John Morton

I had a productive weekend working with Gavin Kostick of Fishamble on a new play I wrote as part of their New Play Clinic.

The play in question is called Punctured which I started writing in 2010. I applied for the New Play Clinic last year and was very excited when the play got accepted. Fishamble are at the forefront of new writing in Ireland for the past 20 plus years so it was a pretty big deal for me to have them help develop something I’d written.

Punctured is a Dublin set urban western about a farmer from down south who rides into the city looking for answers about his daughter’s death. It’s a little bit of a detective story, a little bit of a fish out of water black comedy and a lot of a violent, redemption based western. With the help of Gavin Kostick, I was really able to focus on the nitty gritty of the story and I’m looking forward to getting back into the next draft. It was great to hear actors breathing life into the characters and voice what had previously just been in my head. For the clinic we assembled the cast of Brendan Corcoran, Gus McDonagh, Ken McGuire, Annette O’Shea and David Thompson. We also had lots of tea, biscuits and pain au chocolats. It was a good weekend.

The play has been developed under Devious Theatre and we’re hoping to stage it in 2013, if we can get the necessary funding together. So I’ve got fingers crossed on all fronts that sooner rather than later, I’ll have a finished script ready to saddle up and hit the trail.

My thanks to Gavin Kostick, Marketa Dowling and Jim Culleton of Fishamble for the opportunity and to all the actors for coming on board for the weekend.

The next Devious Theatre production is going to be the Irish stage premiere of Night Of The Living Dead.

Yup, it’s set in present day Ireland. Nope, it’s not a musical.

Also, there’s not much Gaeilge in there… but we’ve a few fluent speakers in the cast so we may well try something out. The title of this blog is me combining the title and being Irish into one absolutely non catchy sentence.

Those are the answers to the main questions we’ve been asked since we launched the play in The Watergate Theatre on Saturday night. People have been really positive about it and have asked many probing questions about how we’re going to pull off a show with such a big cast and the logistical problems of a bloody, undead siege. We give that quiet, confident look that’s a good cover for the sheer terror you feel inside. Sheer terror aside we’re really excited about it and I think it’s going to be a great show.

Speaking of the sheer terror you feel inside, that’s what Night Of The Living Dead is all about. It’s been on the boil for Devious Theatre for a couple of years now. We had an eye on it as a modern Irish political allegory but always had that slight worry that if we did what is ostensibly a B movie in a modern Irish setting it would just seem kinda cheap and hokey (it still might). Then back in the year of 2009 we saw Conor McPherson’s version of The Birds, which showed us exactly how you nail a classic 1960′s horror in a modern Irish milieu. We were inspired. We were confident that we could make our Night Of The Living Dead just as relevant, tense, claustrophobic and bird free. Then last year during In The Future When All’s Well, we pulled the trigger on it and it went into active development around the time we finished Scratcher.

It ticks a lot of boxes for us. It’s got the arse on seats name value that’s really important right now and also allows us to explore relevant Irish themes that interest us. With this play we’re focusing on emigration, the destruction of the family unit and fear of government with a tag line that’s straight from the mouth of our beloved leader (“You are not responsible for this crisis”). Like the original, it tells the story of a group of strangers holed up in a house after the dead begin to reanimate and attack the living. In our version, it’s set on a ghost estate in the south-east of Ireland in 2012 as opposed to a rural farmhouse in 1968 Pennsylvania. We’re confident it’s going to be fresh, relevant and still be faithful to what George Romero and his collaborators cooked up in the late 60′s.

Of course, the zombie genre has been absolutely done to death (no pun intended) but in Ireland and on the stage, we’re confident that there’s a lot of fresh meat (pun intended, yeah. Sorry). I’ve been writing it with Connie Walsh since mid 2011 and I think we’ve done a nice take on the Romero story so far. Connie’s an extremely talented writer not to mention actess, as anyone who saw her in Shifting would attest. She’ll also be playing the part of Babs, of “They’re coming to get you Barbara” fame, for her trouble. You can read about our take on the character here. Here she is in Babs mode for the first of what will be a series of character based posters from Ross Costigan and Ken McGuire. Plenty more where that came from in the next few months.

The play will be running from July 24th – 28th in The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny. We’re mad to take it to other counties but unless people give us money or physically harass their local theatres, we’re starting off simple with it for now. I’ll be posting about it here, but for most content, keep an eye on devioustheatre.com

We’ve released the first promo for the new Vultures webisode Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone?

In it, the former detectives of V.P.I. talk about their own personal favourite fictional detectives. We’re oh so meta. It should provide a nice taster of the upcoming yarn.

The episode, which as we revealed in the trailer is a documentary made by Janine Drew, is going to be released next month. Keep an eye out for it. I’ll probably post up more stuff about it in the meantime. Details and info and such like.

You can subscribe to Vultures on iTunes and also on our YouTube channel.

A promo for the new Vultures webisode Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone?

There are many words to describe a collective of vultures. My favourite is a ‘vortex of vultures’ and I also like that a group of them circling in the air is known as a ‘kettle of vultures’. But for the sake of this entry, I’ll go with a ‘cast of vultures’ because it’s the most apt for my current doings.

We just wrapped the new installment of our webcom Vultures. It’s going to be leading the charge for a new series of Vultures short webisodes that will be released online between March and June. Unlike the bigger story arc orientated first series of the webcom, this time we’re offering smaller, self contained episodes that will be infinitely more digestible. The story catches up with the detectives of V.P.I. three years on from the ill fated Pinkerton feud as they struggle with unemployment, loneliness, mild alcoholism and general disenfranchisement. But in a really FUNNY way.

We shot Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? this past weekend and it was great to get the old team back together, along with new members of our cast and crew. I got the glasses back on as Jim Vultour which was as blinding as I remembered. David Thompson and Seán Hackett return as Dan McGrain and Niall Tennyson respectively with Suzanne O’Brien returning as college student Janine Drew who now takes centre stage as the fourth ‘vulture’. Some familiar cast members will be returning this time around and we’ve got some new characters joining the cast.

The episode won’t go online until March so there’s no point in harping on at length about it now. What I will say is that it was a great shoot, a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to doing some more. For Mycrofilms, it felt like being on holidays. It also felt like being a public nuisance on the streets of Kilkenny. Again.

If you’d all be so kind, please subscribe to Vultures on YouTube, on iTunes and keep an eye on the website for more information. We’ll be unveiling new bits and bobs in the coming weeks. The lovely photos above were taken by Ross Costigan. He still hasn’t taken any photos of himself.

Nearly 3 years since we wrapped filming on our low budget detective webcom Vultures, we announced last week that it’s coming back for a series of new webisodes (like episodes…but on the web…)

So I’m going to write a little bit about why we’ve brought it back and what we’re doing and what to expect. Since we finished the first series in 2009 we’ve been shopping the show around in the hopes of getting it funded/broadcast/commissioned. And it’s just been a really long process. RTÉ weren’t interested. They turned it down in three different formats and told us that it wasn’t ‘broad’ enough and comedy isn’t really their thing. Yup. We should have paid more attention to what Graham Linehan said. We’re going to wear ‘not broad enough for RTÉ’ as a badge of honour. But it hasn’t all been negative. We’ve had some really positive responses and chats with nice people and there’s ongoing interest that we’re trying to sustain.

And sustaining interest explains the return of Vultures. The first series was filmed three years ago so we’re aware that considering the long commissioning process we’re now trying to sell people on older material. So we’ve decided to shoot some new material to freshen up the show.

It’s not a second series though! The process of making anything that took the time and the budget of the first series means that we won’t do anything until we have both time and budget! Which also translates as being less stupid nowadays… less. We wrote a second series that I’m really happy with and we’re still looking for funding. The new episodes, if anything, are like a Series 1.5. Like when Arthur Conan Doyle did all those flashback Sherlock Holmes stories to kill some time and generally be cheap about coming up with new material.

Unlike the long episodes we did in the first series (lesson learned: become your own script editor) these ones are all short and self contained and they bridge the gap between what we did in the first series and the storyline for the second series that we may maybe might make, possibly potentially. You won’t need to have seen the show before to enjoy them. We’ve got four lined up and we’re planning a new Christmas episode to complete the ‘series’ for 2012. The first one is called Janine Drew Presents Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? and it shoots in Kilkenny this coming weekend (that is absolutely a Bonnie Tyler reference). The episodes will then be released between March and June on iTunes, our YouTube channel and VulturesPI.com.

The new material revolves around Tennyson, Vultour and McGrain, the unemployed former detectives of V.P.I. and new addition, college student Janine Drew. We’ve got the cast and crew on board and there’s also a few new faces lined up, so we’re looking forward to getting back into the fun stuff.

The only cast member we needed who we couldn’t nail down was Eddie Brennan who plays Fred Bass. Eddie perpetually has rugby training and all through the first series he would say things like ‘Fuckin’ hurry up, I’ve to go to rugby training.’ When approached about a scene in the new episode, Eddie said ‘I’ve got rugby training that day.’ So yeah, we’re gonna kill Fred Bass off in the first episode. Or maybe just get have him lost at sea. Whatever works. More updates as I have ‘em!

The sexy new promos are by Ross Costigan Photography. (Who coincidentally is currently getting ready to wear a new fur coat and pitch his voice up a few octaves)

This is the trailer for my short film Hot Water Bottle, starring Suzanne O’Brien, David Thompson, Simone Kelly and Peter McGann. Produced by Alan Slattery and Paddy Dunne for Mycrofilms.

www.mycrofilms.com

The trailer for Devious Theatre’s production of Neil LaBute’s Bash: Latterday Plays in October 2011.

www.devioustheatre.com

The trailer for our production of Smitten from June 2011. It ran as part of Devious Theatre’s In the Future When All’s Well season and Solstice during Cork Midsummer Festival.

www.devioustheatre.com

A scene from Devious Theatre’s production of Shifting by John Kennedy in April 2011. It ran as part of Devious Theatre’s In The Future When All’s Well season.

www.devioustheatre.com