With plays such as the Edinburgh Fringe First-winning Catalpa, Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son and Asylum! Asylum!, writer and performer Donal O'Kelly has established a fine body of work and a huge fan-base who squabble among themselves as to which is the best O'Kelly play. They'll soon have another work to add to the list when Farawayan, written and directed by Donal O'Kelly opens in the Olympic Ballroom on September 24th.
Farawayan is a wonderful portmanteau word created by O'Kelly to describe someone who is very far away and unwelcome. Unlike O'Kelly's previous plays which had what he himself describes as "a flood of words", Farawayan has little of the spoken word but like those productions the story is told in an expressive physical fashion.
"The narrative is really moved along by image, music, movement and spectacle," explains O'Kelly. "I tried to use as many faraway theatre techniques as I could."
You don't get much further away than the juxtaposition of musicians and actors that Donal, in his directorial debut has assembled. Among the 10-strong cast there is a cellist, Vedran Smailovic from Sarajevo, who played in the open air for 22 days in a row to commemorate 22 neighbours killed when a mortar struck a bread queue near his house in 1993.
He'll be playing that same music, Remembrance, during the performance alongside Nigerian percussionist Bisi Adigun, traditional musician Emer Mayock, and percussionist Brian Fleming, who plays with the group De Jimbe. The whole musical element of Farawayan will be underscored and produced by composer Trevor Knight. Actors include Richard Meagher, one of the founding members of Red Kettle Theatre Company and Neili Conroy, best known for her role in RTE's series Family. O'Kelly was also determined to use cinematic techniques, notably the nuances of camera angles, in Farawayan, and to that end he wrote the piece for a particular venue, the Olympic Ballroom.
"If it's a dangerous passage in the play, the audience will be looking down on the action, while if it's a virtuous section, the audience will be looking up from below . . . At some points, you'll be looking on from outside, at others the action will be all around you looking in." As a director of Afri, the justice, peace and human rights organisation, O'Kelly has always been actively involved with human rights work and doesn't shy away from bringing it into his work. "It's just what I do. Art can be quite wholesome if there's no political comment but it is wrong when a work is automatically dismissed if it does have political content. Politics is all around us; it's an inevitable part of this swamp we're all in."
Farawayan runs from Thursday at the Olympic Ballroom, Pleasants Street, Dublin 8 at 8 p.m. Booking at 01 6792236/6704539. It will also tour to the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast October 13th - 16th; Cavan Town Hall, October 19th and 20th, and Leisureland in Salthill, Galway on October 23rd and 24th.