the human connection

7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - Sunday, July 4, 2021

The Omnibus Theatre

In March 2020 acclaimed Irish actor and writer Eugene O’Hare sent Omnibus Theatre a message of support in the wake of our first lockdown closure, generously proposing that he rally a bunch of UK theatre’s top acting talents to support our theatre, when the day came that we were able to open our doors again.

Exactly one year later, with reopening around the corner, Eugene made good on his promise and brought us two new punchy and provocative pieces of work. Larry Devlin Wants to Talk to You About Something That Happened, originally intended to premiere as part of the Barbican’s cancelled Ghost Light series, and Child 786 will kick off our first full theatre season in over a year.

Written and directed by Eugene himself and starring a quartet of fantastic actors, we are thrilled to present these two new plays as part of our Summer Season 2021.

Larry Devlin Wants to Talk to You About Something That Happened

Memory can make a fiction of reality, and in a quiet Irish border town a tiny forgotten moment from the past vividly returns to single father, Larry Devlin.

Child 786

During Lockdown, twenty-two year old Lennox leaves his deserted university campus and returns to live with his single mother, Hilary. It’s not ideal. Both of them have big personalities and both hold very different opinions on the global crisis. But Lennox has a new theory. He thinks he has been in a sort of lockdown since the day he was born. Child 786 is a black-comedy about the extremes of family life in an extreme situation.

Eugene O’Hare‘s two debut full-length plays, both published by Methuen, opened to critical and public acclaim in London in 2019, with a cast including Miriam Margolyes. He wrote the film The Music Room for BBC 2, penned the widely-performed teenage cancer play Hospital Food for National Theatre Connections, and wrote the hard-hitting play Refuge for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Several of his short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, narrated by actors including Stephen Rea. Recent poetry featured in The Galway Review and as a news piece in The Irish News. New poems will appear this summer in literary magazines such as Crossways, Beyond Words and under Anne Devlin‘s literary editorship at Fortnight.