Award allows Fregoli reach new heights

Fregoli Theatre Company will enjoy a few firsts when they stage their latest work, The Pleasure Ground, at the Town Hall Theatre next Friday and Saturday, August 21 and 22.

The Pleasure Ground is their 20th show, but this will be their first time on the main stage of the city theatre – until now Fregoli have played the Town Hall Studio when they have performed in this venue.

The Pleasure Ground, set in a West of Ireland town, also marks the first time Fregoli have tackled a two-act play, although their one-act dramas have toured at home and abroad.

And Fregoli are capping their achievement by being the first group to have won the Michael Diskin Bursary, a €5,000 award commemorating the late manager of the Town Hall Theatre, who died in 2012.

Understandably the director of The Pleasure Ground and Fregoli co-founder Maria Tivnan is thrilled, if a little apprehensive, about all these developments.

“This play has been stewing a long time,” she says.

“The Christmas before last, myself [and Fregoli colleagues] Kate Murray, Jarlath Tivnan and Rob Mc Feely met in Tí Neachtain to talk about the year ahead. I said I wanted to do a play about the West of Ireland; a big play that would be in the voice of young people.

“I wanted to do something on the fate of West of Ireland towns,” expands Maria, who is originally from Boyle in Co Roscommon.

“We are all living in Galway, Cork and Dublin, but we will lose a lot if we lose those towns,” she adds, referring to people in their 30s and 20s, the most recent generations to have moved away from rural Ireland.

Maria, “a child of the 1980s”, set up Fregoli in 2007 after studying psychology at NUIG followed by an MA in drama at UCD.

The cast of The Pleasure Ground – Kate Murray, Peter Shine, Eilish McCarthy and Jarlath Tivnan – are “children of the 1990s”.

There were huge changes between those decades, she adds. Mobile phones became ubiquitous in the late 1990s, as did money. It seemed like the 1990s’ generation had it all. But while while Maria and her peers from the 1980s found employment when they left college, the economy had collapsed 10 years on, leaving the children of the 1990s with no work.

The Pleasure Ground explores the dilemmas of that generation, via four friends who have gone their separate ways, but come home for a local funeral.

They meet up at their teenage haunt, the town park and playground, known as the Pleasure Ground. The town is dying, the Pleasure Ground’s glory has faded, and life isn’t matching up to expectations.

The four spend an evening together when buried secrets become unearthed, past grievances boil over, and old scores are settled.

“These characters are 24 and have a lot to learn,” observes Maria. The Pleasure Ground was staged at Nuns Island Arts Centre as a ‘work in progress’ during May’s Galway Theatre Festival when it showed great promise.

The cast performed the first act in a couple of different ways, after which Maria and the actors discussed its development with the audience. The first act was, and remains in the traditional Fregoli style, she says now. That means various character changes as people play out their memories, dancing and singing, not in real time.

The second act, which wasn’t performed then, is largely dialogue-based and is in real time, a departure for Fregoli.

“It’s more measured but it’s where the big revelations take place, when all you’ve learned in the first act comes to a head,” says Maria.

The drama has been largely scripted by Jarlath Tivnan, with input from fellow cast members and Maria. Jarlath is Maria’s younger cousin and also grew up in Boyle. Like her, he moved to Galway where he works as an actor with companies such as Decaden.

For more of Judy Murphy’s interview with Fregoli see this week’s Tribune