'This is a play about many different things and I struggle to qualify all of them, really...' Playwright Ultan Pringle introduces his new work It Is Good We Are Dreaming, which opens at Dublin's New Theatre later this month.
Every time I sit down to write a play there always comes a moment – a lightbulb or eureka or a finally thank you thank YOU God – where the play clicks into place and you know where it is you're headed. For It Is Good We Are Dreaming that moment came when I realised that the play was about two siblings living in the shadow of something greater than them. Their mother, their respective fathers, the climate catastrophe, the housing crisis and the inheritance that defines us - but most of all the mythical that surrounds us. The man made of rock their mother fell in love with. The crystal fish that float in the sky. The person in the attic saying prayers late at night. The four swans taking flight. It became clear to me in that moment, that eureka, that this play, about an estranged brother and sister who meet one morning, boiled down to a meeting of the mundane and the mythic.
We're a new queer theatre company devoted to telling stories rooted in the world we live in, filled to the brim with character, aesthetic, ambition and mystery.
It is the story of Fionn and Fiadh (played by Luke Dalton and Laoise Murray), a brother and sister who’ve grown apart but yet attempt one last time to meet again. It’s the story of their mother, who fell in love with a man who came out of the mountain. It’s a story about brothers and sisters and family and vegan banana bread and potted plants and the mythological world which cracks open and bleeds into ours. It’s about reaching for something beyond you in the hopes you’ll survive. It’s about folklore and tradition and magic and ecological collapse and it asks the question of how survival is possible in a world which often feels like it's ending.
This is a play about many different things and I struggle to qualify all of them, really. I hope it is a slippery thing which twists and subverts and surprises as it moves along and lives in levels both mythological and monotonous. I’ve come to think now that we all live lives full of titanic moments of feeling and emotion which reach towards unreality, moments of madness or mystery or volcanic feeling, moments when it feels like something rational has broken, and then we, more often than not, sit down after and have a cup of tea and head off to bed to do it all again. That’s what fascinates me about life, and in a way what I hope this little big play of ours sets out to capture.
This is our first in-person show as a theatre company, actually. We are LemonSoap, inspired by good old James Joyce and the bar of soap Leopold Bloom would carry around with him to smell with joy throughout the day. We’re a new queer theatre company devoted to telling stories rooted in the world we live in, filled to the brim with character, aesthetic, ambition and mystery.
We’re ridiculously excited to present our first in-person show and we can’t wait for you to come along for the ride and experience something mythical, original and exciting with us.
It Is Good We Are Dreaming is at The New Theatre, Dublin from May 31st – June 11 2022 - find out more here.
