Kinahan busy as love story in a war opens at Glass Mask

Huge success of 'The Saviour' at Dublin Theatre Festival

Wilkinstown-based writer Deirdre Kinahan has been described as one of our best contemporary playwrights at present, and she is certainly one of the busiest and most prolific.

Just as her work, 'The Saviour', starring Marie Mullen and Jamie O'Neill was running to full houses at the Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, another play, 'Tempesta', was opening in Rex and Migle Ryan's Glassmask Theatre on Dawson Street.

Tempasta is a play about the storm of love. A play about the storm of war. Inspired by real events in Ireland and Spain in the 1930s, Tempesta explores the tale of two Dubliners caught up in the onslaught of war in Europe.

It is an homage to the idealism of the day and the majesty of the human heart in the face of great evil. Tempesta is directed by Marc Borrull Atkinson and stars Stephanie Dufresne and Jack Mullarkey with original music performed nightly by the celebrated musician Steve Wickham (Waterboys).

Ciarán Leinster wrote on The Review Hub: "Behind a curtain and up a few steps at the back of the Bookseller Café, Glass Mask Theatre’s permanent venue since 2021 is one of the most effortlessly atmospheric places to see a play in Dublin. Banquets line the walls on both sides, with more tables on the platform that is only occasionally used as a stage for the actors in Deirdre Kinahan’s Tempesta. Instead, Stephanie Dufresne and Jack Mullarkey spend most of their time on, beside, or at either end of the narrow counter that runs most of the length of the room. The rest of the stage is reserved for musician Steve Wickham, who introduces and concludes this play set, variously, in Ireland, Spain, and Germany of the 1930s, with the Romeo and Juliet-style love story the backdrop to the national and international horrors of the decade.

"Dufresne and Mullarkey are an electric pair, their chemistry intense from the beginning. Dufresne plays Ellie, a young Jewish woman whose family will not allow her to fall in love with a Gentile; Mullarkey is Louie, a Socialist activist and later soldier in Spain. Kinahan reserves her best writing for Ellie, gripped simultaneously as she is by familial obligation, lust, and fear. Louie, though, often resembles George Orwell’s idealised Italian soldier, the “flower of the European working class [in whose] fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away”. The standout moment is when Ellie is embraced from behind by Louie, while telling the story of her mother’s escape from Odessa decades previously."

'Tempasta' runs until 28th October at Glass Mask Theatre, next door to Cafe En Seine. Tickets at www.glassmasktheatre.com