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Sacred Sow Press Release

The Sacred Sow

By ELEANOR CUMMINS

Enter a world of ghosts, faeries and curses, a place where a song can call up the dead and family bonds are never broken.

What is Home? How do you get away to find your dreams and when do your dreams become your nightmares? When do we come of age and how do we make a break from our parents and strike out on our own? Irish playwright ELEANOR CUMMINS takes a hard look at the traditions of Ireland, and what happens when those traditions come into contact with the wider world. From the Travelers to Eastern European immigrants who come to seek a better life, the pressure on the traditional Irish way of life can be too much for those who aren’t ready to accept the changing world.

EILEEN POLLOCK (Angela’s Ashes, Far and Away, BBC’s BREAD) stars as the Irish mammy Mrs. Malloy who will do anything to keep her son (JAMES HIGH) from growing apart. MATTHEW BLOOD-SMYTH and TRACY KEARNEY round out the cast as the son’s best friend Rusty and girlfriend Grannie.

THE SACRED SOW features live Irish music performed by ELEANOR CUMMINS (bouzouki, a strummed instrument similar to a mandolin, and bodhran, the Irish drum) and MATEJ TOMEŠ (Uilleann pipes).

The journey of THE SACRED SOW starts as an entry to the 2007 Prague Post Playwriting Contest. It then received a workshop in the Fall of 2007 which resulted in a staged reading of the play. CUMMINS and BRIAN CASPE, the director, decided to take the play to a wider audience at the 2008 Prague Fringe Festival, which invites nearly 40 companies from around the world to take part in a week of innovative and thought provoking theatre you can’t find anywhere else. Productions range from the experimental non-verbal to traditional theatre to music concerts. The Prague Fringe descends on Mala Strana for the last week in May with round-the-clock events in 6 venues (see www.praguefringe.com/2008/ for complete details and schedule). The play will continue to grow after the festival with a tour of Ireland and England.

Directed by BRIAN CASPE
Starring:
EILEEN POLLOCK, JAMES HIGH, TRACY KEARNEY and MATTHEW BLOOD-SMYTH
With BRENDAN PAYNE and ELEANOR CUMMINS.

TIME AND PLACE:
25 May – 1 June at 19:30.
A Studio Rubín, Malostranské náměstí 9, Prague 1

TICKETS:
Tickets are run by the Prague Fringe. Prices vary depending on when you purchase tickets and in what quantity. Tickets are available at the door and through TicketStream (www.ticketstream.cz). See www.praguefringe.com for information on tickets.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Aman Gupta
Mobile: +420 773 248 266
Email: am4ng@aol.co.uk

Biographies
EILEEN POLLOCK: Eileen met Eleanor in Galway for the controversial women’s theatre company, Taboo. At that time she had just finished being Molly Kay, the brothel keeper in Ron Howard’s ‘Far and Away’, and was still notorious as Lilo Lil in the long-running BBC sitcom ‘Bread’. Since then she has continued to tour with many of Ireland’s foremost companies, most notably DubbelJoint, who were also the originating producers of her ongoing one-woman show, ‘Kathleen, Mother of All the Behans’.

Apart from playing a series of wonderfully nasty witches in various Christmas pantomimes, her most cherished recent roles have been as Sharon in Owen McCafferty’s ‘Scenes From The Big Picture’, at the Royal National Theatre, London; the Widow Quin in Synge’s ‘Playboy of the Western World’, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester and Madge in Brian Friel’s ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come’, on tour round Ireland and Great Britain with A.R.T.Northern Ireland. Memorable recent film roles have been: as Mrs Finnucane, the money-lender in Alan Parker’s ‘Angela’s Ashes’ and Helen Pottinger, the retired Scottish missionary in Sid McCartney’s ‘A Love Divided’. She has just finished writing ‘On the Cut’, a play with music about two women doing ‘war work’ on the British canals in the 1940s.

ELEANOR CUMMINS: Eleanor Cummins studied literature, especially Irish drama which reflected social changes in Ireland from 1900 to the present. She is influenced by theatre and it’s relation to social and political events and by writers who present the oppressed, hidden and ugly side of life. Beckett’s plays have a broad sweep which means you can relate to them psychologically regardless of nationality. Nationality has a bearing of course on the writer but most of all theatre has to make people engage with the story, the humanity of a story, hence themes writers explore are relevant to people anywhere who struggle to survive.

The theatre is a scared space where we can explore difficult themes. The Sacred Sow was written quickly but the process of re-writing is a much slower process, and the play is taking shape with input from the director and the actors. Eleanor also is a performer, actress, and singer so she is motivated to write plays that actors would enjoy playing. Theatre needs to be spontaneous and fresh and entertaining as well. It is the most exciting medium of all.

BRIAN CASPE: Brian grew up in California and studied music at the University of California, San Diego. After graduation, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. In LA, Brian studied acting at Playhouse West where he learned Meisner technique. He moved to Prague in 2002 and has been working as a professional actor in films (Hellboy, Illusionist, Revelations, Young Hannibal, Solomon Kane, Wanted, among others) and commercials (Oskar, Pepto Bismal, Bass Ale, Stella Artois, Bacardi…more than 30 in all). He founded the Prague Playhouse in 2003 as a way to work in English-language theater while here in Prague.

Brian directed the award winning “Public Relations” for the 2008 Prague Post Playwriting Contest. He has been teaching acting for the Prague Playhouse since 2006.

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