{"id":653553,"date":"2026-10-13T15:40:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-13T15:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/653553\/"},"modified":"2026-10-13T15:40:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T15:40:21","slug":"on-the-first-day-i-confessed-id-lost-my-fire-and-then-they-took-me-on-an-adventure-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/653553\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018On the first day I confessed I\u2019d lost my fire. And then they took me on an adventure\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When approaching a new Tinderbox<\/a> production, under its artistic director Patrick J O\u2019Reilly<\/a>, it\u2019s usually best to expect the unexpected. <\/p>\n

In 2024 he removed Federico Garcia Lorca<\/a>\u2019s play Yerma from the steamy heat and exotic passion of southern Spain and relocated it among a gaggle of tipsy christening-party guests<\/a> in the car park of a Co Louth hotel. <\/p>\n

Earlier this year he reworked George Orwell<\/a>\u2019s political allegory Animal Farm into a fiery debate on propaganda and freedom of speech<\/a>, using as his mouthpiece a group of feisty female protesters banged up in a detention cell. <\/p>\n

In 2023 he called upon dazzling gaming technology to pitch Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco<\/a>\u2019s absurdist play Rhinoceros into an unsettling, neon-lit virtual environment<\/a> peopled by a community of automaton-type avatars. His new take was named that year\u2019s best revival of a play at the UK Theatre Awards.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly is now in the process of immersing himself and his cast in a cinematic revival of a 20th-century American classic, calling on the world of the movies as an escape route, a refuge, a retreat for its troubled central character, Tom Wingfield, played here by Thomas Galashan.<\/p>\n

In his magnificent memory play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams<\/a> created Tom as a thinly veiled version of himself. As the audience settles into an alternative reality, cocooned inside the safety and darkness of the performance space, on stage Tom\u2019s regular trips to the cinema disguise the brooding demons bedevilling his claustrophobic home life, with his mercurial mother, Amanda (\u00dana Kavanagh<\/a>), his introverted, physically frail sister, Laura (Louise Parker), and her precious collection of small glass animals.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly did his professional training at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School<\/a> in Paris. Its distinctive style of carefully calibrated physical theatre exerts itself, time after time, in his work. He recently stepped into the rehearsal room at the Mac in Belfast, where Tinderbox is the resident company, fresh and re-energised after completing a two-week intensive training programme at Lecoq\u2019s new premises in the historic French walled city of Avignon. <\/p>\n

\u201cBeing back at Lecoq these past couple of weeks has given me the final piece in my professional jigsaw,\u201d O\u2019Reilly says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t been there for 14 years, so to do the whole two-year training again, in just 10 days, alongside former alumni from all over the world, has been incredible. It\u2019s given me the official accreditation to teach Lecoq technique, which kind of closes the circle for me.<\/p>\n

\"Tinderbox:Tinderbox: Patrick J O\u2019Reilly <\/p>\n

\u201cUnder the same tutors as before, we did tragedy, comedy, melodrama, clowning … all the things you do in the course of your training. Then they ask you why you do it. What\u2019s your motivation? It\u2019s like you lay all the secrets of your art on the floor and question your own motives, your decisions, your performance choices. Essentially, you confront yourself. It reinvigorated me. <\/p>\n

\u201cOn the first day I stood up in the room and confessed, \u2018J\u2019ai perdu mon feu \u2013 I\u2019ve lost my fire.\u2019 That\u2019s why I\u2019m here. And they said, okay, we have to help you find it again. I told them, \u2018Je suis fatigu\u00e9 \u2013 I\u2019m tired.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so I was, tired of doing of two shows a year, four-week rehearsals for 10-day runs. I\u2019d lost the spark. I was thinking that I\u2019m 45 years old now. What do my next 20 years look like? And then they took me on an adventure.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was as though my career didn\u2019t exist inside the school; it didn\u2019t matter. We were being returned to our creative roots. I had a few moments of breakthrough, when I said, \u2018Yes, this is the fire, this is the theatre, this is the thing that\u2019s transformative.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are brutal in their honesty. You\u2019re sitting on benches, barefoot, and then you begin the voyage, the cataclysm, in silence. You perform a complete theatrical experience, alone and behind a mask. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end you remove the mask and ask yourself what has changed. The answer is, I\u2019ve changed. Getting back to those roots, silently, deep inside your own head … it was terrifying \u2013 but magic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filled with new resolve and artistic determination, O\u2019Reilly has returned home to The Glass Menagerie, a play he describes as incredible, complex and breathtaking. <\/p>\n

\"TheThe Glass Menagerie: cast members Jacob Baird, Louise Parker, Thomas Galashan and \u00dana Kavanagh. Photograph: Lost Lens Caps <\/p>\n

Drawing on his rediscovered techniques of rhythms and movement, introspection and questioning, he is encouraging his characters to focus their performances on the four natural elements: earth, wind, water and fire. Amanda is fire, Tom is wind, Laura is water and Jim, Tom\u2019s ambitious friend (Jacob Baird), who offers Laura a brief moment of release, is earth. <\/p>\n

The Lecoq mantra is all about the mechanics of movement, what they call the \u201ctout bouge\u201d, the \u201ceverything moves\u201d. Its poetic discourse in theatre-making is all about movement.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly explains how this philosophy works in practice.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith Amanda we\u2019re playing a lot with fire. One moment she\u2019s explosive, she\u2019s got sparks; the next she\u2019s ash, then she\u2019s flames. We\u2019re using poetic metaphors and objects to look at the physicality of each character\u2019s development. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve brought back with me a realisation that each movement has to be clear; each decision has to be clear. Every movement has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it\u2019s my job as a theatremaker to make the performers see and achieve those beginnings, middles and ends.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Tinderbox:Tinderbox: Rhino, based on Rhinoceros by Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco \"Tinderbox:Tinderbox: Jo Donnelly, Susan Hoffman, Clare McMahon and Caitriona McFeely in Animal Farm. Photograph: Carrie Davenport \"Tinderbox:Tinderbox: Caoimhe Farren in Yerma. Photograph: Lost Lens Caps <\/p>\n

When he was developing ideas for reviving and revising Yerma, O\u2019Reilly was disarmingly frank about the parallels between the christening-party scenario and the chaotic family get-togethers he had experienced while growing up in the Co Louth borderlands. <\/p>\n

Once again he\u2019s bringing a sharp sense of personal identity to his choice and treatment of The Glass Menagerie.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love doing memory plays: The Man Who Fell to Pieces<\/a> [which he wrote], The Upside Down House, even Ubu, with its flashbacks and looking to the past,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cI find with Tennessee Williams, and especially with this play, it is obviously semi-autobiographical. You can feel it in the room. As a queer writer, you can feel his need to leave his mother and his sister, Rosa. He just couldn\u2019t stay.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can see lots of parallels and similarities with being a young, queer man, needing to leave a very small town, leaving a family behind, fleeing the nest. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut how do we look back on those memories? How do we reconcile any differences of remorse or shame or regret? That became very much a centre point for choosing the play. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo be very honest, in the current financial climate we have to do a classic play in a contemporary way so that we can bring in the audiences. But then that gives us the freedom to do new or lesser-known work in the next part of our programme.\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t need tricksy effects or a complicated set when you have a play like this, with such multilayered lives and characters<\/p>\n

Director and cast are revelling in the textual and dramaturgical perfection of Williams\u2019s play, which they will perform at Belfast International Arts Festival<\/a> exactly as it is on the page, starkly and simply, without special effects or script changes. <\/p>\n

Through Paul Keogan\u2019s staging and lighting, the audience will be brought directly into the world of 1940s American movies. As in those old black-and-white films, a live pianist will be on stage, in the shape of the composer Daniel Quigley, whose score incorporates a motif for the glass menagerie, mixed in with sounds from the American movie playbook and snatches of southern smooth jazz.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason I chose the prism of the movies is that there is such an importance in Tom\u2019s need to escape his life through film,\u201d O\u2019Reilly says. \u201cWhen I read and reread the play, I felt it needs a second space that is poetic. It\u2019s not realism. Tennessee Williams very much gives you the invitation to be poetic and symbolic and to play with memory in a way that doesn\u2019t feel limited.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all in there but interpreted through a different lens. The idea of editing memory is, for me, really interesting, especially the memories we choose. <\/p>\n

\u201cTom\u2019s escapism, his need to move into fantasy, can only last for so long until reality catches up, and he is only able to look at his reality through the lens of film. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t need tricksy effects or a complicated set when you have a play like this, with such multilayered lives and characters. <\/p>\n

\u201cAmanda is the driving force, the fire. She\u2019s a struggling single mother, abandoned by her husband and in danger of loving her children to death. Tom\u2019s perspective is about the conflict of desperately wanting to leave and be free, while being pulled back by the family. When they release him, he has to go. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018We can all see you\u2019: Gillian Anderson addresses \u2018distracting\u2019 fans in front rowOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cLaura is all about water, seeing the world through the clear glass of her miniature menagerie, drowning under the suffocating love of her mother. Jim, the gentleman caller, is earth. He is rooted; his branches are extending throughout the space. He is the light that the family are looking towards.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that Tennessee Williams has done an incredible job in enabling us to have sympathy and compassion and frustration and anger and hope for every family member. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf those characters had had the ability to articulate their feelings, it would have been a very different play. So it has been a very beautiful and moving journey thus far, in exploring the physicality of the world of the play and then allowing the exquisite text to be the thing that drives that world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Glass Menagerie is at the Mac, as part of Belfast International Arts Festival<\/a>, from Tuesday, October 20th, until Tuesday, October 27th. The festival begins on Wednesday, October 14th, and runs until Sunday, November 8th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When approaching a new Tinderbox production, under its artistic director Patrick J O\u2019Reilly, it\u2019s usually best to expect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4501,70086,93,277029,277028,17452,61,60,277027,277030,277026,277031],"class_list":["post-653553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-belfast","tag-belfast-international-arts-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-eugene-ionesco","tag-federico-garcia-lorca","tag-george-orwell","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-patrick-j-o-reilly","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-tinderbox-theatre-company","tag-una-kavanagh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}