Perched precariously on top of the well-known tourist spot of the Cliffs of Angorra lies the convent of St Aguna's which is populated by a religious order the likes of which hasn't been seen in this country since the days of Craggy Island. Leaving the convent and moving across the seemingly bottomless Bog of Geoff, you come to the quaint, picturesque village of Ballygansey, which happily enough is populated by a bunch of nutters.
This is the setting for a dramatically new Irish theatrical experience which opens in Bewleys Cafe Theatre in Dublin next week. A cast of 13 actors will, on a daily basis, improvise their own soap opera based on the shenanigans of St Aguna's and Ballygansey. There may only be 13 actors on the books, but through a mysterious dramatic process there will be 26 characters on stage propelling the action along.
"Yes, it is a bit confusing" says actor Michelle Read, who developed the show along with director Tara Derrrington. "It all started last year when a group of us were in an improv workshop and came up with the idea of putting on a narrative-based improvised show as opposed to a games-based improvised show (which is the format used in programmes like Whose Line is it Anyway?). We thought up the idea of an improvised soap opera that would run six days a week, for an hour at lunchtime, in a small theatre space," she says.
Essentially what happens is that the actors, who are currently rehearsing their characters, arrive for the first show complete with fully fleshed-out personas - they're mainly either nuns in the convent or loonies from the village. How the soap opera then begins and progresses is totally down to the members of the audience, who will write down suggested plot lines that are put into a container at the front of the stage. The actors then pluck out the suggestions and the fun begins.
"Because of the size of the space, which only fits 60 people, there is no set as such," says Read, "so we've created our own sort of virtual set, which is basically an imaginary one. So for instance, when I'm playing my role as the Mother Superior and I'm in my `office', the other characters know that I'm sitting behind a large `table' so they have to be careful of that. The action is broken up into scenes, some in the convent and some in the village and because we're all playing two characters, there's going to be a lot of quick-dash changes of costumes."
So there's no structure at all to the show except that provided by the audience? "Exactly, except at the start there's an introductory song which will be the same every day. The other element of structure is that one of the characters has a `secret' which will change every day and be suggested by the audience and we build that into the plot. And also we'll be looking for a `sponsor' in true soap opera style each day. All of these ideas will be incorporated into the storyline. Apart from that, we're at the mercy of the audience," she says.
Read, an accomplished stand-up comic, has plenty of experience in comedy improv but stresses the fact that although the performers will be playing it for laughs, the show is a soap opera. "What we're hoping is that when people suggest something for one of the characters, we can build it into that character and run with it, so we won't be starting from a blank slate each day - how we deal with things like alien abduction, though, I'm not sure. We're hoping also that people will come back more than once, so they can keep track of what is happening to the characters and judge the developments for themselves," she says.
Read's most recent theatrical outing was last year's acclaimed Romantic Friction play, which toured around Ireland and picked up a Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival. She's assembled a crack improv cast for this show with Tara Flynn (a recovering Nuala and member of the Comedy Improv); Tara Quirke (ex of Fair City); Natalie Stringer (from Rough Magic) and Stella Feehily (Little Miss Bundoran 1980) all adding to the fun.
Sounding like it's one half The League of Gentlemen and one half D'Unbelievables, but thoroughly unique in its own way, Read says that to the best of her knowledge, this is the first time that something like this has ever been staged in Ireland. Give it a go.
Saint Aguna's is at the Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Grafton Street, Dublin, from next Monday to February 19th. The show starts at 1 p.m. and the £7 admission includes soup and a sandwich.