Metamorphoses

Johnny Hanrahan

Project Description:
This was a new writing commission by Johnny Hanrahan, a founder member and artistic director of Meridian Theatre Company, Cork. He has written numerous plays, including ‘Volpone’, ‘Lear’ and ‘Headroom’ and has adapted Maria Edgeworth's ‘Castle Rackrent’ and Gogol's ‘Government Inspector’.

This commission produced two texts. ‘The Boy who Walked on his Hands’ is a play for children, aged 10-13. Set in Nazi Germany, it focuses on a family who resist the manufactured consensus of their society and looks at the complex choices required of those who choose an alternative route and a different way of walking it.

The second text is a play, ‘The Magic Bullet’, set in a Cork neuroscience laboratory and shows how ambition, frustration and moral autism destroy a scientific aristocrat and his lifework. Loosely based on Macbeth, this is a music theatre piece with a full jazz score as an integral part of the piece.