IT'S A BIT unsettling to hear Deirdre Donnelly, a woman of undoubted style and elegance, pronounce in your very own living-room: "God, I hate this wallpaper!" - even when you know she's acting a part in a play. But on the credit side, how many families can say their living-room was transformed into a theatre for two days and filled with something of the colour that strolling players must have brought to Elizabethan fireplaces?
Or how many parents can see their 12-year-old daughter making her professional acting debut among the familiar "props" of an old blue couch, Gerry and Macy the goldfish - and, of course, the familiar wallpaper? Thanks to an initiative by RTÉ, that's exactly what happened recently here in my home in Old Bawn, Tallaght, south Co Dublin.
There are four radio plays in all being recorded around the country in four living rooms - the others in Sligo, Navan and Belfast - as part of a drama series called Parlour Plays. Each half-hour play is being performed in front of an invited local audience.
Series producer Kevin Reynolds says: "The concept derives from the belief that all over the country there are people who have never had the opportunity to go to the theatre and who have no experience of audio drama. Parlour Plays comes from the fervent desire to give our audience access to an area of the radio listening experience from which they feel excluded for a variety of reasons: social class, race, ethnicity, religion, and place."
When I was approached about the idea, my first reaction was one of panic. My home is over 40 years old and looking a little tired, and I'm a hoarder by nature. However, in its favour, the house has a long living-room which could accommodate the cast, producer and director, as well as the audience on performance night. My kitchen, which leads off the living-room, was deemed suitable to be the sound man's cave, the kitchen table just big enough to take the sound deck.
The play, by Dermot Bolger, is called Moving In Day. It explores the lives lived by five women over five generations in Tallaght. Its story begins in the early 1970s, when Annie and Joe and family return from England and find a house in Tallaght. At that time there was little in the immediate area but the nearby mountains, a caravan shop and "a few old planks thrown over a stream". The timescale stretches to the present day, with the arrival of another, very different family from Africa.
Moving In Day is a multi-layered play. While exploring the experiences of very different women characters, it also takes a searching look at the nature of mother-daughter relationships. In this regard, Dermot Bolger displays a deft understanding of the geography of emotional landscape, as well as that of a sprawling, ever-changing suburb.
As a mother of two daughters myself, I was constantly struck by themes in the play arising from generational divides. I'm reminded that my daughters' experiences in a continually evolving Tallaght will be very different from mine. I came here from the midlands in the 1970s, around the time that Bolger depicts Nora, another of his characters, unpacking a clock and putting it on her Tallaght mantelpiece for the first time, after her move from London, where she grew tired of "strangers shouting through walls, making love or more often making war".
It was thrilling to sit by my own fire during rehearsals (tea-towel in hand some of the time) and become wrapped up in the performances and the language of the play. I never realised how hard directors worked until I watched the script come alive as director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, through sheer skill and patience, brought out every nuance.
And there was lots of fun. When Stephanie Kelly playing Jean, a young woman with a small baby, broke into the Abba number Dancing Queen, she danced around my dining-room table, doll in arms, with such exuberance it brought to mind the women in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa. It was electrifying - and again I was reminded of what I was like as a young married woman with a small baby in Tallaght. Back then, a lot of the day passed to the soundtrack of music on the radio.
Standing at my kitchen sink up to my elbows in suds (after a round of tea with the cast and crew), with the door to the living-room ajar, my mind travelled back to days when women like myself came here as pioneers of a sort, trying to form communities and friendships in the shadow of the Dublin mountains. The days of Moving In Day were moving indeed.
On the evening of the performance itself it was lovely to invite into my home friends and neighbours with whom I have shared so much of my life as we grow older together. Staying in really was the new going out. Because of its setting, watching the play was like seeing a series of scenes from our own lives unfold.
My living-room will never quite be the same again; it has been brushed by the magical world of drama.
Moving In Day will be broadcast on RTE 1 Radio at 8 pm on Sunday, May 11th.