Storyland – devised to develop and showcase great local drama – comes to RTÉ television for the first time for 2022, with three new dramas airing on RTÉ 2 at 9.30pm on 20th October, 27th October and 3rd November.
The new season kicks of with Mustard, adapted from Eva O'Connor's award-winning stage play and starring Eva herself in a bold and spicy insight into love, obsession and the battle to stay sane - watch it now, via RTÉ Player.
Producer Jason Forde introduces Mustard below...
Eva O'Connor, the writer of Mustard and myself, the producer, both shared a mutual friend who suggested we should touch base with each other and have a conversation. This was the start of the journey.
I was aware of the play and the story that Eva had created, having seen the reviews about it. Myself and Eva got in touch and chatted about collaborating and doing something with Mustard; shortly afterwards RTÉ announced an amazing opportunity via Storyland, which was a callout looking for new drama ideas that would work as a stand-alone film, no longer than 25 minutes long. I chatted with Hildegard Ryan, the director of Mustard, who had worked with Eva before, about us putting an application in.
We all got working together and had lengthy conversations discussing every aspect of adapting the stage play for the screen. These conversations consisted of casting, locations and picking key crew whom we hoped would be involved.
We wanted a cinematographer who could give it a very particular look. I reached out to Burshi Wojnar whom I knew would do an incredible job having seen his previous work.
Burshi, Hildegard and I drove to every single location in my car discussing every single shot in length on what we had planned to do in that location. This was time well spent, because we then knew exactly what we wanted and how to achieve it.
We were also very lucky to get a fantastic composer, Nathan Coen, on board early. His score is fantastic and really helps the narrative.
I asked the editor, John Cutler, to read the script, because I thought he would do a great job on the cut, he is fantastic with drama and has a great eye for detail. John got back after a couple of hours and was on board.
We set our targets very high, as we wanted Mustard to have serious production value as well as packing in a lot of locations into a tight schedule, which really helped in telling this story in the way we wanted to.
The application went into RTÉ and they made a shortlist of 8 contenders out of 240 applications - from that shortlist, they selected 3 to go into production. We made the cut.
RTÉ and Screen Ireland were great believers in this project from day one, and championed us all the way. I think they knew we had something special on our hands in terms of tone and style.
As a producer, you are always on the lookout for a script that stands out, and Mustard had all the ingredients that I was looking for to create something original and unique, something that I hadn't seen on Irish TV before.
We were now on the journey to make Mustard with a great crew and cast.
Mustard is now available to watch via RTÉ Player.
