Skibbereen Theatre Society’s latest production, 'The Way You Look Tonight' is a powerful memory play by Niall Williams, who is probably better known as a novelist. The play harnesses the roller coaster of emotions that grip a couple, and their grown-up children who have fled the coop, on the day the manual telephone exchange they operated in a small rural village all their lives is taken out of commission. The end of this era has greater repercussions than any of them could ever have imagined.
A play about love, it is set in the mid-’80s in a rural post office, where the old telephone exchange has just been disconnected. It tells the story of the postmaster, Jim, and his wife, Katherine, who were once amateur ballroom dancers before illness stilted their dancing.
‘The Way You Look Tonight’ is a about the difference between fantasy and reality, romance and real love. It is also a play about their three children, now gone about the world, but connected still by the dreams and guilt and the invisible lines of love that tie us to our parents.
Being a memory play, there are many flashbacks to when the children were young and the action moves regularly from present to past and back again, as the playwright explores how relationships between the parents themselves and between them and the children, both individually and collectively, developed on the one hand, and deteriorated on the other, over the years.
It features a cast of five, with Carmel O’Driscoll and Frank McCarthy as the parents and Angela Galvin, Majella McCarthy and Tom Curran playing their offspring, both as children and adults. It is a very demanding play to perform, physically, for all the actors and they certainly will earn all the plaudits they receive!
'The Way You Look Tonight' is directed by Catherine Field, who has been a leading actress with Skibbereen Theatre Society for many years and has taken over this year as artistic director from Fachtna O'Driscoll, who is taking a sabbatical. Having been lucky enough to work with award-winning directors, such as Fachtna, as well as the late John O’Sullivan, Catherine will bring all her own experience and flair to her directorial debut, as she takes on this challenging production.
She is sure to maintain the high acting standards and production values that audiences in Co. Cork and much further afield have come to expect of the Skibbereen group.