The Local (2023)

Asylum & Kilkenny Arts Festival in association with Once Off Productions & Watergate Theatre

There’s 50p on the pool table, Sinéad is ripping up the Pope, Féile’s going to get messy and Ireland is on the brink of cataclysmic social change...

The Local is an immersive soap opera. It’s 22 August 1992. The pub is the epicentre of Irish culture. Ireland is a drunken teenager.

We’re about to grow up and leave home and take responsibility for ourselves. The craic is exponential and the only way is up. Little did we know we were heading for a crash. We should have seen it coming.

Following on from the success of the award-winning Big Chapel X, Asylum Productions return with their unique production style bringing local actors, community groups and professional performers and artists together.

The Local is a time machine. It will take us back to 1992, to an Ireland fresh from the glory of Italia ‘90 and a million miles from marriage equality. To a time when the pub was at the centre of the community, and the church was moving to the periphery. The purpose of this play, in some ways, is to retrace our steps, and go back to the past to understand ourselves better today.

Today, 90s nostalgia is everywhere especially in fashion and music. So when we began writing this - all three of us being 80s/90s kids - it was a time we remembered clearly and fondly. But it wasn't long before the social and cultural context looming over our pub and our characters sent a shiver down our spines. 1992 was on the cusp of change, where for a brief period two Irelands co-existed. It was time when we knew, but we didn’t. When we hoped, but we daren’t.

We began writing this play together in 2020 as three women in three corners of this island (Dublin, Galway and Kilkenny) united by the glow of a computer screen and a grá for a story well told. For drama and stakes and humour in the darkness. It was pure escape when we all needed it. We didn't know if we'd ever be in a pub - as we knew it - ever again. And then all of a sudden there was a venue and a cast and a real embodied soap opera in the middle of Kilkenny started to emerge with a story and stories that wanted to be told. And you here to witness them.

Thank you,

Medb Lambert, Clare Monnelly and Emma O'Grady