Poster condemned for glorifying drug abuse

Date Published: 16-Dec-2010

By Denise McNamara

A poster depicting cocaine use to publicise a play being staged in the Town Hall Theatre has been condemned for glorifying drug abuse.

Who Needs Enemies?, the debut play by Conor Montague, shows one man snorting cocaine off the head of the main character.

The poster, which has been placed around town ahead of the one-night show next Monday, has infuriated some.

The show is centred on the character Eoin Hancock, who has decided to lead a clean-living life after completing a detox in the mountains. However his friends have other ideas and try to lure him back into the depths of debauchery.

The show was a sell out during last October’s comedy festival and a longer version has now returned to the stage, complete with a new scene showing the characters spending Christmas day in a hallucinogenic haze after consuming reindeer’s urine.

The show and its posters have prompted a flurry of letters of complaint into the Galway City Tribune. One reader described the publicity as “distasteful in the extreme” in light of the revelations that broadcaster Gerry Ryan died as a result of complications from cocaine.

Another said it “glorifies a problem that plagues Irish society”. “As somebody who has witnessed at first hand the problems associated with substance abuse, I feel that shows of this kind have no place in our city theatre, and urge your readers to articulate their disapproval by staying away from the production in question,” he wrote.

A mother of teenage boys said it was making a mockery of the country’s drug problem at the time of year when addictions destroy the festive period for so many families.”

Mr Montague said just like the Limerick comic duo, the Rubberbandits, pointed out, “you have to understand irony”.

“We’re looking at tragedy through comedy. We are depicting the situation as funny, but it is tragic. You see cocaine use on Fair City – does that mean you take Fair City off the air?” he asked.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.