Fregoli tackle issue of memory in revived Tape

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Tape, a hard-hitting and blackly comic play that explores the nature of friendship, memory and truth, will be staged at the city’s Nuns Island Theatre from Tuesday August 30 to Thursday September 1.

In Stephen Belber’s three-hander, three school friends have been re-united by circumstance in a motel room, where they revisit their past and compare memories of events that have left a lasting legacy on their lives.

Tape is being presented by Fregoli Theatre, one of Galway most innovative and energetic theatre companies, which was founded in 2007.

Directed by Rob McFeely, the play stars Jarlath Tivnan, Peter Shine, and Eilish McCarthy, and it sees Fregoli and Rob revisit a drama from the company’s early days.

“I’d directed it before so it comes naturally to do it again,” says Rob of Tape, which was written in 1999 and subsequently made into a film.

Tape has been described as a “terrific” piece by The New Yorker, while Fregoli received a five-star review when the group brought it to the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, following a short run in the studio of Galway’s Town Hall Theatre.

Since then, Fregoli have become more experimental in the work they do, introducing drama “with humour, but packing a punch, crazy character-driven pieces, with music”, according to Rob.

In more recent plays, they have consciously worked to remove ‘the fourth wall’– the imaginary wall that traditionally exists between cast and audience.

However, while their style has evolved over the years, Tape is a play that has stayed with them and this seemed like a good time to revive it, Rob explains.

Fregoli stage two plays a year, one big one such as last year’s well-received Pleasure Ground, and another smaller one.

“For the bigger one, we explore what’s meaningful for us to write about and to create,” Rob explains. “With the second play, we don’t want to put our creative energy into writing it, so we’ll do something with a script that’s already polished and our very talented actors will tackle that.”

And he feels Tape, a fast-moving 50-minute piece, fits the bill.

“It’s very moving and very funny and has a great reveal in it. There’s a lot of energy in it, as in character-driven energy rather than people jumping around the place. It’s a play about how people’s perception of something changes over time. Three different people are recalling the same event and their memories are different, so it raises the question ‘what is truth?’.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.