The reservoir took the village in 1961. It took the church, the shop, two farms and the lane between them, and it left the weir keeper’s cottage forty feet above the new waterline, which is where the Cassidys have lived ever since.
The play
Aoife Brennan’s first play for this company begins with a drought. The water is down eleven feet and falling, the tops of walls are coming back into the light, and the water authority wants the sluices opened to supply a city ninety miles away. Eamon Cassidy has operated those sluices for thirty-one years. His daughter has come home to persuade him.
It is a play about what a place is owed by the people who left it, and it is very funny for the first forty minutes, which is what makes the last twenty work.
The design
Tomás Vidal has built the full height of the upstage wall as the face of the dam — nine and a half metres of it, wet, with the water level marked in lichen. It is the tallest thing this company has ever put on the thrust, and it is the reason the seating plan on this site warns rows K, L and M specifically for this production rather than in general.
Note from the director
We rehearsed this one in the round for three weeks before we ever went onto the thrust, because the play is an argument between two people and an argument does not have a front. On the thrust nobody has the good seat. That is the point of the building.