Kilbeggan drama group say ‘You Can’t Take It With You’

Building on the success of last year’s well received production, Kilbeggan Players Drama Society return to the stage with ‘You Can’t Take It With You’. The amateur drama group bridged a three-decade hiatus last time out and intend to build on the success of Blithe Spirit.

This year’s play is a Pulitzer Prize winning comedy about the Sycamores, an eccentric family living life on their own terms.

When their ‘normal’ daughter Alice falls for Tony Kirby, a wealthy banker’s son, the chaotic Sycamores clash with the prim Kirbys, promoting a message that happiness matters more than money.

“It’s a quite an old play, and not very well known here in Ireland. It’s set in the 1930s in America, in New York City,” director Seoidín Rochford said of the play. “It’s about a family of eccentrics, basically blending with a straight-laced, typical New York family. In the play two worlds kind of collide.”

The selection of the George S Kaufman and Moss Hart play was down to the director: “When I said I wanted to do this play, the group members were looking at me like I had four heads, as they usually do. The original cast numbered 16 or 17 members, but I have whittled it down to 14,” Seoidín said.

Casting posed some challenges: “I’ve changed the gender of some characters to suit who came to auditions. Typically we get a lot of females and fewer males. For this play kind of needed more males, so some characters have been changed. We did a lot of recruiting of men to fill the other parts.”

Over the last few months, the play has been refined: “It’s been tough to blend everyone’s life schedules together but we’ve made it work, thankfully. We picked the play in the first week in October. We quickly had kind of the core group of people, but it did take a while to fill out all the roles because there were so many of them.

“We had to adapt some of the language in the script. It’s set in 1930s America, so we have changed it a bit. For instance, one of the characters makes fireworks and we’ve had to make minor adjustments to make it believable and still carry the story.”

Seoidín says ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ will build on the success of last year: “We had our core number of people that worked on the play last year. That was the first year for Kilbeggan Players Drama Group in a while because we revived the group after a 30-year break.

“We did a search in the local community, then reached out to other drama groups and put it out there to other Facebook pages to see if we could get others involved. We have somebody from outside of Rahugh, and we have someone from Mucklagh and another from Moate. So we now have a couple of people from a wider area that joined this year.”

The play will be performed in the heart of the community: “We have our stage in St James’s Hall in Kilbeggan. We have a bit more budget to play with this year, compared to last year so hopefully we can make our set more realistic. I designed the sets and James Craig helped us build it.”

The production brings everyone together. Everyone helps to bring it to life: “We have a team to build, decorate, and paint the set. Obviously everybody pitches in. One of the ladies in the play, Edwina Maloney, is incredibly creative.

“Edwina is a milliner, so she’s pretty good with sewing and things like that. She has done bits with costumes and kind of helped anyone who needed assistance. She’s even put fabric over lampshades to add to the character of the set.”

Seoidín says audiences are in for a treat: “They will enjoy a night of fun, charisma, craziness and a story that has a heart-warming end and strikes home a very positive and hopeful message.”

The Kilbeggan Players Drama Society perform the classic comedy ‘You Can’t Take It With You’ at St James’s Hall, Kilbeggan, on March 5, 6, and 7, at 7 pm. Tickets, at €17, can be booked via TicketSource.