Boyface and Standard Practice Productions Present

New Era, New Éire - A New Play by Luke De Brún

at Smock Alley Theatre

Smock Alley, May 21st - May 25th, 2024 Evening Shows
(matinee and evening show on May 25th) Tickets available from Smock Alley

In collaboration with Smock Alley’s Scene and Heard Festival of New Work

A blackly comic look at how men grieve, ‘New Era, New Éire’, is a play about change and memory that touches upon more serious issues in Iife such as grief, alcoholism and mental health challenges.

Written by playwright and filmmaker, Luke De Brún, and presented in association with Boyface and Standard Practice Productions, ‘New Era, New Éire’ is a contemporary play told through two intertwining monologues developed in collaboration with Smock Alley’s Scene and Heard Festival of New Work. Set in a working-class suburb of south Dublin, the play centres around JT O’Brien (played by Jason Corbett) and his father Stephen “Buzzer” O’Brien (played by Desmond Daly) as they deal with the recent death of JT’s mother, Marie.

The play alternates between late night and early morning, as JT arrives in from a night of drinking in a mates house in town, before his father gets up for his job as a Dublin bus driver. The two men contemplate their strained relationship with each other, which grew distant as JT got older.

They only seem to bond when an Ireland football game is on the telly or alcohol is involved. New Era, New Éire is a play about change and the importance of memory. Both men must deal with a massive change in their lives through Marie’s death but also in their mental and physical state.

Change is also evident in the environment around them with cranes towering over their housing estate, building apartments across the way. Alongside this is a crippling housing crisis leaving JT feeling rather hopeless about his prospects of owning something of his own in the future. Both men are left with their memories of better times as their lives move forward.