Blue Teapot to break new ground with Friel classic

A Galway theatre company will make history this weekend when it stages the Brian Friel masterpiece, Dancing at Lughnasa, for three nights at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway City.

Blue Teapot has cast Jennifer Cox, an actor with an intellectual disability, in the role of Rose, exactly as the character was written by Friel, and the first-time a company has been completely true to the character.

“Rose is the same as me, she is venerable but she’s fun and cheeky, she’s cheeky just like me,” Cox said of her ground-breaking casting.

Blue Teapot’s Artistic Director, Petal Pilley, explained that she began to investigate existing plays a couple of years ago that had characters with intellectual disabilities in them.

“Working with disabled and non-disabled actors in a series of workshops, we explored texts such as Shakespeare’s King Lear, Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed, and Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.

“I called the process Hidden because it was so clear that although disabled characters were there on the page in black and white we rarely, if ever, see them performed by actors with intellectual disabilities. They are literally hidden in plain sight.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.