Sherlock Holmes & The Hound of the Baskervilles DINNER THEATRE OCt 30-Nov14 2016, Kildare Street Hotel, Dublin 2.

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Wonderland Productions

Proudly present

Sherlock Holmes

and the Hound of the Bskervilles

Dinner Theatre

Oct 30-Nov 24

@ the Stella Lieu Boutique, Kildare Street Hotel, Dublin 2

 TICKETS NOW ON SALE Show only €17.50, 3 Course Dinner + Show €39.50 (Sun-Thur), €45 (Fri, Sat) *excld. EventBrite fees. Book Now

Dine on Drama in Dublin! Sherlock Holmes, devil worship, banqueting, mystery, spectacle, gothic drama, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a thrilling night out, where you dine on the flavours of Baskerville Hall, whilst the greatest of Sherlock’s classic adventures unfolds around you by candlelight. This is an intimate 360 degree dinner theatre experience with limited audience capacity of 35 approx. diners per performance.

Played by an ensemble of extraordinary Wonderland actors, Hound of the Baskervilles is a vivid theatrical production, complete with comedy, engaging characters, Gothic grandeur and breathtaking suspense.

Adapted and Directed by Alice Coghlan, Sherlock Holmes & the Hound of the Baskervilles is Wonderland’s most innovative and ambitious dinner theatre show yet – building on our nationwide hits Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Italian classic comedy La Locandiera. This show has been an ambition of Alice’s for many years — the seed was sewn over fifteen years agO when she worked  as a student at the Sherlock Holmes museum in the UK.

Cast List

Sherlock Holmes and ensemble roles…………………………. Colm Kenny-Vaughan

Doctor Watson and Roisterer …………………………………………………..Niall O’Brien

Doctor Mortimer, Barrymore and Mr Stapleton ………………………. Conor Marren

Sir Henry and ensemble roles …………………………………………………Jeremy Cooke

Miss Stapleton and Laura Lyons ……………………………………………

Frances ….Played by a different member of Wonderland Drama Club each show

Creative Team

Director and Writer/Adaptor and program articles …………………… Alice Coghlan

Producers …………………………….. Sinead Gillett, Natalie Hans and Annabel Bass

Costume Design ………………………………………………………………………. Risa Ando

Set, Props and Production Design ……………………………………Katarznya Horzela

Sound Design and Composition …………………………………………..Thomas Dunne

Make Up …………………………………………………………………………. Gillian Kinahan

Production and Stage Management ………………………………..John Oliver Murphy

Assistant Stage Management ………………………….

Costume Assistants …………………… Paula Bourke-Girgis and Katherine Michael

Photography …………………………………………………………………….. Eugene Langan

Graphic Design ……………………………………………………………………..Oisin Hughes

 

Work in Progress Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles


 

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Come join us this Mon 9 or Wed 11 March for our Audience Feedback performances of The Hound of the Baskervilles @ Cafe en Seine. We want to hear what you have to say!  Entry is FREE and there are some special offers on Food and Drink to enjoy in the stunning Atrium Theatre setting!

 

 

Get on the Guest List!

 


Cast & Crew

Colm Kenny-Vaughan        as Sherlock Holmes

Damien Devaney                 as Doctor Watson

Roy Grimson                        as Sir Henry Baskerville

Jack Walsh                           Ensemble

Elitsa Dimova                      as Miss Stapleton

 

Alice Coghlan                     Director

Sinead Gillett                     Producer

Ciara Nolan                       Stage Manager

 

 

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Reviews: The Hostage

Centre Stage, Dublin City FM  (Aug 2009)

‘Rarely was a company so aptly named – this show really is such a Wonderland…it’s so funny, so dark, so satirical – at times it feels like a party. One is eye to eye with the actors and there is terrific involvement between the audience and the actors. It is beautifully directed and choreographed and the movement feels like the sea, it flows around the room, it ripples over the audience and into the corners of the room like a wave, the choreography is both lyrical and poetic and the direction is terrific. The play pits humane solidarity against political violence and this is a completely original take on the piece.

The thirteen actors are fantastic and it’s hard to single one out – there is a wonderful performance from Noel O’Shea which is beautiful, and Kerrie O’Sullivan’s Teresa is so so beautiful. This is a very funny production, which pushes the fun and the humour, and also leaves you helpless with laughter. It really needs a great director like Alice Coghlan to pull it off. It is filled with philosophy and it brings the light up on a serious tale. It is a unique and natural production and I thoroughly recommend it to our listeners – it is a lovely experience and, a most enjoyable one.’


 

The Irish Mail on Sunday (July 2009)  ✮✮✮✮
This Brendan Behan play started life in Irish as An Giall, and became The Hostage under the influence of Joan Littlewood in 1950s London. At its simplest, it’s almost a dramatisation of Frank O’Connor’s great story, Guests of the Nation, with echoes of O’Caseys Shadow of a Gunman, but the Littlewood treatment turned a generally serious play about hostage-taking into an extraordinary mix of sex romp, exuberant song and dance, and a satire on political and religious hypocrisy.

Set in a brothel during the IRA’s campaign of the Fifties, it now seems peculiarly suited to the setting the Wonderland Company has chosen, two rooms of the Pearse Centre- although Pearse would hardly approve of the sexual gropings. Sitting in the actual rooms gives the feeling at times that you are intruding into the action.

Despite the manic bawdiness of the brothel, which includes a couple of gay men and an array of women, the core of the play remains the human plight of the young English soldier (Noel O’Shea) held as a hostage to be shot in the event of the an IRA man being executed.

O’Shea is a convincing naïve young soldier, clueless about politics and history, who integrates well with his captors and falls for the simple country girl played with a nice mixture of compassion and uncertainty by Kerrie O’Sullivan.

The dying-for-Ireland speeches are mostly delivered by the dubious War of Independence hero/piano player (Morgan Cooke) by the cartoonish English-soldier-turned-IRA man (Martin Philips) and the fanatic IRA chief (Neill Flemming.) But the play takes no side in the political battle.

It’s an emotional barrage, that begs to be savagely edited, yet it is delivered with such exhilarating enthusiasm by director Alice Coghlan and a cast who contribute musical accompaniment, that it disarms logical criticism.


The Sunday Independent  (July 2009)
The grinding that might be heard in the area of Pearse Street in Dublin these evenings is undoubtedly Patrick Pearse turning in his blood-obsessed, humourless grave. Wonderland Productions have staged a site-specific production of Behan’s The Hostage in the Pearse Centre, where the 1916 leader was born.

Having suffered imprisonment as a teenager for the ’cause’, Behan regarded it at best with mordant humour, and frequently with extreme cynicism about its true worth. It certainly wasn’t worth dying for, he reckoned: whether your weapon of choice became a self-preserving bottle of stout, or you bedecked yourself with the badges of joylessness such as the Pioneer pin and the gold Fainne, you needed bringing down to a sizable reality. And he did it with The Hostage.

When 18-year-old National Service squaddie Leslie is kidnapped by the IRA leaving a dancehall in Armagh in 1960, and imprisoned in the Dublin brothel run by Old IRA Pat and his common-law wife Meg, on behalf of the nutty ‘Monsewer’, to be held hostage for an IRA man about to be executed in Belfast, he tells his captors “everybody was doing something to somebody” in times past.

It’s the argument that has fallen on deaf Irish ears for generations; we preferred to believe in the singularity of our suffering. And it has given generations of subversives their raison d’etre.

This ambivalent heritage is seldom credited to The Hostage, but it emerges wickedly in this production, with the cast still maintaining the wild vaudevillian nature of the piece and its bawdy anarchic humour.

There are good, sometimes excellent, performances from Noel O’Shea as the puzzled Leslie, Kerrie O’Sullivan as the innocent Teresa, Martin Phillips as Monsewer, Morgan Cooke as Pat, Lesa Thurman as the hymn-singing Miss Gilchrist, and Neill Fleming as the IRA man. There is terrific direction and choreography by Alice Coghlan.


The Sunday Times  (July 2009)
Staged in Padraig Pearse’s former family home in Dublin, on a stage comprising adjoining rooms, this Wonderland production has a rare intimacy, a quality enhanced by Alice Coghlan the director and choreographer, as she encourages her off-stage actors to sit amongst the audience and to remain in character during the interval. With little or no distance between stalls and stage, Brendan Behan’s biting lampoon has an energising narrative drive, not least during the surreal musical interludes. In one, Leslie Williams (Noel O’Shea) the hostage, is welcomed with a mini ceilidh to the IRA safe house run by Pat (Morgan Cooke). Eithne McGuinness, Martin Philips, Michael Bates, Neill Fleming, O’Shea and Cooke (who is also the composer) all contribute strong turns, but this is a collective effort, particularly as most characters are required to sing, dance and play an instrument. The result is by no means perfect, but it is a worthy triumph of the imagination.


Irish Times (24th July 2009)
Without any risk of overstatement, Wonderland Productions is a company that is really going places. A plucky, ideas-driven and indefatigable theatre group, they have had no easy access to conventional venues and have learned to improvise handsomely, staging their works in various site-specific venues. Alice Coghlan’s troupe have previously staged Molière’s The Miser in a Georgian home, her own version of Goldoni’s La Locandiera in a Tapas bar, and the original comedy Life Shop til You Drop! in venues from Dublin to Dubai.

A young company with a clearly classical sensibility, Wonderland’s new undertaking is Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. Its largest production yet, the show is performed in the birthplace of Padraic Pearse, a Victorian terrace house which here stands for the 1960s Dublin brothel-cum-safe house where the IRA hold Private Leslie Williams hostage for the night. Behan’s play is populated with rebel heroes, homosexual navvies, whores, convent girls and decaying civil servants. As is so often the case with site-specific theatre – sometimes the associations between play and space chime, sometimes they clang.

But Wonderland know their history. This venue is an appropriately charged place for The Hostage’s execution.

 

Back to The Hostage Production Details               Read More Wonderland Reviews

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Reviews: Gulliver’s Travels

Arminta Wallace, The Irish Times,

The Big Job of Creating Small People

IT’S A PRETTY big tale to stage. There’s a land of giants, a land of tiny people and a land of horses. There are royal processions and sea battles. “Every scene is asking the audience to imagine the impossible and tell the story of the fantastical,” says Alice Coghlan, who has adapted and directed the production of Gulliver’s Travels which is currently on stage at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin.

It’s a fast-moving show, with 38 scenes packed into 90 minutes as five actors and more than twice as many backstage designers and manipulators use a mixture of puppeteering, physical theatre and perspective trickery to recreate Jonathan Swift’s classic satire. “We’ve left out the floating island,” Coghlan admits. “But only because we’re trying to keep the running time to a length where children will still be paying attention.”

Not that there isn’t plenty to catch the eye. “In the book the giants are as tall as churches – 60 feet tall,” she says. “I have an image of Liberty Hall in my mind as I say that. It’s such a relief when we do the scenes with Gulliver’s family; all the people are the same height, and there are no talking animals or whatever else. Because we can’t put 3D glasses on the audience like they do at the cinema.”

The project came about through Coghlan’s company, Wonderland, being in residence at Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow. “They wanted a big family show,” she explains. “I had this idea that Gulliver’s Travels was relevant to the contemporary situation in Ireland. Then, basically, they said ‘do it’. We did three development weeks over the course of 2010, and it became clear that it was definitely a puppet show.” But they decided to use actors as well, partly to help the audience visualise the differences of scale in the story, partly because actors can convey a great deal more than puppets in terms of emotions, facial expressions and so forth.

Where do you startwhen you are adapting an early 18th-century text for the stage? Coghlan has already adapted Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for Wonderland, using about 20 per cent of the book as dramatic text. Wilde, however, is generous with his dialogue. Swift isn’t. “I would never presume to be a better writer than Jonathan Swift,” she says. “But we had to invent the dialogue because there’s hardly any of it in Gulliver’s Travels . So I do feel, to some extent, that I have written a play. I wanted to preserve the flavour of Swift’s language – but for a family audience, we can’t use too many big words or arcane expressions, or the children would be left behind.”

Swift’s satire, however, is bang up to date. “So much of what he says is about the human condition – about human frailty and weakness – that you feel like he’s writing for now,” says Coghlan. She isn’t the first to spot this. The vicious civil war in Lilliput between the Big-endians and the Little-endians, over whether a boiled egg should be opened at one end or the other, has given rise to a feature in computer software known as “endian-ness”. For Swift, says Coghlan, the boiled egg business was a question of religious belief versus fundamentalism.

“The Lilliputians were really talking about God being at the centre of rule and kingliness. But all their talk about ‘God is on our side’ – as I was writing that, I could just hear the voices of Blair and Bush and all that stuff in my head, so it became incredibly contemporary for me. Swift was very anti-war, and I think a modern audience can really connect with that.”

Reducing politicians to the size of six-inch dolls is also, she says, a fruitful satiric strategy. “To see human pomposity reduced to that level, and how endlessly pathetic the Lilliputians are. They love long words and big phrases – which is, again, very like modern politicians – and long, long titles. The king is introduced with about 18 of the most florid adjectives before you finally say his name. So a lot of it does remind me of modern politics. It’s just kind of sad that Swift said all he had to say in the 1720s, and nothing has really changed in the meantime.”

Coghlan invited three different stage designers to work on the “worlds” in the piece. Thus Lilliput has a bright, playing-card sort of look while Brobdingnag, the land of giants, is styled like something from Nordic mythology. “It’s like making three different shows and then pushing them into one,” she says. How, then, do they ensure that the whole thing hangs together? “We’ve picked up on something that’s almost comic in the book, which is that Gulliver keeps getting shipwrecked in various forms. He escapes from Lilliput; he’s rescued; then he gets left behind on a beach. The sea is the link.

“We also laugh at that with the audience, because it’s getting so ridiculous. Like, he’s rescued by a boat called The Swift . This guy’s just a bit too lucky. Although I did hear once there was somebody who was rescued from both the Lusitania and the Titanic – so it can happen.”

Wonderland is going to have a busy year in 2011. Gulliver’s Travels will be at Smock Alley until the end of the month, and dates are already planned at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge, Co Kildare and the Town Hall Theatre, Galway in March. The Picture of Dorian Gray will be back at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre for a third stint in April, and next week the company’s production of Goldoni’s comedy La Locandiera returns to the Campo di Fiori restaurant in Bray. “That’s by popular demand, which is fantastic,” says Coghlan. “It will be our third time going around Wicklow. That’s all to do with our residency, that we take our work around the county. Our dinner shows can go anywhere there’s a restaurant or a hotel. The hope is that that will connect us to audiences and to other shows.”

Meanwhile, Gulliver’s Travels is going with a bang. Or, as Coghlan puts it, “plenty of bangs – like the movies. Children think much more pictorially, so I felt there had to be something very clearly happening visually all the time, as well as what the text was doing. Our puppets do things that people can’t. They fly up into the air, or do slightly crazy spirals.

“I saw a programme about Roald Dahl while we were rehearsing, and he said that to keep children interested you need two events a page. I think he was about right.”

Wonderland’s Gulliver’s Travels is at Smock Alley until January 22


Valerie Shanley, Sunday Tribune ( 15th January 2011)

When breaking an egg, which is the correct end? On such matters do wars begin, as when the tiny Emperor of Lilliput orders Lemuel Gulliver to lead his Little-Endians into battle against the Big-Endians of Blefuscu. Jonathan Swift’s 1725 satire takes many a swipe at the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics of that era.
Wonderland’s production, with an ensemble cast of just five talented actors using puppets, models and shadow play is fast moving, funny and frequently bawdy – as when Gulliver (Nathan Gordon) is disgraced for quenching the fire on the Empress’ boudoir by peeing on it from a great height. The confines of Smock Alley Theatre makes the audience really feel part of our hero’s journey.
Fetched up in Brobdingnag our former “Man Mountain” is reduced to a grildig (midget) and becomes the plaything of Glumdalclitch (Roseanne Lynch) – a little girl of 60 feet in height. The cast are at their physical comedy best when Gulliver reaches the land of the Yahoo with the sad realisation that he’s worryingly similar to these grunting, scratching creatures.
By comparison, the Houyhnhnms are noble and civilised, and Gulliver wishes nothing more than to stay and eat with them, and discuss why lying has no part in their language.
Although written almost 300 years ago, the belief that there are those in power “who say the thing which is not” still resonates. All credit to director Alice Coghlan for highlighting the horse sense as well as humour in Swift’s timeless classic.


Dave Madden, DublinCulture.ie

 

The first act is about Gulliver’s most well-known adventures, his visits to Lilliput and Brobdingnag. On Lilliput, he towers over the tiny inhabitants; on Brobdingnag, the locals are giants and he is treated as a silly amusement. In both cases the play uses puppetry to represent the interaction between characters of very different sizes. The costumes are very nicely done, matching up the actors with the corresponding puppets. I also appreciated that Gulliver is presented credibly as a man of his time – sometimes in fiction the protagonist seems like a modern 21st century person put incongruously into a historical setting. I do have one slight criticism: during the Lilliputian part of the play there were a few moments when I wondered if the pace might be too slow for the kids in the audience. (Glancing around, my impression was that that concern was unfounded.)
….
The second act is set in the land of the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnm; a land where horses can speak, and humans are dumb, ignorant savages. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the play – it’s excellent on all levels, and the audience were enraptured, children and adults alike. The actors’ representation of the equine movement of the Houyhnhnm was especially good. (Forget two-man horse-costumes, this is how it should be done.)
Wonderland Theatre can be proud of this production. They’ve taken on an extremely hard challenge and created an enjoyable show. It might be a little slow at times in the first act but the Houyhnhnm make up for that.

 

Back to Gulliver’s Travels’ Production Details    Read More Wonderland Reviews

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Reviews: Moliere’s – The Miser

By Patsy McGarry, The Irish Times  (14th September) ✮✮✮✮✮

Reviewing The Miser’s Opening Night
Quite simply superb! Witty, wonderful, Wonderland. I had not seen a performance by Wonderland Productions before, though they have been in existence since 2003, nor have I come across a more promising company since the debut years of Rough Magic. A late beginning did not augur well, but that was soon forgotten as venue, performance, pace, writing and costumes wed into a intoxicating mix of what is probably Molière’s best farce. Translated, written and directed by the clearly multi-talented Alice Coghlan, it has been updated to Georgian Dublin (of the 1770s) with strong resonances for today. Martin Philips is utterly unsympathetic as Harpagon, as he should be, and I single him out only because he was the lead. There was not a weak link in the excellent cast. I just hope that when the Fringe Festival ends this production finds a home in a larger venue. It deserves to.


Michael Moffat, The Irish Mail on Sunday (16th September) ✮✮✮✮

 

Verdict: Fresh Molière shows us the filthy lucre…
This late play by Molière is pure seventeenth century situation comedy, satirising a soulless obsession with money. It’s full of misunderstandings, revelations, double-dealing servants and thwarted lovers.

A sparkling fast-paced production in the eighteenth century surroundings of the Joyce Centre in North Great St Georges’ St, at its core is the pathologically miserly widower Harpagon, keen to marry the lovely wealthy Mariane, who of course loves not him, but his penniless son Cléante. Harpagon’s daughter Élise is in love with the steward, but her father wants her to marry the elderly, wealthy Anselme. The subplots have Connolly Heron as a street-wise fixer sharper than his aristocratic masters, and Paul Nolan as a vengeful chef. There is other first class acting support from Sarah-Jayne Quigley (Élise), Eithne McGuiness as the unscrupulous matchmaker and Declan McGauran as Cléante.

Martin Philips gives a scintillating, exhausting performance as the skinflint Harpagon, in this adaptation by Alice Coghlan, who has moved the setting from Paris to eighteenth century Dublin and has thrown in occasional modern colloquialisms and references for comic effect, but has otherwise remained close to the original. Coghlan also directs with pace and an excellent eye for detail.


Emer O’Kelly, The Sunday Independent  (16th September 2007)

Molière’s great satire is inventively staged by Coghlan’s company, Wonderland, in the drawing room of 35 North Great St Georges’ St (the James Joyce Centre) and there’s some fairly spiffing acting on display, particularly from Martin Philips in the title role, Shadaan Felfeli as Valère and Eithne McGuiness as the scheming Frosine.


John McKeown, The Daily Mail  (14th September)

 

Reviewing The Miser’s Preview Night

Verdict: A rumbustious production

There’s a little irony in having a site-specific staging of one of Molière’s comedies. His plays could be improvised pretty much anywhere: tennis courts, inn yards, the halls of the great houses. Molière would certainly approve the choice of the Georgian rooms of the James Joyce Centre, however, and the cast leave little doubt that they could put this show on anywhere that has enough space or a couple of sash windows.

The audience is seated in the thick of the action, which concerns the efforts of the insanely avaricious money-lender Harpagon (Martin Philips) to keep secreted the strongbox full of money which he’s convinced everyone, including his two children – Cleanté (Declan McGauran) and Élise Sarah-Jayne Quigley) – are out to steal, and to get himself and his daughter married off with as little expense as humanly possible.

Mariane (Bernie O’Reilly) the girl he’s selected, is also the girl Cleanté has set his heart on, while Anselme (Alberto Albertino) the rich, middle-aged Italian he’s sacrificing Élise to, is the father of Valère (Shadaan Felfeli), his steward, Élise’s true lover.

The rest of the cast do a fine job of soaking up Harpagon’s dementia. McGauran’s tall, bewigged Cleanté is a visually appealing and amusing contrast with Harpagon’s sneering austerity. Eithne McGuinness as the marriage-broker is the plump epitome of lead painted amorality, one of the few characters who can hold Harpagon’s attention. The cast’s frequent exits and entrances could be timed more effectively, but all told it’s a good-looking boisterous production, which will doubtless sharpen up during the rest of its run.


 
 Jane Brogan – A Preview of Wonderland’s The Miser 

The French have a proverb: à père avare, fils prodigue (a tightwad father engenders a spendthrift son). This is something that Molière, being French, thought only too true and a good plot-catalyst for his classic comic farce, The Miser. However, it wasn’t simply the musings observed by 17th century French proverbs that led either Molière to write it in 1668, or Wonderland Productions to choose it as their offering to the 2007 Dublin Fringe Festival, but rather a morbid curiosity in the universal, timeless and fascinating human sickness that is greed.

The success of Wonderland’s 2005 Dublin Gay Theatre Festival production of Molière’s short play The Love Doctor, inspired Alice Coghlan, writer/director and founder of Wonderland to take on a full-length Molière play. Coghlan who is a French speaker translated The Miser after becoming frustrated with what she felt were stilted English translations, which betrayed the colour and “fire” of Molière’s French language. She adapted Molière’s play to Georgian Dublin and into the language of Georgian Dubliners from the street to the town houses.

Coghlan decided to move away from the proscenium arch format of traditional theatre and to present Molière’s farce in a manner which would bring his characters to life – as this Miser is literally performed in and around the audience – who are seated in the beautifully restored Georgian sitting rooms of The James Joyce Centre. Breaking down the imaginary “fourth wall” separating the life of the story from the reality of the audience, Wonderland’s production of The Miser injects new life into the 350-year- old script.

Because The Miser follows the unities of time, place and action, its performance in this naturalistic setting, where 1668 Paris is substituted with the Dublin of the 1770s, means that the audience literally eavesdrop on the ridiculous pursuits of the miserable Harpagon and his family. What is particularly lovely about this site-specific performance (which is set in real time throughout the course of an afternoon and evening) is that it is staged at dusk, meaning that the natural light changes from daylight to darkness and firelight – thus lending a particularly realistic and magical atmosphere to the entire experience.

As soon as the audience arrives at Harpagon’s home, actors in character and costume will usher them to their seats and help them with their transition from the present to eighteenth century Dublin. The play was adapted to the 1770s to suit both the rooms in which its performed as well as the materialistic values parodied in the story. Coghlan made the choice to adapt the setting, along with her Hibernio-English translation, to this period of economic growth in Dublin’s history, in order to highlight the materialistic values of Dublin’s last great economic boom, values which modern Dublin audience will identify with all too well.

The Miser is a funny and hauntingly relevant play, parodying and attacking the bourgeois approach to life and its inevitable cycle of endless discontent. As Declan McGauran who is playing the romantic, extrovert, Cleante, points out “this play is very funny but there is a darkness to the humour; it has reverberations for today’s audience as money is still a controlling factor in all our relationships. Everything is commodified now.” “I think it’s a great play for the Fringe audience” says Connolly Heron, playing Le Flèche, “especially the fact that it is set in Dublin, you see that Dublin hasn’t changed much really. I like the fact that it’s a comedy and it’s light but yet it’s also tragic and intense.” Coghlan clearly has an interest in capturing the zeitgeist of modern Dublin as well as sampling its moral fibre as her previous hit production which is currently on a national tour, Life Shop till you Drop! was a spoof of the modern self-help culture.

Just watching the fun the actors themselves have in rehearsal is infectious, and it is expected that this site-specific production of The Miser will be highly entertaining and accessible. Using a mixture of Irish Georgian history, a unique and realistic setting, splendid period wigs and costumes and plenty of laughs, Wonderland’s The Miser promises to be a carnival of theatre and most definitely one of the highlights of The Fringe this year.

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Molière’s – The Miser

themiserinactionA new version of Molière’s classic comedy. Translated, Written & Directed by Alice Coghlan. Performed in The James Joyce Centre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival 9th-23rd September 2007,

Money makes the world go round. And Georgian Dublin’s worst miser and money lender would sooner die than lose it. Wonderland’s site-specific staging of Molière’s classic comedy replaces Paris with Georgian Dublin, and uses the magnificent backdrop of wonderfully restored Georgian drawing rooms to full dramatic effect.

Old Harpagon has sent his debtors to the gallows. Now it’s time to send his children to the devil. For his loving daughter he has selected a marriage without dowry and a rich widow for his dandy son. But when Harpagon lusts after the same girl as his son, all comic hell breaks loose and his children conspire to trick this dirty Scrooge out of his beloved treasure chest.

This splendid adaptation features splendid Georgian costume, live music and operatic song, and a setting which transports the audience back to the Dublin of 240 years ago – a booming city with a miserly money culture which could be our own.

“Quite simply superb! Witty, wonderful, Wonderland …
the most promising company since the debut years of Rough Magic”
The Irish Times ✮✮✮✮✮

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Credits
From Wonderland Productions Ltd.
Starring:
Alberto Albertino, Shadaan Felfeli, David Ferguson, Connolly Heron, Declan McGauran, Eithne McGuinness, Paul Nolan, Martin Phillips, Bernie O’Reilly, Sarah-Jayne Quigley & Helen Smith

The Production Team
Writer/Director: Alice Coghlan
Costume Design: Aisling Nic Eoin & Gillian Hollingsworth
Lighting Design: Helina Patience
Producer: Sean Ramsay
Assistant Director: Charlotte Harrison
Stage Management: Camilla Jade Wilcock & Jean Igoe
Photography & Poster/Flyer Design:

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