Set Adrift on memory bliss

The Backstage Theatre in Longford is humming with the distinct, charged energy that only precedes a major theatrical premiere. For Deirdre Kinahan, one of Ireland’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights, this moment is both a continuation of a remarkable 30-year career and a vital, immediate response to a country undergoing profound social change.

Her new play, Adrift, presented by the Nomad Theatre Network in association with Once Off Productions, is a fierce, funny, and immediate contemporary family drama. Set against the backdrop of a rural Irish birthday celebration, the atmosphere turns febrile when a family is forced to address a sister’s relationship with a local refugee.

For Kinahan, launching this urgent piece of work through a regional touring network is a deliberate and meaningful choice. “The team on this show are just fantastic,” Kinahan says, her enthusiasm palpable. “We’ve got a young emerging director, Marc Atkinson Borrull. He works in New York and he works in Ireland. He’s just a really brilliant guy from Limerick originally. And then we have a young designer, Zia Bergin-Holly. She’s one of the best set and lighting designers in the country.”

The production boasts an extraordinary ensemble of Irish acting royalty, including Catherine Byrne, Darragh Feehely, Janet Moran, Bríd Ní Neachtain, and John Olohan.

“That cast is just out of this world,” Kinahan smiles. “I mean, they’re all kind of veterans of the Abbey and Druid and I’ve worked with many of them before. It’s such a privilege to put this team together and to have a play that’s about a really urgent, immediate moment in our country’s social history.

“To open it in Longford, made and created by a theatre network to tour rural venues. I think it’s a real testament to the people at the heart of that network and what they want to bring to their audiences.”

The genesis of Adrift stems from a specific, fractured moment in recent Irish current affairs, the protests that erupted with the repurposing of a hotel to a refugee accommodation centre. Watching the television footage, Kinahan felt a complex mixture of local empathy and profound shock.

“There was a protest in Tipperary when Racket Hall, a local hotel, was being turned into a refugee centre,” she recalls, “And the people in the town were up in arms because they didn’t want to lose their local hotel. I remember watching the scenes on the news. On one hand, I live in a small rural area, just outside Kells, County Meath. I could understand, because we have a hotel, the Headford Hotel, that’s key to the heart of the town and the village. So I could understand people’s upset at an accommodation no longer being available to them.”

However, the nature of the demonstrations shook her to the core. “I also couldn’t believe that they would protest outside a building in the manner in which they did. Terrorising women and children as they were kind of walking through a police vanguard into the hotel. And I just kept thinking, ‘this isn’t us.’ I began to think about how I could explore this moment in a theatrical way?”

To dissect this collective anxiety, Kinahan anchored the macro-political crisis inside the micro-cosmos of an ordinary, relatable household.

“I conceived of a play where we have a really kind of rambunctious, warm Irish rural family, where one member of the family has struck up a friendship with a local Syrian man from a refugee centre,” she explains. “And her other two siblings are filled with a bit of fear and suspicion. ‘Jesus, your man will only be taking advantage of her, making an eejit of her, trying to get his feet under the table.’ Through that scenario, I wanted to explore these kinds of conflicting responses to people coming into the country from other cultures.”

Kinahan’s writing treats her characters not as political caricatures, but as decent people trying to navigate a shifting cultural landscape. She believes the current hostility seen in certain pockets of the country runs counter to the fundamental Irish identity.

“I really believe in the humanity, the decency and the kindness of Irish people,” she asserts. “As a nation of emigrants ourselves I don’t believe it’s in our nature to attack or frighten or turn away a stranger. There’s a lot of posturing and stirring the pot. There’s a lot of fear and muddying of issues. Ordinary people are struggling to try and navigate that. I wanted to present that in a very human way, with that familiarity and humour that you can create in a traditional Irish play.”

To hold up a mirror to contemporary attitudes, Kinahan introduces historical counterweights into the narrative structure: two “ghosts” from the family’s own lineage who represent the historical realities of Irish emigration.

“There’s two ghosts in the play,” Kinahan reveals. “There’s their grandmother who left a workhouse in Oldcastle and went over to work in New York and ended up in a brothel. Saved up enough money, came back and bought this little house in rural Ireland that they now live in. And then there’s their younger brother who was a young gay man, was forced to leave Ireland in the 80s, but ended up an illegal immigrant in America. I wanted to put our own stories that we kind of know and love and all those little creases in a human being’s experience or life story.”

The tragic irony of the modern debate, Kinahan notes, is how selectively we apply our empathy. “We’ll accept them when they’re Irish and we wrap our arms around them, but then we use it as a weapon against other peoples. ‘They’re all illegal, they’re all this, they’re all that.’ I wanted to explore that in a way that was both theatrical and riveting, because of its familiarity in many ways it is quite funny. It confronts our own responses and our own attitudes and our own conversations as we all try and navigate this kind of shift in Ireland. We don’t head off in droves on the boats anymore. But the boats are kind of coming towards us.”

While the underlying themes of Adrift deal with heavy matters of displacement, xenophobia, and fear, Kinahan insists that comedy is the vital ingredient required to keep the audience engaged and receptive.

“There’s nothing funny about the crisis of people fleeing war-torn countries. I don’t for a moment kind of go there for humour, but you can create great humour out of great characters. I’ve created a familiar family, but also dynamic, feisty, funny, vulnerable characters within this family.”

Much of this comedic energy is generated by the natural, abrasive affection found within long-established family dynamics.

“It’s through their sibling push points that a lot of the comedy comes,” she notes, “through their own stories and their interaction. How they engage with each other and how they try to push away conversations they don’t want to have. I think it’s really important if you’re writing about very divisive issues, to present the audience with a familiar situation where they immediately feel comfortable.”

Kinahan is no stranger to high-stakes theatrical environments. A member of Aosdána and a former board member of the Abbey Theatre and Theatre Forum Ireland, her work has been produced worldwide, from London’s Bush Theatre and the Old Vic to international stages in Germany. The development of Adrift was an exhaustive, year-long process of refinement. “I am a very collaborative writer. I mean, I’m 30 years writing plays, so with something like Adrift, I would have written a first draft and shown it to Marc and had a chat about it and then gone off and written a second draft.

“Then we invited all the actors down to Roscommon a year ago. We spent a week working on the second draft and discussing it and arguing and looking at the different perspectives and the different moments in the play. Then I wrote another two drafts of this play.”

Even when the production entered the rehearsal room, Kinahan continued to tweak the text to ensure absolute emotional truth and protection for her cast.

“I did another bit of a rewriting in rehearsal because I’m very conscious that there’s huge sensitivities around this issue and around this play,” she admits. “So you needed to be really sure that all the actors were comfortable with the drive of their character or what was going on with their character or the language their character was using. Similarly, it’s such an immediate kind of issue. There’s a lot in there that are literally things I hear on the street or I hear in an interview.”

Kinahan’s ear for authentic dialogue is sharp, often lifting phrases directly from everyday Irish life to pepper her scripts with lived experience.

“There’s one line in it where one of the characters is lamenting the refugee centres and the fact that they changed the face of the community who is going, ‘you know, there’s a time when I knew every face on Main Street.’ And her sister goes, ‘yeah, and you couldn’t stand half of them.’ I actually heard that. It’s those things that I’ve actually added. Conversations or little phrases that I’ve heard in the pub or I’ve heard on the bus. It’s been quite a dynamic write because this is such an immediate moment.”

Working with a cast of such immense pedigree requires a writer to have thick skin and absolute confidence in their vision. Kinahan describes the rehearsal process as a thrilling, exhausting crucible.

“I’m an old dog for the hard road. I’ve been at this 30 years,” she laughs. “When you go into a rehearsal room with a cast like this, John and Catherine, who were in the old Abbey Company. They worked with Micheál Mac Liammóir in The Gate, they’ve toured to Moscow, they’ve toured to New York, and Bríd is exactly the same. She’s worked on films like The Banshees of Inisherin. And Janet is a great writer as well as an actor. And then young Darragh Feehely is one of the great young actors of our time. Well, when you go into a room with them, those minds and that experience, you’re going to be challenged as a writer, but for all the right reasons. They have to really love and hold and believe in the characters that they’re playing.”

The Adrift nationwide tour starts Thursday in Longford.