DRUID THEATRE Company’s main contribution to this year’s Galway International Arts Festival is Be Infants In Evil, the professional debut of Dublin-born playwright Brian Martin.
At once playfully comic and uncompromisingly savage, it is an outstanding debut which centres on a priest, Fr Patrick, newly posted to a parish in Dublin.
Fr Patrick needs to be alone. He can no longer put off the reckoning that has been a long time coming, but instead finds himself hearing confessions he is in no mind to hear - from Noleen, a blind widow who knows more than she lets on to know; Jacinta, a Muslim convert who wants it in writing that she has left the church; and he’s playing host to Henry, a 13-year-old boy who has somehow made it alone from London to be with his former tutor and old friend.
Brian Martin is a native of Dublin now resident in London. He is a graduate of TCD where he studied playwriting with Marina Carr, has been a participant in the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme as well as their Studio Group, and is also an actor, as he tells me over an afternoon phone call.
“I went to drama school in LAMDA, I came to London in 2009 and I’ve been acting here ever since graduating in 2011,” he says. “I’m currently in Titus Andronicus at The Globe which is going extremely well. It’s quite gory and there have been people fainting during the show. We enter through the audience in ‘the pit’ and one day as we were waiting to make our entrance we heard this loud smack and the door swung open and this woman had fainted as she was trying to get out and she was just sprawled there on the ground as we were entering!
Read Charlie McBrides full interview here. Book tickets here.
