ireland Tag Archive

1628

December 30, 2012 • mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold

The final episode of Vultures hit the web just before Christmas, finalising the hell out of our final season with a real sense of urgent finality.

The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold is the title of the episode (it’s not just spies you know) and sees the events of the second series get tied up in what I hope is a funny, entertaining way. The story sees Janine Drew finally going through with her promise to quit college. She arrives home for the Christmas break intent on fighting crime in her home town (without her Ma finding out she’s quit). After watching Janine’s detective documentary, crime novelist Kate Marple hires the ambitious young sleuth to help her write an expose of rumoured crime boss Johnny Curragh. In the meantime, former dicks McGrain, Vultour and Tennyson have been brought together for a Christmas reunion by an unknown party. Everything comes to a head in this festive finale which should answer the question posed by the first episode of the new series ‘Where have all the good dicks gone?’

This is the one where we get to tie together all the storylines of the new series, which has predominantly dealt with the mundane lifestyles of retired crimefighters. This follows on from the fourth episode Dan McGrain In The Nick Of Time which saw the former dicks meet their first fully fledged adventure only for them to walk away from a return to detective life. In this one we also get to show the full extent of our series villains Johnny’s Blades. Like a mix of Charlie’s Angels and Josie and the Pussy Cats with a dash of IRA brutality, we hope they provide formidable villainy to proceedings. The artists sketch of Johnny Curragh as drawn by Mick Minogue definitely gives a sense of our Josie and The Pussycats (well, Captain Caveman) meets IRA spymaster vibe.

And the Charlie’s Angels idea is best represented by the Blades, Johnny’s trio of ball busting lady agents. Maeve Munroe was introduced in the last episode. The new episode will see the debut of Irene O’Haire as played by Alexandra Christle. McGrain and Vultour referenced the nice girl who they used to go line dancing with back in Episode 3 and here she makes her mark. And it will inevitably involve more unprovoked, albeit stylish, violence. And of course, there’s a third Blade but you’ll just have to watch the episode to see how that unfolds.

So this is it for Vultures in its current webcommy form. It may be the end overall but there’s still a few other potential outlets for our brand of detective comedy so we’ll see how it goes. It’s definitely exhausted itself as a low budget webcom and after 12 episodes I think we’ve pretty much told the story and had the laughs that we wanted. It’s also been really nice to finish it off as we started it in 2007 with a Christmas episode. I’d also like to personally thank all the good people who have watched and supported the show since we started making it. It’s been a lot of fun. Here’s the episode itself. Enjoy!

For more on the show, please take a trip over to VulturesPI.com

Continue reading

1383

December 21, 2012 • irish sitcom, mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

Employment Opportunities

We’ve just released the trailer for the very final Vultures episode. ‘The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold’ hits the web this Sunday December 23rd and it will tie up our second series with a bit of festive panache.

The trailer features a head to head between the punky informant Jack Street (Ross Costigan) and dapper architect Tom Moriarty (Stephen Colfer). It allowed us a nice opportunity to give two of the best Vultures supporting characters a scene all on their lonesome as we see that the former detectives aren’t the only ones struggling with unemployment.

It also ups the stakes for our detective baiting Christmas reunion in the final episode. The plot for the new episode sees Janine Drew upping the stakes as she tries to reunite the good dicks who can take the fight local crimeboss Johnny Curragh. And it’s also set at Christmas just like the very first episode all those many, many years ago. It’s nice to finish things off in a sorta full circle kind of fashion. Here’s the trailer:

Check out www.VulturesPI.com for everything else on the show!

Continue reading

1316

July 24, 2012 • devious theatre

The Night Of The Living Dead Rises…

Devious Theatre’s production of Night Of The Living Dead opens tonight in The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

It’s the culmination of a massive year’s work and I can’t get my head around how quickly it’s arrived. You always think it seems so far away but no, it always creeps up on you. Like a zombie, aptly enough. But after a long, bloody birth, our biggest, nastiest baby to date is about to hit Kilkenny’s biggest stage for the first time.

Myself and Connie Walsh spent a long time working on the script for this one. It’s been a blast getting to play with the entire history of zombie fiction and I hope we’ve written something that pays respectful homage to it. We’ve tried to write a version of the story that’s new, fresh, funny and uniquely Irish whilst also staying close to Romero’s vision of the origins of an undead apocalypse. If you’re a fan of zombie fiction I’m confident there’s a lot you’ll like about this.

The cast and crew have been powerhouses all round as we bring our vision of the end of the world to an Irish stage for the first time. A director just couldn’t ask for a better team. Most of them are majorly tired and can’t get fake blood off their clothes so it helps to keep them sweet as much as possible.

Word from the box office is that we’re nearly sold out tonight which is a massive achievement and it will be amazing to play to a near full house for our debut performance of the show. It’s been a long haul to get here but finally, the first ever Irish zombie stage play and the Irish premiere of Night Of The Living Dead is ready to rise…. we hope to see you invade.

Night Of The Living Dead runs from tonight July 24th – 28th in The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny. Bookings can be made on 056 – 7761674 or online here. Check out www.nightofthelivingdead.ie for more details.

Continue reading

1388

May 26, 2012 • devious theatre

Sever The Head Or Destroy The Brain

It’s all kicking off for Devious Theatre’s production of Night Of The Living Dead.

After launching the production with a character poster for Babs back in February, we’ve just released the second poster. This time it’s Tom and Judy, the teenage lovebirds of the original movie. Played by Kevin Mooney and Aoibhín Murphy, our version of the characters have a lot more attitude. They’re also very Irish. Which explains the hurl. It was very hard to write an Irish zombie movie and not use a hurl as a weapon. It’s also a pretty handy way to sever a head or destroy a brain, which as the movie tells us, is the only way to kill one of the living dead. So yeah, there’s going to be a lot of that going on.

There’s also going to be a lot more character posters. Four more to be exact. Yup, we always do overkill on the posters but if there’s anything this play requires, it’s overkill. The concept for this poster was based on imagery from Badlands, Heathers and Natural Born Killers. Essentially, iconic movies about young attractive killer couples. It definitely makes an eye grabbing poster. I just hope we’ll be allowed put it up in public!

Night Of The Living Dead runs from July 24th – 28th in The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny.

Continue reading

1446

May 14, 2012 • mycrofilms, vultures

A Movie About Dicks, Private Dicks

We were delighted to get accepted into the inaugural Digital Comedy Lab with Vultures back in February. But now we’ll be even more delighted if we actually win the Digital Comedy Lab outright. If we do, we would receive a €50,000 budget to make a Vultures mockumentary feature film. Nice, eh?

It would be a fantastic achievement for us after the last couple of years work on Vultures. It’s pretty cool to have a webcom out there that people can watch and enjoy but it would be even cooler to have a feature film that people could watch and enjoy. Our Digital Comedy Lab trailer outlines the plot for a prospective Vultures movie, which works as kind of a Year Zero for Vultures (Please let me get away with using that term, I’ve wanted to for so long!). The trailer spoilers the fuck out of the new series anyway, as the prospective film would lead on from it, showing Janine quitting college. It then moves into her rallying the unemployed dicks together as they truck off to Ireland’s first ever detective convention. Then there’s a murder! So, it’s a classic closed house murder mystery with a host of suspects and motives and twists and our bumbling heroes are thrust into the middle of it. The twist on the format though is that it’s done mockumentary style which has some very tasty possibilities for a murder mystery (which is completely new ground… unlike the rest of Vultures, ho ho!). Our trailer also showcases us doing FEATURE FILM type things like showing our dicks all dickied up, Vultour and Janine without their glasses and Jack Street in a real mink coat. Speaking of the trailer, here it is!

If we get to make it, I assure you, it will be very funny. And clever. And exciting. And it will have comedy and detectives in it. If you want to see a Vultures mockumentary feature that’s like the bastard of Scooby Doo and Agatha Christie playing Cluedo, there’s something you can do for us. Watch the trailer. Share the trailer. Like the trailer. Show it to people, maybe keep clicking on it, go to multiple computers and play it. That kind of ethical stuff. Hey, it’s a competition right? In fairness, if the folks at BeActive hate our story and think our trailer is the drizzling shits, they probably won’t commission it anyway. BUT if our trailer gets enough views, it might help persuade them that Vultures is worth making. All help would be greatly appreciated.

And if it doesn’t get made, how will we carry on with Vultures you may ask? Eh…. radio? Or maybe RTÉ might pick it up…?

Okay, radio.

Continue reading

1249

March 15, 2012 • irish sitcom, mycrofilms, v.p.i., vultures

The Vultures Are Circling

We’ve just announced the date for the return of the Mycrofilms webcom Vultures.

Janine Drew Presents Where Have All The Good Dicks Gone? hits the net this Monday, March 19th (I made that title way more complicated that I needed to). It’s the first new Vultures episode since The Long Goodbye in 2009 and the first of what will be four incoming webisodes between now and June. We’re also lining up a new Christmas episode but we’ll see how everything else goes first.

Everything else being the various walls that we’ve flung Vultures shit at over the past few years, some of which have stuck. The feature film version of the show (which has the equally long but sleeker working title of The Dicks Who Came In From The Cold) has been shortlisted for the Digital Comedy Lab which will see 2 filmmaking teams (1 Ireland, 1 UK) get €50,000 to make a feature mockumentary. So we’re going to get really competitive about that because we want to win. The plot of the movie is the same storyline that we had been saving for a potential follow up series and we’re confident it’s suitably cinematic. The quartet of new webisodes bridge the gap between the lives of the detectives in the first series and our ultra exciting second series story (none of which are too indebted to each other).

Speaking of mockumentaries, the new episode is the first Vultures one to be shot in that format. It follows Janine Drew’s attempts to make a documentary about unemployed detectives in her hometown for her first year college project. The results are tragic and comical. Yes, we’re going for a general tragicomic tone on this one. We hope you enjoy it when it hits.

If you don’t, it’s entirely my fault as it’s the first Vultures episode I’ve written and directed entirely on my own. Yup, I’m finally off the stabilisers. I could probably blame Alan Slattery, my trusty producer…. and I guess in some way, I will.

All the main cast are returning as well as other familiar faces and some new ones, like this ginger rogue Ronnie Drew, younger brother of Janine Drew. He’s played by Colin O’Brien who I had the great pleasure of working with last year on Devious Theatre’s production Shifting. He’s a fantastic young actor and also a total scumbag, which helps.

The episode will go online at some undetermined time Monday and can be viewed on VulturesPI.com, YouTube or if you’ve subscribed on iTunes you’ll get it there. Give it a look, spread, support and share, it’s all very much appreciated.

Photos by Ross Costigan… who may or may not be in the episode….

Continue reading

1283

February 14, 2012 • devious theatre, night of the living dead

Oíche Of The Living Dead

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.

Angela, Ken, meself and Dave: wine drunk.

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

Continue reading

1131

October 13, 2011 • bash: latterday plays, devious theatre

A Trailer For Bash

Here’s a trailer we did for our upcoming production of Neil LaBute’s bash: latterday plays.

It’s fairly simple stuff. We shot the opening lines of each of the three plays within bash (Iphigenia In Orem, A Gaggle Of Saints and Medea Redux) and set it to some lovely Billie Holiday music (featured quite heavily in the text) and that was it. The reason my mouth is covered in this promo photo is because I didn’t have the David Brent goatee I’ll be sporting in Iphigenia In Orem. Clever, eh? Our crack team of theatre professionals are full of clever tricks like that.

We’re currently nearing the final hurdle of production as bash opens in Cleere’s Theatre this Monday night October 17th If you’re looking for tickets you can get them in Cleere’s, book them on 056 – 7762573 or online here.

Continue reading

1301

September 13, 2011 • devious theatre, Theatre

So, There Was This Bash…

The next Devious Theatre production is going to be bash: latterday plays by Neil LaBute.

After the In The Future When All’s Well season we were looking forward to a nice long break. But well… we got the new premises and wanted to get some use out of it this year. Also, we’re suckers for punishment.

We’ve been looking to do something by Neil LaBute for quite some time, as we’re really big fans of his writing. So when we decided to do another production before the end of 2011, we took it as a welcome opportunity to finally stage one of his plays.

And that play is bash, one of his most controversial works. It consists of three monologues that tell seemingly normal stories from normal people but, yup, they’re anything but. Like a lot of LaBute’s stage work (The Shape Of Things, reasons to be pretty, Wrecks, Fat Pig) it takes a look at the dark impulses that drive civilised people. We’ve given it the tagline of ‘Three Horror Stories Of Everyday Evil’ which sums up our take on it. We’re doing it around Halloween time but it’s a bit of an unconventional choice of ‘horror’ material. It’s more of a gut punching, nauseating, awkward kind of experience. Way to build it up, eh? In short, it’s a fucking excellent piece of writing and we’re very excited. It’s a real departure from our trademark style of comedy so I hope we deliver with something ‘deviant’.

I’ll be acting in Iphigenia In Orem, which I’m thrilled to perform. It’s the story of a young businessman who makes a confession to a stranger in a Las Vegas bedroom. Rehearsals started last week under the sturdy hand of Ken McGuire and I’m pretty sure it’s going to preclude me from much of a social life for the next month. I’m also doing some directing myself for Medea Redux which is being performed by Annette O’Shea, and based on what she’s already showed us, it’s going to be epic. The final piece is A Gaggle Of Saints performed by Amy Dunne and Ken McGuire and directed by Annette O’Shea.

So that’s the basic info on the play. We’re going to be performing it in the intimate surroundings of Cleere’s Theatre from October 17th – 22nd. You can tickets online here. I’ll write more about it as I have more to write. I really need to go and start learning my lines.

Continue reading

1161

July 25, 2010 • Uncategorized

Dario Fo Season

Between September 2009 and March 2010 I spent pretty much all my spare (and often full) time working on Devious Theatre’s Dario Fo Season which saw two of the most famous works by the great Italian playwright performed in Set Theatre, Kilkenny.

I directed both Accidental Death Of An Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and it was definitely a high point in the 10 or so years I’ve spent doing this theatre lark. The reviews were lovely, the audiences were great and best of all, I got to work with a superb cast and crew on two plays by one of my absolute favourite playwrights. Happy out. We did a fairly comprehensive rundown on the entire season which can be read here. It’s taken me a while to get around to posting this but here it is. It’s a video compilation of some bits and pieces from both shows. Enjoy!

Continue reading