Epic production of Tarry Flynn is a real family affair for Mary

Mary Monaghan’s acting CV includes playing Pegeen Mike in J M Synge’s Playboy of the Western World the Abbey Theatre and sharing a stage with Tony award winner Anna Manahan in a production of John B. Keane’s Sive. Her participation in drama has brought Mary all over Ireland, not to mention to Hungary and to America, yet she doesn’t earn a penny from it.

She is one of the many passionate amateur actors who can be found in drama groups up and down the country, who take part in theatre purely for the love of it.

Now, after an absence of six years, Mary is returning to drama, to play in the Town Hall Theatre’s forthcoming production of Tarry Flynn, which features a cast of 62 actors as well as five musicians and dancing chickens, in addition to a large backstage crew.

Tarry Flynn, set in the 1930s, is the story of a poetic young Cavan farmer, poet and frustrated bachelor. This innovative stage adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s novel by Conall Morrison won huge plaudits when it was first produced in the Abbey Theatre in the 1990s. The Town Hall production is being directed by Andrew Flynn of Decadent Theatre and Galway Youth Theatres.

And, for Mary it’s very much a family affair, because her husband John and their seventeen-year-old son Myles are also in the play, although their roles aren’t as demanding as hers.

Mary is playing Tarry’s mother, a woman who dotes on her only son. She auditioned after being recommended by fellow amateur actor, Geraldine Holmes of Kats, but had no great confidence she’d get a main role.

“I’m afraid every time I pick up a script, I’m going to get caught out,” she laughs. “But I figured I’d get a part somewhere because there’s such a big cast!”

Despite her doubts, she’s now in intensive rehearsals for the production which opens on Tuesday next, August 3.

Mary has a day job with Eircom and because time is precious, she grabs every minute she can get to practise her lines – her script is beside her as we speak. Her older son, John has been a great help in that area she says.

Learning lines on the run is a process she is well familiar with.Mary’s involvement in amateur drama, which began in her teens, has helped shape all aspects of her life.

She met her husband, John at a summer drama course in Gormanstown College, Co Meath, in 1980. He is from Headford, where they settled after marrying and is also an enthusiastic participant in amateur drama and musicals.

Ever since she was a child growing up in Kilconnell near Ballinasloe, Mary loved storytelling and drama, but as the eldest of eight children, it was a question of ‘go out and get a job’ after leaving school, so she never considered an acting career.

But one of the first things she did when she got a job with the Department of Post and Telegraphs in Athlone was join the local Little City Theatre Group. With them she played in Shadow of a Gunman and – a major challenge – took on the lead role of Anne Frank in the play of the same name, based on the famous diary of the young girl who was murdered by the Nazis.

Since moving to Headford in 1983 Mary has been involved with many local groups including Headford Players, Heads or Harps, Pegasus and KATS, taking on roles from the tragic to the comic.

By the 1980s, the Department of P&T had renamed itself Telecom Éireann, and with that company’s musical society, she played Elsa in the Sound of Music, winning an Aims Award for her performance.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.