Underneath

Description

It's mad that ye're here with me. In Cobh. I always felt like I was born on the brink of the world. That I was near death, always. And here I am! Hereafter. This place of slower motion. But whipping energy. Back Home. A woman lies dead in her grave in the Tumbledown cemetery, Cobh, County Cork. It's a recent relocation; only two weeks before she was living in a flat near Croke Park in Dublin, beneath two East European prostitutes who she had begun to be friendly with. From her last resting place, she tells the story of her life: her happy childhood and the mother who loved Cleopatra; being struck by lightning and then missing school for a year; her night shifts in hotels washing and mending laundry; up to her ultimate and untimely demise in a north Dublin flat; all via a series of unlikely encounters and heartbreaking betrayals. Written in Pat Kinevane's signature style, Underneath is a blackly comic, rich and vivid tale of a life lived in secret, a testament to the people who live on the fringes, under the nose of everyday life. Underneath was published to coincide with the play's first production by Fishamble theatre company in December 2014.

Pat Kinevane is a native of Cobh, County Cork. He has worked as an actor in Dublin for Dublin for many years, performing with most of Ireland's leading companies including Team, The Abbey, Druid, The Gaiety, Passion Machine and Fishamble. His first play, The Nun's Wood, won a Stewart Parker Trust/BBC Award in 1999. His subsequent plays Silent and Forgotten have successfully toured internationally for years, entertaining rapt audiences and gaining critical acclaim wherever they go.

Pat Kinevane brings extravagant expressiveness to the role of Tino McGoldrick, a homeless drinker ... What in other hands might be relentlessly grim material is saved by Tino's mocking black humour. Keeping self-pity at bay, his wit skewers those around him. (on Silent) -- Helen Meany * Guardian * Mr. Kinevane artfully conveys the secrets, the hidden past, of the aged, and the dignity often behind their quaint, seemingly innocuous bearing. (on Forgotten) * New York Times * wears death as if it were a quilted dressing gown. . . . 'Underneath' . . . is an amiably meandering diversion for those who regard Halloween as a time for embracing the ghosts we run from the rest of the year. Mr. Kinevane . . . is a monologuist of untrammelled imagination, who loves to gerret out the poetic glitter in dark, dank corners. . . . This play is in essence a sustained memento mori that asks us to see the skull beneath the human skin as a reminder of what ultimately links us all. * New York Times *