The Drawer Boy, blazing a trail from Galway, opened to a packed house in Dublin. There wasn't a spare seat in sight at the Peacock this week as the lights went down.
The playwright himself, Michael Healey, said he was pleased to receive plenty of e-mails from the crew during rehearsals, dealing with questions such as the nature of Angus's character, "which is very easy to over-sentimentalise", he said.
John Comiskey, the play's lighting designer, said the main challenge for him was "to try and capture some sense of the isolated rural landscape that it's in".
Malachy McKenna, another playwright and actor, who won the Stewart Parker Literary Award this year with his own play, Tillsonburg, which is set in Ontario, was curious to see The Drawer Boy. McKenna has been commissioned to write the screenplay of his own Canada-based play. He and his girlfriend, Sarah-Lyn Hartigan, chatted to director, John Lynch, who is set to direct this screenplay. Lynch is currently working on a documentary about the Abbey, which will be 100 years old in 2004.
Playwright Ken Harmon was equally curious to attend an opening night in the Peacock. His seventh play, Done Up Like a Kipper, premières at the Peacock as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, on Tuesday, October 8th.
Another face at the opening was Martin Fahy, general manager of the Abbey Theatre, who retires later this year after 29 years, having worked with eight artistic directors.
For those theatre-goers who noticed an error in On the Town last week, apologies. Joan Bergin, the film and theatre costume designer, was described as Oscar-winning. Although Bergin has won awards in her illustrious career, she has never picked up an Oscar. In fact, say our film experts, she has never even been nominated for one. Thank you to the alert reader who pointed this out.