Мюзикл Pretty Vacant раскроет проблемы заброшенных зданий в районе Liberties на фестивале в Дублине

Playwright Tom Swift explains how a punk anthem and a walk around the Liberties led to the creation of The Performance Corporation's new musical satire, Pretty Vacant, coming to this year's Dublin Fringe Festival. The Pretty Vacant project started from a question that, I think, bothers many people. Why are there so many derelict sites and vacant buildings in Dublin? It is a city with a massive housing crisis, a city that suffers from a severe lack of social and cultural spaces. It is also a city with an apparently healthy economy. It doesn’t add up, or does it? We need your consent to load this rte-player content We use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content. Manage Preferences Listen: Director Jo Mangan and performer Ruth McGill talk Pretty Vacant for RTÉ Arena Vacancy and dereliction affect virtually every town and city across Ireland, and its an issue we felt passionately about. Ironically, as makers of site-specific theatre, we had often been drawn to making work in old warehouses and disused buildings. The blankness of these spaces allowed us to make them our own, bringing audiences on an adventure behind previously padlocked doors. For this show, we wanted to make a work that questioned the emptiness of leaving so many potentially useful (and often historic) buildings to slowly crumble. When we started brainstorming a theatrical response to these questions, we had nothing but a title – shamelessly borrowing from the Sex Pistols punk rock anthem, Pretty Vacant. We knew the piece would be site-specific but still didn’t know where exactly we wanted to perform. Patricio Cassinoni. As it happened, our early development sessions took place in the Digital Hub on James’ Street in the Liberties, and as we walked around the streets of Dublin 8, we could see a microcosm of the big question we were trying to explore - lots of unused buildings and derelict sites. In among these were the historic buildings like the Iveagh Markets and once-busy Mother Redcaps venue. The real lightbulb moment came when we joined the 'In My Shoes’ walking tour of the Liberties in the company of Anthony Freeman O’Brien from the Liberties Community Project. The tour is a social initiative that gives a local perspective on the area, not just the tourist gloss. Walking the streets with Anthony, who proudly boasts a Liberties heritage going back generations, we got a deeper insight into the personal and human cost of dereliction for people in the area. In fact, we liked the tour so much we asked him to join the cast! In further conversations with community members in the Liberties, we heard the same story repeatedly. The needs of the local community are consistently stuck at the bottom of the priority list. In an area that has a chronic housing shortage, the majority of new local developments consist of tourist accommodation and expensive student apartments. It’s a grim story, but one that’s always balanced out by the Liberties’ wickedly funny ‘if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry’ approach to life. Thanks to those conversations, we felt we had to lean into humour more than darkness. And so we’ve ended up with Pretty Vacant, a "high-octane musical satire", performed in the historic Tailors’ Hall in the Liberties as part of Dublin Fringe. Set in a community consultation session, it follows the trials of Eurovision star turned property developer Carmilla as she tries to sell her "ambitious vision" for the redevelopment of The Liberties to the people of the area. Inevitably, nothing goes quite to plan and in the course of the show expect a few Eurovision bangers with a generous pinch of punk anarchy -- after all, it’s Pretty Vacant. Pretty Vacant is at Tailor's Hall, Dublin 8, from September 15th - 20th as part of this year's Dublin Fringe Festival - find out more here