Thrill and terror as Jane takes key role in Druid’s ‘The Beacon’
Arts Week with Judy Murphy
“I love doing new work, it’s a real treat,” says actress Jane Brennan who plays the lead role in Druid Theatre’s upcoming production, The Beacon, which will open at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre on Tuesday, September 24.
A co-production between Druid and Dublin’s Gate Theatre, The Beacon will transfer to the Gate for the Dublin Theatre Festival, opening there on October 3.
This darkly comic drama about a fraught mother-son relationship is by Dublin playwright and screenwriter Nancy Harris and marks her debut with Druid. But she has been making her mark elsewhere in recent years and another of her plays, Two Ladies, starring Zoë Wannamaker and directed by Nicholas Hytner, will premiere at London’s Bridge Theatre on Wednesday, September 25.
Harris’s debut full-length play, No Romance, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Stewart Parker Award in 2012.
Her modern version of Hans Christian Andersen's extraordinary and disturbing fairytale of dance, desire and destruction, The Red Shoes, premiered at the Gate in 2017 to full houses and critical success.
As a TV writer, her episodes of Channel 4’s 2014 series, Dates, led to her being nominated for a BAFTA Award as a breakthrough talent.
Nancy Harris had been commissioned to write a play for Druid, but when she handed in The Beacon, it “was quite different to the play they’d originally spoken about,” Jane Brennan explains. “Garry decided to do it anyway and saw me in the role. I thought the play was really interesting, a terrific piece of work. She doesn’t take the easy route,” she says of Harris.
In The Beacon, Jane’s character Beiv, a celebrated artist, has moved from Dublin to her holiday cottage on an island off West Cork. But a shadow from the past hangs over her. When Beiv’s estranged son and his new young wife come to stay, she has to cope with some difficult questions. These involve a mysterious accident and a dead husband as secrets from a different time resurface.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
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