On Whit Weekend, 1941, a German plane circled the night sky of Dublin’s North Strand for ninety minutes, carefully picking its spot to cause maximum damage before dropping a bomb. The conflagration caused numerous deaths and tore apart a close-knit Dublin community. My latest play to be performed, The Messenger, was written in memory of those killed that night and is about a teenage girl whose family – like many others – was displaced when the bomb destroyed their old home. Set on a half-build housing estate in Cabra, where many shell-shocked North Strand families found themselves, The Messenger allows this girl to recount the horrors of that bombing, while she also endeavours to embark on a new future by eliciting a date from the boy she is determined to marry – a boy who was in love with her sister who died in the bombing. It is, hopefully, a bittersweet play about how hope and romance survive, even amid the most tragic circumstances.
The title of the play comes from the secret beauty tip known to all teenage girls in the 1940s, which was that if you dampened the cover of The Sacred Heart Messenger magazine (which was always printed with rich red ink) and rubbed it into your checks, it made for excellent rouge, especially in a time of rationing.
2020 and 2021 has been a terrible time for live theatre with the pandemic, but Irish playwrights have been greatly served by theatre companies and theatre directors who found new ways to reach audiences in their own homes. Axis Ballymun streamed a free production of the play (filmed by Ger Kellett) to mark the 80th anniversary of the bombing on 31st of May, 2021, which reached a wide audience in Ireland and abroad. I was brilliantly served by the actor Ericka Roe, who starred in the production, and by the director Mark O’Brien.
This was Mark’s final production before leaving Axis to take up his new post as the Executive Director of the Abbey Theatre. Mark directed a number of my plays for Axis and it was always a huge honour, a pleasure and indeed a benediction to work with such an innovative and creative director. Hopefully one day a live audience will get to see The Messenger, but it was lovely to see the 80th anniversary marked, despite the difficulties of mounting productions at this time.