible for one of the radio pieces that aired in the week building up to Shifting and today finished a work placement with us for a few weeks. Here’s what she has to say…
I thought the audition went much better than I expected. I thought I would be nervous but nerves didn’t really come in to it.
Waiting to see if I got cast in the play was almost torture, then BAM; I’m picked to play a stereotypical looking English chav. Good thing I’m English.
Drowning my insides with tea, stuffing my face with custard creams and practically ruining rehearsal time with my constant coughing and spluttering.
Staggering through in my belt of skirt and orange stripper boots; the costumes were fun to look at.
The day of the photo shoot was hectic, rushing around getting ready, applying layer after layer of foundation and bronzer. But when the time came to capture the image for the poster; it was too comical to not laugh. I did it though. The poster looked great.
Shooting the promo video was far more awkward then I first imagined. Having to kiss someone in front of a man with his camera seemed a tad surreal; looked great though!
Writing one of the radio pieces to help promote the show then hearing it on KCLR made my day.
Talking and laughing could be heard clearly from the girl’s dressing room, over the ‘sizzle’ of the hair straightners.
The table was filled high to the ceiling with orange covered facial wipes; a montage of my loud mouthed, chavy character: Hilary.
Having to record my voice so my accent could be mimicked was just plain weird.
The opening night was brilliant, the whole show was run on pure adrenalin and I enjoyed every minute of it.
At least my hands aren’t marked from knocking the crap out of the door. (The crack in the glass is nothing to do with me…)
Outside trying to listen for my cue, my face almost smeared across the window but luckily we were soon able to hear everything through speakers; otherwise I’d still be waiting.
Hiding out in the kitchen, sitting on the floor and drinking pint after pint of tap water and waiting to go out in front of the audience without pissing myself.
I’ve learnt that it’s easy to stay away from something for a long time then to start again, as though it was just yesterday.
I could easily do another week but maybe with less effort.
Fighting back the urge to ‘high five’ a member of the audience was tough; we were close, real close, practically shifting.
Getting six standing ovations for a six night show was incredible, everyone worked so hard and I was exceptionally proud to be part of such a talented group of people. We officially acted our socks off.
The Shifting week was such a buzz, bouncing from scene to scene, night to night; filling in the gaps with incredible banter and epic amounts of dancing.
Rhian Gibson
By Darragh Byrne
From the April 27th edition of The Kilkenny Reporter.
Devious follow the success of Scratcher with the very different but equally as striking Shifting. The second part of their ‘In The Future When All’s Well’ trilogy in their Arts Office residency, this is about teenagers adrift in our modern abyss and kissing each other to make up the gaps in between.
The structure of the play is of an 18th birthday party where a bunch of expectant and slightly drunken girls wait for the lads to arrive and most importantly a cool band who are on their way down from Dublin.
In the second act all the secrets and lies come forward as the party goers are even more inebriated and there is the violent arrival of a third party with a hurley. To pass the time there is banter, casseroles and shifting: lots of shifting.
Written for the first time by a new writer who isn’t established, Devious have taken a gamble on a young playwright not yet out of his teenage years. John Kennedy has repaid this gamble with a fine piece of writing which is very tense and funny but equally not afraid to handle dark matters. Showing a huge maturity of approach while keeping an ear for his age group’s turn of phrase, this never feels forced or gauche.
John Morton, Ken McGuire and Angela Barrett must all take a bow for helping this young cast onto a larger stage. All veterans of youth theatre, this massive leap to a professional environment is made seamless by the quality of the blocking and their superb performances.
Peter O’Connor is the confused heart of the play, annoyed that his friends have left him behind. Alan Doyle is incredible as the boy trying to grow up to quickly at all costs and John Kennedy himself delivers a lovely turn as someone caught between romance and his hormones.
The girls too are uniformly excellent – Alex Christle is the American birthday girl who is struggling with her past, Aoibhín Murphy the Spar worker who will do anything to escape Kilkenny while Ruth Phelan who manages the tricky thing of making a drunk party girl flesh.
Special mention must however go to two character parts who stole the show – Connie Walsh was brilliant as the Sylvia Plath wannabe, while Colin O’Brien was a revelation as the Darina Allen obsessed chav.
Now this party is over it is sad that there isn’t a place for these superb actors to hone their craft, as for the next generation of young thespians locally there is only pantomime and musicals. Devious have proven two things with this play – that there is a hunger as well as a need for this kind of theatre that reflects teenager’s lives without condescending to them. John Hughes himself – that great chronicler of teen life, would have walked out of this play punching the air to the tune of ‘Don’t You Forget About Me!’
The following review appeared in The Kilkenny People on Wednesday April 27th 2011.
By Tess Felder
Published in Wednesday 27 April 2011 edition of The Kilkenny People
Devious Theatre Company: The Next Generation arrived with a bang last week.
Presenting Shifting, with a new cast including new writer John Kennedy, their sharp, highly comedic performances met with standing ovations on opening night and throughout the week.
Directed by John Morton, it’s the company’s second of three plays to be staged in the Arts Office as part of their six-month residency. The play tells the story of the lovely teenage Amy (Alex Christle), whose 18th birthday party is a celebrated success, until it all goes horribly wrong.
A sort of Dazed and Confused for the current Kilkenny generation, it’s full of teenage crushes, laughter and a few tears, and even a Matthew McConaughey-older-brother-interloper type in the form of a braided-hair, rough Englishman David Thompson. (A Devious play just wouldn’t be the same without him, would it?) Being written and performed in Kilkenny, there were also added laughs for local references such as being kicked out of certain venues for being underage.
With a cast of 13, there were plenty of diverse and well-shaped characters to love, or to love to hate – the latter honour going to an outstanding and hilariously unpredictable Colin O’Brien as party-crasher Mark.
The playwright himself was on the mark as Jamie, the birthday girl’s boyfriend with one thing on his mind: her virginity; and Peter O’Connor as his best friend Jim captured the confusion of a teenager not sure which girl to ‘shift’, not sure what to do with his life, and whether to grow up or to stick around playing Guitar Hero for another year. And your heart had to go out to Connie Walsh’s Eimear, the lovably sweet, socially awkward, Sylvia Plath-devoted poet whose heart was destined to be broken as the night wore on.
There are so many clichés about young people being the hope of the future etc, etc, etc. In this case, it’s deviously true.
Artists at No. 76 John St, Kilkenny 
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