Night Of The Living Dead

description

We will perform a brand new stage version of George A. Romero’s classic horror from 24th – 28th July at the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny. It will be the first time any version of the work has been performed in Ireland.

The original 1968 movie is regarded as one of the most seminal horror movies of all time and regarded as the template for political commentary in horror cinema. It also gave birth to what has become known as the ‘zombie’ genre of movies.

Our production is written by John Morton and Connie Walsh and uses the original script by George A. Romero and John A. Russo as a jumping off point. It has been transposed from a farmhouse in rural Philadelphia in 1968 to a ghost estate in the south east of Ireland in 2012. It tells the story of a group of disparate strangers, trapped in an abandoned house after an unknown incident causes the dead to come back and attack the living.

The country is dying and dying fast. Able bodied young people are emigrating in droves. Their elders are barely surviving, just waiting and watching as things go from bad to worse. Families are falling apart. No homes, no money, no prospects: ripped apart as units and if they're really unlucky, limb from limb. The undead are the only ones rallying together in this country. And soon there's going to be more of them than there is us.

This new theatrical version uses the story to examine present day issues in a fear-gripped modern day Ireland. Like the original movie, it is a darkly comic satire that depicts the capacity for horrific acts in normal people during times of crisis.

Devious Theatre have been making alternative theatre for young audiences since 2006. We don’t repeat ourselves much. Our last body of work was the In The Future When All’s Residency which turned Kilkenny Arts Office into a theatre for 7 months. We performed the shows Scratcher (The Theatre Machine Turns You On: Vol II), Shifting and Smitten (Solstice, Cork Midsummer Festival). Other works include our Dario Fo Season (2009/10), the PPI award winning new radio version of The War Of The Worlds (2009) and the Irish stage premiere of Cannibal! The Musical (2007).

We first started actively developing this play during our In The Future When All’s Well residency in 2011. It continues our vein of work that explores the modern Irish experience for a younger, angrier, hungrier generation. Night Of The Living Dead encapsulates a lot of the themes and ideas that interest us in theatre and that have informed our work for the past five years. But with more zombies.

Money raised goes towards costs of our production design, set design, make up, costume, props and realising the potential of such an iconic work on the Irish stage in an exciting new, large scale production.