Playwright Eoghan Quinn introduces his new play, Neptune Calling, a new site-specific piece about 'our ways of coping with things, our ways of connecting with people, and how those two things can distort one another'.
Early in the pandemic, I was attending regular online check-ins for theatre makers hosted by the Irish Theatre Institute. These were an opportunity to hear about what people were (and were no longer) up to, how people were feeling, and where they saw the theatre scene headed. The mood was, as you might imagine, a bit sombre. Theatre, after all, is generally premised on stuffing groups of people into closed rooms, and it turns out that this isn't the greatest idea during a once-in-a-lifetime, airborne, respiratory pandemic.
To be fair, not much is.
Watch: Redbear Theatre's Aoibhéann McCann on Nature Calling
But these conversations were, just as often, hopeful and imaginative; a reflection, I think, of our propensity to hold within us both a dismay at the state of the world, and a compulsion to persist and make something out of the pieces we find in front of us.
One theme that kept recurring at these sessions was that if audiences could not come to the theatre, theatre would simply have to come to audiences. Literally: theatre could now repay the loyalty of its audience not simply by trying to offer entertainment or solace or stimulation, but by responding to the changed world and physically bringing itself to where people lived. I find this a compelling idea, one that seems to respond to the 'crisis’ of traditional theatre in a very material, socially meaningful way: our culture is reflected in how theatre happens, not just in what it happens to say.
I began to feel that the pandemic was asking many of us to confront two main things about ourselves: how we cope with crisis, and how we connect with other people.
With all that said, this is not something I had much clue how to actually do. It takes not only creative vision and care for an audience, but also organisational skill to take ‘theatre’ beyond the walls of the theatre. Luckily, I was approached late last year by someone who has all three in spades. Director and writer Tracy Martin of Redbear Productions asked me to write for a piece that could truly fulfill this kind of mission: to bring a theatre-installation to people who may have had a particularly isolated and lonely time with the pandemic, and to communities that might traditionally have less access to live art. I was suddenly in the exciting position of getting to write the story that such an experience might contain.
Neptune Calling emerged slowly, then quickly, from the conversations we had about that imagined experience. I began to feel that the pandemic was asking many of us to confront two main things about ourselves: how we cope with crisis, and how we connect with other people.
The script tells the story of Sara, a woman of about 30 who is dealing with the pandemic mostly by telling herself she’s fine, and swimming in the sea as often as she can. Although the crisis has conspired to stall her career at precisely the wrong time, she is still desperate to leave her job in retail and become a full-time journalist. She decides to write a piece about the rise of conspiracy theories in lockdown and comes in contact with Helen, a retired piano teacher who is wading deeper and deeper into that world of misinformation, paranoia, and distrust.
The story is told through a series of phone calls between Helen (Geraldine Plunkett) and Sara (Aoibhéann McCann) in which we hear a deep, funny, and turbulent bond grow. These are interlaced with Sara’s own reflections on what is happening to her life and how this new relationship is forcing her to confront it. Is she really dealing with all this so much better than Helen? The audience listens through headphones in a space local to them, while the dancer/choreographer Robyn Byrne accompanies with a stunning live movement piece.
For me, as I suggested above, Neptune Calling is really about our ways of coping with things, our ways of connecting with people, and how those two things can distort one another. I’m not much of a swimmer, nor am I a conspiracy theorist (although I could be convinced that #micheálmartinisasentientwoodendoll), but the very act of writing this story, during this weird year, confronted me with my own cache of mechanisms for coping and connecting. One of those, and a source of entertainment and joy, has been experiencing the theatre that has made itself available outside the four walls of ‘the theatre’.
Our hope is that Neptune Calling can offer the same for its audiences.
Neptune Calling runs in locations near Axis, Ballymun, Civic Theatre, Tallaght and Draíocht, Blanchardstown from 21 August -12 September - find out more here.
