Observing from afar at Bench Tales in the Castle Park in Kilkenny

Bench Tales is a highly-anticipated theatrical production which will take place at the Castle Park during Kilkenny Arts Festival.

The production was devised during the pandemic when Barnstorm Theatre Company created new ways of reaching their audiences and creating new works during a time of lockdowns and restrictions. Love in Lockdown which was performed using Zoom and on You Tube was a great success and showed both innovation and adaptability in bringing theatre to audiences using non conventional means.

Artistic producer of Bench Tales, Philip Hardy explained the genesis of the project, which involves a trilogy of new plays.

“During lockdown we did monologues and Love in Lockdown using Zoom and You Tube. We were looking at ways on how we could do real audiences and actors with social distancing and we came up with voyeur theatre.

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“We put out a call looking to develop a piece of writing and to come up with a piece that was twenty to thirty minutes in length with a maximum of three actors that is set on a park bench.

“We had 25 submissions and thanks to our great panel of readers we brought this down to five plays and we commissioned five plays to write and we chose three to perform,” he said.

Choosing the three plays to produce was no easy task and the final five were all excellent. The team at Barnstorm are passionate in cultivating new talent and in recent years have got heavily involved in new writing and hope to also develop the other two pieces of writing in the future.”

Bench Tales will be performed three times a day from August 14 to 20 and will involve the audience (which will be small in size) watching discreetly from a distance and using binoculars and headphones to listen into the conversation and observe the interaction between the characters.

One of the plays. Pink Makes the Boys Wink by Julie Sharkey will be performed by two octogenarians - Geraldine Plunkett and Helen Roche along with Cathy White and is directed by Ellie Pearson. There is Always Tomorrow by Joe Bergin will be performed by Andy Doyle, Peter Rothwell and Jenny Fennesy and is directed by Sally Stevens. The final play is The Last Trip to

Tipp is directed by John Morton and stars Rosey Hayes, Evanne Kilgannon and Anna Doyle.
Ticket holders will be contact prior to the performance with details on a meeting point for the show.