Free-verse drama with dark underbelly

‘How to Stop the Sea’, a new spoken-word play set in Connemara, will be staged at An Taibhdhearc Theatre on April 22 and 23 as part of Galway Theatre Festival.

Written by Emer McMahon, it’s being directed by Róisín Stack, who created last year’s festival hit My Poet Dark and Slender. The actors are Macnas performance director Johanne Webb and Gaiety School of Acting graduate Conor Quinlan, who was recently seen alongside Jamie Dornan in the film Siege of Jadotville.

How to Stop the Sea, written in free verse, and with a dark underbelly, tells the story of a woman who discovers a beetle infestation when she moves into what was once a family home in a Connemara village. While investigating this unwelcome menagerie, she meets her landlord’s son and the pair of outsiders soon form a deep bond.

Dublin-born Emer McMahon moved to Galway in 2014 to do an MA in Theatre in NUIG and while in college here, she became interested in writers such as Mark O’Rowe and Debbie Tucker Green.

“They were using a very immediate, urgent kind of poetic language – at times drawing on free verse – to explore predominantly urban landscapes,” she explains. “I wondered how I could approach writing a play rooted in a more barren, isolated environment, such as Connemara.

Emer had been writing poetry, but felt it was time for a different approach.

“The idea of that kind of heightened language occupying a real-time space on stage fascinated me, and I wanted to write something that could be pared back and poetic, but also dramatic and demanding, to be experienced as a piece of live work, rather than read.”

And so How to Stop the Sea became “this very distilled, free-verse piece” which allowed Emer to explore the “raw, exposed rural landscape in Connemara”.

And it’s clear that she has developed a genuine affection for “the two wonderfully odd, endearing characters who are each navigating this isolated landscape and, within it, their own experiences of loss and connection”.

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