Art is taking lessons from premiere on January 19th.
Jim Nolan's play The Salvage Shop is directed by Ben Barnes and will star Niall Toibin. As the rehearsals continue, the author, director and members of the cast have been spending time in Sean and Jim Corcoran's real-life Salvage Shop on the airport road.
To give the play more authenticity, for it is largely set in a similar business, they are observing and participating in the activities, and the banter, of the carpenters, furniture-makers, glaziers, stone-cutters and polishers who are restoring old and discarded materials for re-use.
Old timbers, stone and salvaged building materials such as slates, tiles, roof trusses and so on are stored and recycled by the Corcorans for modern use. The father-and-son team are expert restorers of the ancient materials.
Jim Nolan's play, by coincidence, also centres on such a relationship. The salvage shop floor, according to the pre-launch Red Kettle publicity, "becomes the crucible in which public and personal redemptions are sought and, ultimately, found".
The sets and the characters may be more realistic as a result of this "hands on" experience.
Meanwhile, Waterford's dynamic street theatre group, Spraoi, will be homeless in the new year and looking for new premises. The group has to evacuate its warehouse workshop on the city's quay in order to make way for construction work on the new Bus Eireann depot, which got the go-ahead from An Bord Pleanala just before Christmas.