I REMEMBER being in the upstairs room of The Pothouse (which has undergone what seems like a dozen name changes since then) on the corner of Waring Street and Hill Street on a Tuesday night in early May 2005 for a Rawlife Theatre Company production of A Clockwork Orange with Martin McCann playing the lead.
It was part of the sixth Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival and was the first piece of theatre I’d seen in a pub which left a lasting impression. The story goes that it left an impression on Richard Attenborough, too, who happened to be in the audience and gave McCann his feature film debut in 2007.
Exceptional theatre in pubs during CQAF continued this year with a sold-out rehearsed reading of Alice Malseed’s work in progress, Sticky City, a one-woman show drawing on the writer’s experience of life in Belfast in 2023: chaotic men on dating apps, seedy TV producers promising the world and buildings mysteriously going up in flames.
The performance wasn’t confined to the small stage in the upstairs room of The Sunflower, but saw the play take over the bar room floor and right in among the audience.
With the writer/performer sticking around to talk with guests after the show, it was a reminder that Belfast’s radical history of blurring of the lines between professional and community theatre is alive and well.
And it will continue in the Naughton Studio at the Lyric when another of Alice Malseed’s recent plays, The Half Moon, will run for five performances before it moves for an extended run in the Pleasance Theatre for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The Half Moon
The Half Moon tells the story of four women from Tiger’s Bay across four generations. It was commissioned as part of a Green Shoots Productions residency in the North Belfast neighbourhood and Alice said, "I spent time across a two-year period talking to residents about the area, their lives, histories and hopes.
"The Half Moon is a play about hope and resilience. I was so inspired by these women, by their tenacity, drive and togetherness."
It stars Ruby Campbell, whose theatre credits include Translations at the Abbey and Lyric and The Ferryman in the West End, and is directed by Emily Foran, who has worked with Druid Theatre Company, The Everyman in Cork and The MAC.
Three weeks ago in Listowel, where I was programming the town’s Writers’ Week, I watched a performance of Minimal Human Contact, a one-man show by Naoise Ó Cairealláin from Kneecap. Starring Seán T Ó Meallaigh, it was produced by Aisling Ghéar and directed by Bríd Ó Gallchoir.
Even though it has sold out shows in An Taibhdhearc, I talked with Bríd and Seán about staging it in Mike The Pies, a remarkable small music venue in a pub with a long attachment to the town’s horse racing festival. There was barely a foot between the actor and the audience and the visceral story of a gambling addiction may as well have been made for the venue. It played to a full house.
The day before that performance I got a call from Bríd to say that (as with quite a lot of organisations, thanks to the ever-decreasing financial allocation) Aisling Ghear had lost their Arts Council funding and were going to struggle to keep their doors open.
She mentioned a crowdfunding campaign and I said I’d do anything I could to help. So that’s what I’m doing: you can help keep this incredibly important theatre company (described as ‘the most sustained, innovative, and progressive theatrical experiment in Irish in recent decades’) afloat by donating to their GoFundMe drive here.
