Myrn’s humorous play on broken-hearted lockdown

An aspiring actor and playwright from Corrandulla has used her time under lockdown in London to write and direct a short play which is being featured in a virtual theatre festival.

Myrn Devaney’s The Jar is a humorous take on how one woman copes with isolation and a broken heart with only a spider for company.

It is one of 12 Irish plays chosen by The New Theatre, located in Dublin’s Temple Bar, in collaboration with TakeYourSeats.ie for its Fight Back Festival 2020.  Members of the public are asked to make a donation of at least €5 for each short play they watch.

Anthony Fox, The New Theatre’s founder and director, contacted Myrn about submitting a piece for the online festival.

Last year she had submitted her first full length play, PUP, to the New Theatre’s New Writing Week. It was selected and presented as a work-in-progress in November, with plans to produce it into a full-length play when life returns to normality.

“I wrote The Jar in a couple of days using an exercise I learned last year during a workshop with Graham Whybrow, head of playwriting at The Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art in Dublin and associate director of the Royal Court Theatre in London,” she explains.

“I was aiming to write something that spoke to our current situation, so I knew the character would go through the motions of feeling trapped, vindictive, heartbroken and hopeful, but I wanted to tackle the theme of self-isolation from left of field. . . .I also wanted to get a nod to loo-roll in there somewhere!”

Myrn and her fellow actress Lauren Farrell rehearsed over Zoom video calls every day – Lauren in Leitrim and Myrn in London.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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