Apples don't fall far from the theatrical tree

Is a theatrical dynasty being born, asks actor Garrett Keogh

Is a theatrical dynasty being born, asks actor Garrett Keogh. His daughter, Lisa Tierney-Keogh, is about to make her debut as a playwright. Eve and Adam is about to open in the Crypt in Dublin Castle.

Her mother, Marie Tierney, a well-known film and theatre designer, who is just back from working on the film The Mapmaker in Leitrim, has designed the set and costumes. Her cousin, playwright Conor McPherson, is expected to attend.

Colm Meaney, famous as Captain O'Brien in Star Trek, The Next Generation, arrives along with his daughter, Brenda Meaney (16). Next he's off to Venice for the gala screening of How Harry Became a Tree, and he's just finished doing a version of King Lear, called King of Texas, shot in Mexico - with co-stars including Patrick Stewart (also of Star Trek fame as Commander Jean Luc Picard), Patrick Bergin and Lauren Holly.

Another member of the audience, actor and writer Sue Mythen, is off to Herning in Denmark to appear in a play to be devised there. On her return she will perform her own short play, Stone Ghosts, at the Dublin Writers' Museum. The lunch-time performances will run from September 4th for five days.

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But the Keogh family keep coming. It's a proud night for Peggy Keogh, mother of them all and grandmother of the younger ones. And Rosie Keogh (16), the younger daughter of Garrett, is here too.

More friends and relations arrive before the lights go down, and the three twentysomethings in the play - Juliette Gash, Steve Gunn and the playwright herself - unleash a Dublin style Friends with "a frightening underbelly" upon us.

The play's director, Audrey King, greets her family outside: her mother, Margaret King, and her sister, Jean Seneff, with husband Max Seneff, along with her brother Gordon King, are all looking forward to seeing Eve and Adam. It's not grim or gruelling, she says. "It's funny in parts," she counters. "We all have that sad part in our happy times."

And all the while, Keogh, the father, who played the flashing Fuso Negro in the Abbey's award-winning production of Barbaric Comedies last year, is beaming. "I'm as proud as punch."