Dingle’s dolphin inspires ‘’After Sarah Miles’’ starring Don Wycherley
‘’After Sarah Miles’’ by award-winning Kerry playwright Michael Hilliard Mulcahy, which had a sold out run at Dublin’s Viking Theatre last July will be staged at Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre from Monday next, May 19, to Friday, May 23 at 8pm nightly.
It’s part of a nationwide tour which sees Michael’s fourth play call to 11 venues nationwide, concluding with a two-week run at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin .
This 80-minute monologue on the life of a fisherman living on the Kerry coast is delivered by Don Wycherley in what has been hailed by national critics as “a magnificent moving performance”.
In the play, Don Wycherley’s character, Bobeen wrestles with the harsh tides that an Irish fisherman must endure, as he recounts a life filled with disappointment and regret. While he finds it hard to face the sea these days, what he discovered in the mouth of the bay almost 30 years ago keeps calling him back there and to the waters beyond it. On this visit it will connect him to what he thought was lost and gone forever.
Although the central character is a fisherman, the play was inspired by Dingle’s resident dolphin. This creature is known to the world as Fungi, but it’s a name that makes the playwright shudder - he feels it was wrong to name this wild creature.
“At the core of the story is a dolphin who appears and sustains the man when he needs sustenance,” says Mick, who adds that, having watched the play one night, he came away thinking that “it’s A Wonderful Life, Dingle style, about a man who never leaves town but eventually realises it hasn’t been so bad after all”.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.