No resting on laurels for director Andrew
Constant dripping wears the rock is a phrase that could be have been coined for theatre director Andrew Flynn. Andrew and his Galway-based company, Decadent Theatre, have carved out a reputation nationally for staging quality, accessible works by contemporary writers, and they have been doing this for over a decade, through good times and bad.
This week the curtain came up on Decadent’s biggest production yet, Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, which runs in the city's Town Hall Theatre until the weekend before touring to Cork, Dublin and Belfast. It has been attracting full houses and standing ovations, bringing the company to a new level.
Andrew is a major fan of McDonagh’s plays – and they have been friends since the late 1990s Andrew was an assistant stage manager with Druid when that company staged McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy.
The Pillowman, set in the prison of a totalitarian state, is very different from the Trilogy but “it still has Martin’s language and rhythm,” observes Andrew. “And that means the play does an awful lot of the work for you”.
So far, “people either love it or hate it, but they are really engaging”, says Andrew, describing how he met one man at a preview who left at the interval. The man’s brother had died last year and he found the play too upsetting.
For more, see this week’s Connacht Tribune