Alannah and Wolves ready for local stage

Brian O'Loughlin

Alannah Lawless-Looby is taking a light touch approach with the cast as she directs a play for the first time, and that’s because she knows them so well and trusts them to interpret their parts in the way she wants.

Alannah has years of stage experience, having been involved with Mullingar Arts Centre since she was nine, and now she is off stage for the first time, as she works with Katie Purdue, Grace O’Gara, Anna Casey, Emily Shaw, Hazel O’Hehir, Caoilfhinn Ní Choiligh, Danni Corcoran, Ciara O’Reilly, Lauren McLoughlin for the Little Brother Productions offering, ‘The Wolves’.

Asked to outline the plot, Alannah said: “Without spoiling too much about the play itself, ‘The Wolves’ doesn’t necessarily follow a traditional linear plot, but it deals with both the most beautiful and the most difficult, nitty-gritty aspects of teenage girlhood and becoming a woman.

“It focuses on character rather than storyline and through that, we learn about how their relationships with each other grow and progress. There is, however, one defining moment towards the end of the play that changes the girls, both as a team and as individuals, and forces them to confront and come to terms with their realities.”

She chose the work “because it’s female-led, and it was very different to what I’ve seen done in the arts centre before. It’s modern, a very modern dialogue, and I like the fast pace of it, the way everything overlaps, and that all of the characters have something going on”.

“None of them just serve as a plot device to further somebody else’s story, they all have something happening.”

She saw a production of The Wolves by the Trinity Players which had one of her college friends in it and I remembers thinking, “okay, maybe I could direct – because up until that point, I hadn’t considered it”.

Alannah completed a foundation course at the Lir (the National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College), where she was exposed to “different directors, different ways of working, different styles of theatre that I hadn’t really seen before – there’s so many different ways you can do a play, and that made me go, ‘oh, maybe I could do that, maybe that could be an option for me’.

“I will always act and will always want to act, but I’d always ruled direction out, as there were too many moving parts, and this play in particular, because it stood out to me so much, made me want to change my mind about it [directing] and give it a go.”

Asked if there is much leeway in directing, Alannah said there can be: “I’ve chosen a fairly actor-led approach. I’ve worked with everyone in the cast in some capacity before, so I know the girls and I know what they can do. I know that they’re well able to make their own choices.

“I gave them the script, ‘learn it, come back to me’, and then if they ask, ‘where do I go on this line?,’ I reply, ‘where do you want to go? What do you want to do? What feels right? What would make sense for your character to do?’. If it doesn’t work, I’ll pull them back, but so far I really haven’t had to.”

There is a lot of expertise at Mullingar Arts Centre and Alannah is making use of it mostly on the technical side, in the area of lighting and sets, for example. She expressed her gratitude to Sean Lynch and the arts centre team generally – Josh Griffin in particular for building the set – and to the cast members.

Concluding, the Examiner asked Alannah how she expects it to be this weekend: “I think I’ll feel very different on the night, because usually I’m the only person I have to worry about on stage and if I do everything right, that’s all I can do, whereas as a director, it’s a different perspective, because it’ll be on me if it doesn’t look good as a final product, which isn’t something I’m used to having to worry about.”

Apart from having only a month for rehearsal (due to the busy calendar at the arts centre), Alannah says she and the cast are ready, and look forward to welcoming audiences to Mullingar Arts Centre this Saturday and Sunday, August 1-2, at 8pm.