On Sunday, 27th September, Drama On One will broadcast The Last Room by writer and restaurateur JP McMahon. The play won third prize in the 2024 PJ O'Connor Awards.
In The Last Room two men meet, after travelling through a series of interconnecting rooms, unsure of where they are and what they are supposed to do next. Moving from the kitchen to the radio studio, JP describes his passion for two kinds of feast, the culinary and the literary...
I fell in love with food and theatre at the same time. Somewhere around my fifteenth year, I found myself cooking in an Italian restaurant: pizza, pasta, and ciabatta. Soon after I encountered the work of Samuel Beckett. First, through his poetry and then through his plays.
Food and Beckett were strange bedfellows.
They still are.
I have always loved listening to words. From early days, listening to stories on the RTÉ Radio One with my grandma in South County Dublin on a Sunday morning to playing cassettes of the plays and poems of any writer that I could find on audio: William Shakespeare, John Donne, Lord Byron.
I need the spoken word in the same way people need food.
I devoured all I could.
Cooking in my early twenties in Galway, I regularly visited the theatre. Indeed, one of the reasons for deciding to move to Galway was its rich theatrical heritage, especially through its Arts and theatre Festivals. It was there that I encountered the work of Synge, Murphy, Friel, Carr and McDonagh.
Some may say that I took the long way around to becoming a playwright – even though I have been writing drama since at least my late teens. From college in Cork and Galway (I have a PhD in drama) to owning three restaurants (Aniar, Cava Bodega, Kombu) and running an international food symposium (Food on the Edge), I finally found time to put together a collection of plays, the last of which is the radio play The Last Room.
As one who loves working towards deadlines, the origin of the play began with my encounter with the PJ O'Connor Awards. As our director Jessica Dromgoole observed, the play is a strange fusion between the work of Samuel Beckett and the Netflix show Squid Game. To write the play, I simply sat down in front of the black screen of my laptop, closed my eyes and listened.
What I heard were the voices of Adam and Paul.
The Last Room is a taut, atmospheric radio drama that explores memory, grief, and the quiet terror of not knowing where you are or why you are there. It is a tale as old as humanity.
Who are we and why are we here?
Two men — Paul, a middle-aged, divorced man drifting through a life of failed connections, and Adam, a father hollowed by the loss of his young daughter — enter a stark, featureless room from opposite sides. They do not know each other, but they recognise something familiar. Around them, the same pattern repeats: rooms, doors, silent movements directed by unseen figures, and an unspoken sense that there are rules they do not fully understand.
The Last Room exists in the uneasy space between theatre of the absurd and contemporary existential Netflix thriller. It is a play about isolation and repetition, but also about the fragile possibility of communion in the face of uncertainty. Like Beckett or Pinter before me, its power lies in what is unsaid: pauses heavy with dread, small talk that teeters on revelation, the ever-present threat of an ending that never quite arrives.
I hope you enjoy the play. Writing for radio opens up so many unseen possibilities in today’s digital and hyper technological age. Close your eyes and listen to the words.
Drama On One will broadcast The Last Room by JP McMahon at 8pm on Sunday, September 27 on RTÉ Radio 1 - listen to more from Drama On One here
