Sister act on a winner with daring young drama group

The sisters who founded one of the hottest young theatre companies in Galway have a very simple philosophy when it comes to creating new work – stage a play that will enrapture adults and it will also surely grab the attention of teenagers.

The reaction by young and old has been phenomenal to Moonfish’s latest work, Tromluí Phinocchio (Pinocchio – A Nightmare), which won the Stewart Parker Trust / BBC Northern Ireland Irish Language Theatre award.

Geared to sixth class and secondary school students, there was such a buzz about the show when it premiered at last year’s Baboró International Arts Festival for Children that they were invited to return for the 2013 programme.

As the elder sister Máiréad Ní Chróinín opines: “They’re an exciting audience to create for, teenagers. And challenging. When we did The Secret Garden we had a theatre full of primary school boys and they are so loud. We were worried, this was a story about a girl and gardening. But after it began you could hear a pin drop they were so into it. It taught us not to have preconceived ideas.”

She and Ionia Ní Chróinín set up Moonfish in 2006 after being swept up by the energy of Project 06, the rebel festival established by Saw Doctors manager Ollie Jennings in protest at the lack of engagement by the Galway Arts Festival with local artists.

Their first work, Bonny and Read, was based on a tale about two famous female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, renowned for their ferociousness. A Scottish friend suggested they bring it over to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the following year. The three-week run would prove pivotal to the group’s future direction.

“It was almost like a holiday because we saw lots of other shows and they all had a huge influence on how we do theatre. I’d really recommend it for companies who want to do ensemble theatre. We’d all go to the shows together and discuss them afterwards and it almost created a shorthand,” explains Máiréad.

They returned to conceive their next work as an ensemble theatre. She points to the white board in their new home on the Old Monivea Road to show how that process works.

The company is currently in the development stage of a play based on Joseph O’Connor’s novel, Star of the Sea.

There are lines pulled out of the book, scenes reimagined and quotes plucked apart after a three-hour brainstorming session by six of the company.  Máiréad photographs the board, writes up the ideas and creates a very rough first draft.

Over the next year, the group will gather for a few weeks at a time to workshop the piece before they perform it before a group of peers to get feedback. Hopefully the final product will hit the stage next July.

“It’s a bit like orchestration, you’re finding out what your main tune is, you want the brass section here, you might shift it all around. Everyone is part of the process and it ends up the finished product by consensus.

“The best thing is to throw up as many ideas as possible. I see it like a bubble and you put in washing up liquid and you watch as they join up to one another morphing into a different bubble.”

The girls, 33 and 29, grew up in Tirellan Heights and later Craughwell but were bilingual from a young age, going first to Gaelscoil Dara in Renmore and later Coláiste na Coiribe.

Their mother, Maura Ó Cróinín, an American who founded the Galway Early Music Festival, spoke to them in English, while their father, Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, a professor of history at NUIG, spoke to them only ‘as Gaeilge’. The couple met while studying a masters in  the US and now both work in the  NUIG history department.

“It’s probably influenced how we translate things for theatre. It was more of an artistic decision to do things in Irish. As we started to build the ensemble, we worked with people who had Irish in Galway – none of us are native Irish speakers – and it seemed a shame to be always working in English when we all like speaking in Irish,” explains Máiréad.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.