‘Also for Roaring’ brings life’s absurdities centre stage

“It’s a bit like Marmite,” jokes theatre director and creator Róisín Stack about her latest show, Also for Roaring, which takes place in the Black Box Theatre from next Friday to Sunday, February 18-20.

Audiences can expect an experimental evening as the three characters in the piece try to make sense of the world – in a performance that veers away from making sense.

And by Marmite, she feels people will love it or hate it! But she’s encouraging audiences to take a risk – just like the creators of Also for Roaring have done.

“The whole point, setting out was to make something that wasn’t driven by a story,” she explains. “So much Irish theatre is in the literary tradition and we learned so much of it at school. It’s great but we were interested in challenging ourselves to do something different.

“I always admire people who risk something and fail rather than doing what’s familiar and safe,” she adds.

Nobody could ever accuse Róisín of playing safe.

She’s been a key figure in Galway’s performance scene for many years, as a creator, an administrator and an advocate for a generation of theatre-makers who sometimes seemed in danger of being forgotten by those with clout and funds.

She’s worked with Druid, she helped to grow Galway Theatre Festival and she was involved in establishing Theatre57, a collective representing individual artists and performers who so often get overlooked as Galway trades on its faded reputation as an artistic capital.

Along the way, she’s created her own work, including the performance piece, My Poet Dark and Slender, an adaptation of a Pádraic Ó Conaire short story about a woman’s recollection of an affair with a famous artist. Róisín was awarded a Fuel bursary by Druid Theatre in 2015 to develop that work and it received a full production at Galway Theatre Festival the following year, when she showed her enthusiasm for the Dadaist dramatic tradition of mainland Europe.

Róisín began working on Also for Roaring immediately after that, in conjunction with “three brilliant and creative collaborators”; Daniel Guinnane, Conor Kennedy-Burke and Johanne Webb.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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