Shakespeare comes to the Abbey Theatre, but not as you know him. In fact, with director Maeve Stone's feminist agenda taking central stage within the production, this one is more about the 'her' than the 'him'. The Tempest gets a revamp and a provocative new title, with a focus on the feminine. The Shitstorm draws on a West Kerry landscape for its influences and it's the story of what might have happened after the curtain fell on the original play, if the characters lived in a modern-day Ireland.
"For me it was really important that it would feel contemporary and relevant to an Irish audience… I was really interested in thinking, if this were set in Ireland, where could it be, if Prospero were a living, breathing man, who would he be, and taking that idea of his magic being in books, that would be a writerly character… I liked the idea that there's an ilk of person who is very creative and may not have the success they want, or may have the success they want and eventually reach a point where they give up on society and they end up in West Cork, in Castletownbere or on islands scattered around the world, so I liked the idea of Prospero living somewhere on the Great Blaskets on his own and just sort of bitterly remembering the mainlanders who no longer appreciated him."
Writer and collaborator on this project, Simon Doyle, hails from Dingle so it was no stretch for him to keep the Blaskets in mind during the creative process. He describes the play as a "counterfactual 'what-if' after The Tempest" and says the new production draws on some of the lighter elements of Shakespeare's original.
"As in all the best Shakespeare comedies, the lovers get married, everyone is happy, everybody gets to return to the mainland, the bad guys are found out and the good guys are rewarded, but what if instead of Prospero and Miranda going back to the world that they came from originally, what if they say, to hell with this, we're staying here, we'll stay on this weird little island in the middle of nowhere because we like it and we've made this weird little space for ourselves."
One of the aspects that drew Maeve to The Tempest originally was the fact that Miranda was the only female character. She wanted to focus on and draw out this character and see how far she could be developed. A voice that comes through strongly in her characterisation and dialogue is that of Moira Brady Averill, a close friend of Maeve's who died suddenly during last year's Fringe Festival.
"It was a strange one because she would have been in this play, she would have been performing in it. Her husband was very generous in sharing a lot of her writing with us, and the play within the play in our version is Moira."
The Shitstorm runs from 9th-16th September in The Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival.
Click here for the full interview.