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My new play, Guest Host Stranger Ghost is the story of three people living in someone else’s home, designed to be performed on the sets of other people’s plays, the form reflecting the transience and precarity of its characters’ lives. It will premiere at Dublin Theatre Festival this October. In July we spent a week developing and rehearsing the text in Portlaoise, with the crucial support of Dunamaise Arts Centre.

I have been developing the idea for this play since 2018, when I was living precariously, renting a house in Dublin where I was uncertain whether the lease would be renewed each year, and if it was renewed, uncertain whether I would be able to afford the increased rent. I realised that in every house I lived in the city, this was the abiding feeling: the feeling of keeping your boots on, of having flattened cardboard boxes neatly stacked under your bed, ready to be reassembled and repacked at a moment’s notice. I became interested in exploring the psychology of this precarity, in what it means to not have your own space, in how a life of transience becomes embodied, shaping decisions, paths, relationships. I ‘noodled’ with voices for three characters across a year, and a story emerged, in which a mismatched trio rent a house owned by an elderly woman now living her last days in a nursing home. Unlikely housemates, they try to find a connection in the short time they’re here–and a space for themselves amongst the stuff of her entire life. Set in an ageing suburban 2-up-2-down built during Dublin’s 20th century housing boom, the story touches on the Nursing Home Support Scheme (Fair Deal), a dysfunctional rental market, and generations locked out of stable housing. The form for the play, in which our play would become a ‘guest’ performance on a ‘host’ set, emerged from the explosive pressure of this content.

In developing the work, I came back again and again to ideas of guests and hosts: what it means to be a good guest, a good host. Someone told me that both words come from the same root in Old English, as do the words stranger and ghost, all four of which are about a connection with a dwelling (a stranger shows up on a doorstep unannounced, a ghost haunts it). Despite a brief encounter with Old English as an undergraduate, I don’t know if this is completely true! Still, all of the ideas I was exploring seemed drawn to it, like metal filings to a magnet.

The development period was more protracted that planned: a global pandemic forced a hiatus after an initial development week at Mermaid Arts Centre in late 2019. In the interim, it became impossible for us within the restrictions placed on lived performance to see a place for sharing space with another production. In 2023, I was finally able to pick the play back up again, collaborating with director Eoghan Carrick, and performers Finbarr Doyle, Shadaan Felfeli and Maeve O’Mahony, with a 2-week text development culminating in a work-in-progress sharing at Dublin Theatre Festival 2023. Here, we shared with an audience a number of scenes that gave a sense of the characters and their journey, the story and its arc, and a hint at the theatrical language. On the back of this, with the support of Once Off Productions, who came on board to produce the work, we managed to secure Arts Council funding for a full production.

Dunamaise Arts Centre have been crucial in the support of this current phase of development as we near production. Dunamaise resourced and hosted an initial text pre-rehearsal, or ‘table week’, in the building in July. Here we focused on interrogating and finalising the script which I had worked on solo in the gap between the work-in-progress showing last October and us being in the same room together again. This first week for a new play is usually an incredibly busy week for the playwright. In the rehearsal room, I hear the words spoken live for the first time (or the first time in a long time), and hear what is working and what isn’t, and the director, performers (and intern Olamide) really feed into the script, interrogating sense, meaning, character motivation. At the end of each day, I get home, write up and metabolise these notes, make a plan of attack, eat, sleep, waking at 4am to complete any rewrites or new scenes, before getting back into the room mid-morning to do it all again. I have been back living in Portlaoise permanently since 2020, and being able to run a week like this so close to my own home was a crucial lifeline. Supporting artists to make work where they live? More of this please.

At the end of this week at Dunamaise, the script was close to final, and after a short break, we will regroup to begin rehearsals away from the table and on our feet, with the support of host partner Mermaid Arts Centre. Here will explore everything the form of this play throws up, finalising aspects of design and other practical elements. If the characters demonstrate how transience becomes embodied, the play itself confronts what it means to not have your own space. When rehearsing, the usual certainties will be off the cards. Blocking—the process by which actors’ movements are established and locked in relation to stage, set, audience—will be impossible. Each day in the rehearsal room, we will mark out a new imagined stage and set, a new imagined set of obstacles and opportunities, with Finbarr, Shadaan and Maeve responding to each, improvising movement, positions, connections, finding their way through in real time. If you are able to come to Dublin to see the play in performance—and I hope you will!—they will not have rehearsed the play on the stage you see it on.

This play in its DNA wants to stay nimble, to move, to meet the challenge of one night performing on a stage designed to be an international space station, the next night a pub—asking what it might mean to bring an insulated delivery backpack filled with food onto a set that is just “A Country Road, A Tree”.

Guest Host Stranger Ghost by Once Off Productions and Kate Heffernan will be presented at a number of venues as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from 3-13 October 2024. It is supported by Mermaid Arts Centre and Dunamaise Arts Centre, and funded by the Arts Council | An Chomhairle Ealaíon. For more information visit and to book tickets visit: dublintheatrefestival.ie

Bio

Kate Heffernan is a writer and theatre artist from and living in Portlaoise. Her first play, In Dog Years I’m Dead (directed by Maisie Lee) was a winner of the 2013 Stewart Parker Trust Emerging Playwright Award. Peat, her first play for children (directed by Tim Crouch), was commissioned and produced by The Ark in 2019. In 2014, with Maisie Lee, she was theatre artist-in-residence at Dunamaise, where she wrote and produced Hometroots, a series of short radio plays with, for and about the people of Laois. In 2023, The Ark staged a rehearsed reading of Always the Two of Us, a documentary theatre script commissioned by the Ark in partnership with One Family, based on conversations with men and women who grew up in one-parent families in Ireland over the past 50 years. Kate was the recipient of an Abbey Theatre Commemoration Bursary in 2021, through which she developed Stories from the End of the Garden, a play about siblings and loss, and a story of war from the perspective of children. The Abbey completed a pilot project in 2023, using the text as the basis for process drama in classrooms. Kate is an associate artist with Theatre Lovett, and the writer and designer of their acclaimed show programme series for young audiences. www.kateheffernan.ie

A painter from Laois, working with oils to create dark, emotive and atmospheric figurative artworks. Homed in our large dressing room adapted to be a pop-up studio, Rebecca creates new work for exhibitions, alternative markets and festivals nationally. In 2018, Rebecca curated an exhibition of work exploring the surreal and fantastical in our gallery entitled "A Painted Otherworld" embed link to exhibition archive listing, bringing together a fantastic group of artists with links to Laois. Her paintings and prints of her works are available for sale on request and Rebecca is available for commissions. Groups and individuals are welcome to book a visit to her studio.



Rebecca facilitates regular Life Drawing Sessions at Dunamaise, suitable for practicing artists of all levels, as well as collaborating on other creative events in the centre. Learn more about Rebecca and her work and her social media @RebeccaDeeganArtist

In Spring 2021, we invited older people to participate in a further chapter of Always Human - a multi-phase art project to connect older people with artists during lockdown, created by Cabrini Cahill and commissioned by Dunamaise.

Led by poet and tutor Denise Curtin Dunne, with support of the KEEP WELL Campaign, older people’s memories were celebrated by creating a souvenir in writing. Free, specially designed creative writing packs were distributed by post to older people in their own homes as well as care home settings, to gather material which culminated in the publication of a wonderful commemorative book, which is still available through the Laois Libraries.