Curlew Theatre

Ferry

A Play For Voices

Performed by Tegolin Knowland and Seán Coyne

Written and Directed by Eamon Grennan

First performed at The Yacht Club Howth for Stonecoast MFA Creative Writing Programme - January 10th 2013 First performed at Clifden Arts Festival - September 21st 2010

Ferry is a play for two voices playing five characters. Unlike the other three pieces presented over the past few years, it is an original play. It’s title remembers the myths that portray the passage after death to the next world, “the other side,” as a journey on a ferryboat in charge of the mythic ferryman, Charon. What we represent here is one such journey. The “passengers” in this case are an old Irishman, a younger Irishman, an old Irishwoman, a younger woman (English, whose mother was Irish), and a philosopher (roughly based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent some time out in a cottage in Rosroe, on the coast of Connemara). These five strangers, played by our two voices, talk to one another or to themselves, revealing fragments of their lives now left behind them. The bits and pieces that emerge in this way form a collage meditation on life and death, religion, violence, ambition, body, spirit, language itself, and memory. What they offer us are some random but pivotal moments that mattered in these ordinary or not so ordinary lives. Between short exchanges and longer soliloquies we get to know a little about these different, wounded lives.