Over the course of four seasons, six characters gather at a Quaker Meeting House to seek comfort through community... Playwright Janet Moran introduces her new play Quake, which receives its World Premiere this October at the Dublin Theatre Festival.
The launch of the theatre festival programme every year is a moment of real excitement. For me, the chance to see international work has always been a treat every year as well as the chance to see the finest homegrown work. As an actor I've always got a great kick out of being involved in DTF shows and this year I feel even more fortunate having my play Quake programmed.
In 2016, I moved house and as part of my commute would pass a Quaker meeting house. I’d always been fascinated by Quakers and by what happens in a meeting house. I began to think it could be a wonderful setting for a play. A kind of forum where people could speak to their preoccupations. I eventually plucked up the courage to go in, and the experience did not disappoint.
Quaker meeting houses are uniquely contemplative spaces, where the silences are pregnant with meaning and potential. It still seems extraordinary to me that people gather in this way to attempt to articulate something of the human experience to each other in order to offer comfort.
Pictured: Karen Ardiff in Quake
It made me think of the theatre. Isn't that what we try to do too?
This is the most ambitious play I have written. It will be directed by Conall Morrison and designed by Paul Keogan and Joan O Clery, with music by Denis Clohessy and featuring a superb cast of six.
Quake is about lots of things. It’s about our need for community, for moments of connection and communion in a secular world where all the old certainties are gone. Our six characters share their anxieties, fears and joys, as the play takes theatrical risks with silences and eruptions of the inner voice, contrasting what we say aloud with what we choose not to say. Which is all a fancy way of saying it’s about loneliness and longing and sexual desire, and how to live the best life you can.
With all that said, it will be funny, I hope. I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have a sense of humour, so I hope it moves and provokes but also makes people laugh. As the play began to take shape, I found I was writing mostly to my own preoccupations; my own fears around whether I’m a good enough mother or daughter and what that might even mean.
So Quake is also about that core relationship, between a parent and a child. Our relationship with our parents is so fundamental, and yet they are only human too. As one character in the play says, "How can you ever honour the potential of a small human being?".
We try and we sometimes fail because we are human.
And so, compassion for parents, for mothers is central to this piece. The compassion that we humans do, thankfully, so readily have for each other. Our compassion, our resilience and our capacity for joy are things to celebrate. We know that Spring will always come.
Quake is at the Samuel Beckett Theatre from 3rd – 8th Oct, as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, with previews at the Mermaid Theatre on September 29th and 30th.
Pics: Olga Kuzmenko
