BROKEN CROÍ - manchan.com

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Manchán Magan

Broken Crói/Heart Briste

a bilingual play by Manchán Magan directed by Tom Creed

Broken Croí/Heart Briste reviews - Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Metro Herlad, Oh Francis, Totally Dublin, Irish Theatre Magazine, Culchie.ie .... read on

Manchán's Irish Times article on preparing Broken Croí/Heart Briste ....read on

A self-loathing dancer (Eva O'Connor) and a fanatical Gaeilgeoir (Manchán Magan) seek to connect in a language lesson that swerves from slapstick to acrimony to personal revelation. It’s a comedic and heartfelt look at fractured relationships, using a blend of Irish and English to reveal the warped truth behind our passions. Magan's kilt-clad pedagogue vyies with O'Connor's mutinous teenager, both using language in a way that makes it understandable and relevant to all. Is it in Irish as we know it or language as weapon of mass destruction? A bit of both.

Broken Croí/Heart Briste was nominated for Irish Times Theatre Awards 2009 for Best New Play and Best Supporting Actress. It was also nominated for Fishamble New Writing Award 2009, and Bewleys Cafe Theatre Award 2009. It won the Stewart Parker Irish Language Play Award 2009. After a debuting at the Dublin Fringe Festival, 2009, it was restaged in Project Arts Centre, Dublin, March 2010 & Cork Midsummer Festival, June 2010. It was recorded as a radio play by RTÉ October 2014.

Listen to RTÉ Radio Version here

Background to The Play

Ireland finds itself with a national language that everyone understands a little bit, but few speak fluently. If it’s to have any relevance we need to find ways of incorporating this crippled, semi-comatose language into our lives and into mainstream arts. Broken Croí/Heart Briste is an attempt at using Irish in theatre without alienating those who don’t speak it - a technical experiment into whether a play can be 50% in one language, but understandable in another.

The idea for it came while doing No Béarla, (a TV series based on a journey around Ireland seeing could I survive speaking only Irish), and learning that Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, founded to foster Irish culture staged only 4 plays in Irish in a decade, as opposed to 75 in English. This, of course, is because there aren’t the audiences for large-scale Irish language productions, but I was keen to explore whether audiences would be interested in a play which presented them with simple straightforward Irish that they would most likely remember from school.