Mojo Mickybo (2015)
Two actors perform seventeen parts in this fast paced, poetic and colourful play by award winning writer Owen McCafferty. It offers a child's-eye view of 1970's Belfast during one long, hot summer, when every day is a new adventure. Mojo and Mickybo are childhood friends who forge a friendship over a shared love for the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a defiance of the local gang led by “Gank the Wank” and a mania for making dens and digging to Australia, rolling down hills and avoiding their parents spitting bullets at each other.
But while the children are busy having mock shoot-outs, the adults are warring for real. Whether it is the verbal bullets that fly between Mojo's parents or the real war that is taking place on the streets of Belfast. Events from the adult world bring reality crashing into a world of myth and make believe.
This is a glorious, vivid play full of verbal swagger. Beneath its exhuberance is a deep sadness for the blindness of sectarianism, the loss of innocence and how all heroes, even your father, fall in the end.
But while the children are busy having mock shoot-outs, the adults are warring for real. Whether it is the verbal bullets that fly between Mojo's parents or the real war that is taking place on the streets of Belfast. Events from the adult world bring reality crashing into a world of myth and make believe.
This is a glorious, vivid play full of verbal swagger. Beneath its exhuberance is a deep sadness for the blindness of sectarianism, the loss of innocence and how all heroes, even your father, fall in the end.
Cast
- Mojo.......................................................Paul Cullen
- Mickybo....................................... Brian O'Rourke
- Director.................................................Carol Ryan
- Lighting Design............................. Ciaran Cullen
- Lighting operator................................Jim Keegan
- Sound........................................................Carol Ryan
- Set Construction ................Mark & David Ryan
Draiocht Theatre: 6th and 7th , March 2015
Civic Theatre: 15th to 18th, April 2015
Civic Theatre: 15th to 18th, April 2015
The Author: Owen McCafferty was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1961. He was brought up in London from the age of 1 until aged 10 when his parents returned to Belfast. He was educated at St Augustine's Secondary School, the College of Business Studies and then the University of Ulster where he studied Philosophy and History.
His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.
McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses but only used the skeleton of the original. McCafferty's writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. Like John Millington Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized.
His play Scenes from the Big Picture, originally produced in 2003 at the National Theatre in London, earned him the John Whiting Award, the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award for New Playwriting and the Meyer-Whitworth Award. It was the first time any playwright had won all three awards in one year.
McCafferty has also adapted J P Miller's Days of Wine and Roses but only used the skeleton of the original. McCafferty's writing features the language and complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. Like John Millington Synge, McCafferty's dialogue is highly stylized.