Quietly
by Owen McCafferty
The play tackles the depth of pain and division that still defines Northern Ireland. McCafferty’s writing feels psychologically nuanced and the emotions conveyed through the script and the performances are acutely visceral. Belfast is a place where things need to be said. Jimmy and Ian are meeting tonight for the first time. They share a violent past. Set in a small back street bar in the Ormeau Road area of Belfast, Quietly sounds an echo of plays such as The Weir or Conversations on a Homecoming, with men meeting, drinking, and attempting to gain control over scattered lives by telling their story.
The two men were 16 on July 3, 1974 when Ian’s actions on that night would change each man’s life utterly. Ian has requested to meet Jimmy, the first in a long line of victims, whose names he can recite as a well worn incantation, that he must talk with in an attempt to end his ‘dislocation’.
Six people were killed in the bar in 1974, and those actions have had long consequences for Jimmy. They also had consequences for Ian, as we learn. He has come to the bar to explain, to give context to what he did, to reach out for something, and to risk.The story is what happened both in the bar in particular in 1974, but also what happened in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the late 90s. The hurt, the carnage and the consequences.
Owen McCafferty
Owen McCafferty (born 1961) is a playwright from Northern Ireland.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, McCafferty in 1961 he was brought up in London from the age of 1 until aged 10 when his parents returned to Belfast. He was educated at St Augustine’s Secondary School, the College of Business Studies and then the University of Ulster where he studied Philosophy and History. He held several jobs, including civil servant, accounts clerk, tiler and working in an abattoir, before becoming a full-time writer. He lives in Belfast with his wife, three children and granddaughter.
His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard’s Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses but only used the skeleton of the original. McCafferty’s writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. Like Synge, McCafferty’s dialogue is highly stylized and his vocabulary burst with strange compounds and coined words yet the sense of what is being said is never lost.
Video
Cast Soho Theatre Production 2014
Robert Zawadzki – Robert
Patrick O’KaneIan – Jimmy
Declan Conlon – Ian
Creative
Owen McCafferty – Writer
Jimmy Fay – Director
Alyson Cummins – Set Design
Catherine Fay – Costume Design
Sin̩ad McKenna РLighting Design
Philip Stewart – Sound Design
Andrea Ainsworth – Voice Director
Diarmuid O’Quigley – Company Stage Manager
Kelly Phelan – Casting Director
Val Sherlock – Hair and Make-Up
Anthony Woods – Photography
Zero – G – Graphic Design
Jimmy Fay
Jimmy Fay has been a dynamic force in Irish theatre for close to twenty years. He was the first director of the Dublin Fringe Festival which he co-founded with Bedrock Productions, has been Literary Director of the Abbey Theatre and in 2007 was the Theatre Curator of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. Among other Abbey Theatre productions Jimmy has directed are The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht, The School for Scandal by R.B. Sheridan, The Seafarer by Conor McPherson, The Playboy of the Western World in a new version by Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle, Saved by Edward Bond, for which he won Best Director in the Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2007, True West by Sam Shepard, and Flánn O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, adapted by Alex Johnston.
Reviews
Quietly is a well-written, powerfully performed, close-to-the-bone play about violence and forgiveness. The seventy-minute performance is compelling, from the moment that Jimmy (Patrick O’Kane) says to Robert (Robert Zawadzki), the Polish barman of his local pub, “There’s a man coming in later to see me. There might be trouble†and you know, right there, that there is trouble on its way for sure. Irish Theatre Magazine to Read More
by Emilie Pine
Now Playing at the Soho Theatre 21 Dean St Soho London
05 June 2014 – 22 Jun3 2014
Box Office: 020 7478 0100
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