Fishamble is the only Irish theatre company to receive a Laurence Olivier Award, the highest award in British theatre, equivalent to the BAFTAs for television.
Indeed, they received the same bronze statuette twice.
Once, in 2016 at a gala ceremony in London for their “brave, bleak, beautiful” production of Silent, written and performed by Pat Kinevane and directed by Jim Culleton, Fishamble’s founder and artistic director.
The statuette was presented to them a second time, by gardaí following its recovery after it was stolen last year along with an Irish Times theatre award from the mantelpiece on the Fishamble premises in Dublin.
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Anyone who missed the news that they had won it the first time around, certainly knew about it when news of the theft broke in the national media. The publicity was such that there was dark muttering in thespian circles that it might have been, er, staged.
There’s not a word of truth in that, as gardaí can confirm.
The Larry – as some call the statuette – was used to raise funds for the Simon Community as Fishamble brought the statuette on a year-long tour which included the West Cork Fit-Up Festival and many parish halls where patrons paid for the opportunity to have their photo taken with it.
Fishamble was in danger of becoming a hot news item again last March when Kinevane and Culleton were advised to leave the Serbian capital, after just one performance of Silent, on the advice of the organisers of the Belgrade Irish Festival.
It was nothing to do with audience reaction to Silent, but thousands of students were converging on the city to protest against government corruption, so the pair left Belgrade along with the singer Mary Coughlan.
“We were supposed to do three performances, but we had to get out of the country after just one. We were driving out toward the airport as thousands of students were marching into Belgrade from Novi Sad and all directions,” Kinevane recalls.
“It was tough saying goodbye to the young people working on the festival. There were tears in their eyes. They were saying, ‘We don’t know if we will be beaten or shot, but we have to see change in our country’.”
Their visit to Geneva in November passed off peacefully where I had arranged for them to put on their latest collaboration, King, the story of an Elvis impersonator from Cork with a colourful family history. He suffers from anxiety and mental health disorders and a fair dollop of postcolonial trauma inherited from his rebellious grandmother.
The show got a standing ovation and raised more than €6,000 for the Gaza School of Music, a branch of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Palestine, whose outreach is one of the few forms of therapy for children traumatised by two years of war and loss.
“A cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hall’s Pictorial Weekly,” was how one audience member, a child of the 1970s, described it, which makes me wonder how it came across to audiences in India where Fishamble toured the show in late November.
Once the hard work of stage direction, costume design, sound and lighting has been completed, a Fishamble drama is usually ready to tour with all the props and costumes tucked into a suitcase. In any given year, half of all new plays produced in Ireland come out of the Fishamble hit factory.
King played in festivals in Kolkata and Jaipur and made it to the city of Itanagar in the north-eastern province of Arunachal Pradesh on the border with Tibet. In a welcome address, Ireland’s Ambassador to India, Kevin Kelly, highlighted the shared history of India and Ireland and their common struggle for independence from the British Empire.
This is the first time such an initiative has been undertaken by the Irish embassy in New Delhi as the Department of Foreign Affairs expands its network of culture officers across several embassies.
Culleton reflects: “Touring these shows that fit into a suitcase and bringing them all around the world making connections with people who have never been to Ireland and don’t know much about Ireland is extraordinary.”
Over the last 20 years, Kinevane and Culleton have forged one of the most dynamic partnerships in the history of Irish theatre. It is on a par with other theatrical pairings such as Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, Stephen Rea and Brian Friel, and Conor Lovett and Judy Hegarty Lovett.
King is the fifth solo show Kinevane has written for Fishamble since he wrote Forgotten in 2005, the first in a line that also includes Silent, Underneath and Before. All five have a focus on people living on the margins of society.
There is no sign of the series coming to an end. The pair are already at work on a new solo show, which Kinevane hopes to perform in 2027. You read it here first.
