Blue Thunder set to rock west Mayo town

Funny and frightening by turns, Padraic Walsh’s award-winning play, Blue Thunder, examines what happens when the people who should be there for you have nothing left to give.

An immersive, site-specific show staged entirely within an actual minibus for just 12 people at a time, Blue Thunder is being performed as part of Westival in Westport from October 25 to 30.

A co-production from Cathal Cleary Theatre and Kelly Phelan, it is directed by Cathal Cleary (Druid’s Furniture). The cast includes Gary Lilburn, Eoin Geoghegan and Seán Doyle.

The Irish premiere of the winner of the Vault Festival London Innovation Award 2019 will take place as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and will then embark on a tour that includes Westival.

It’s 3 a.m. in small-town Ireland. The nightclub is closed, the chipper is chaotic. Down a quiet side-street, taxi-driver Brian is sitting in his minibus, finished for the night.

But then his two drunk sons call, demanding a lift home. They arrive at Brian’s taxi, loud and full of booze, songs and stories.

It becomes clear that one of them has a plan to do something horrendous. And you’re all coming with him. Tonight.

This is the latest work from creative team Padraic Walsh and Cathal Cleary, who met while doing their Masters in Theatre in NUI Galway in 2005. Their working relationship has seen them begin their careers in Ireland, move to the UK and make the decision to return home to Ireland to create the kind of work they really wanted to see on stages.

Both are from rural Ireland and moved to London for many years, where their tastes developed in parallel through seeing a huge volume and variety of international work.

Their love for character-driven theatre that manages to create real excitement and forward propulsion comes from this time. During their years in London, they became a creative team and workshopped and staged readings of Padraic’s plays in places like the Jerwood and for HighTide Theatre. These plays were set back in the rural Ireland they grew up in, so there was a shared shorthand for characters, language, social norms, and humour.

Their collaboration built to staging Padraic’s debut play, Blue Thunder, at the Vault Festival London 2019. The production was a great success, selling out all 30 performances, receiving great press, and winning the festival’s Innovation Award, from 400+ shows.

A second production ran at the TREND Festival in Rome, an annual festival showcasing ‘New Frontiers in Theatre’, and toured to Molise, Arezzo and Milan.

Padraic also adapted it for BBC Radio 4, where it was The Times’ Radio Pick of the Week, The Guardian’s Audio Pick of the Day, and chosen for the BBC’s Drama of the Week podcast.

They’re now bringing it home to Ireand – and to the west – for the first time, almost 20 years after meeting as students in Galway.