This weekend Longford’s own Luke Casserly brings his unique immersive co-production with The Abbey Theatre that has been making waves across the waters. Distillation will be performed in the round setting in the Temperence Hall on Fri 20th as part of Culture Night (sold out) and Sat 21st at 8pm. Limited seats remaining.
We caught up with him beforehand to hear about his career highlights to date and his love for nature..
Where did you go to school?
I went to school in St. Mel’s College in Longford town.
Do you remember what sparked your love for theatre?
I remember going to see a production of John B Keane’s The Field in Backstage a good few years ago. I was studying the play for my Junior Cert at the time, and I remember seeing actors onstage who were around my age and thinking “I’d be really interested in trying that”. I believe Darragh Greene (the Olympic Swimmer) might have played Leamy Flanagan in that production if my memory serves me correctly – so perhaps I have him to thank. I eventually went on to join Backstage Youth Theatre which was a brilliant experience for many reasons, but in particular because it gave me an opportunity to experience incredible theatre when I was a young person. Seeing pieces like Silent by Pat Kinevane or Follow by Shane O’Reilly when I was a teenager really ignited my imagination, and showed me what theatre could really achieve as an artform.
What has been your proudest career moment to date?
It’s really hard to choose one, but having had the opportunity to share my project Distillation over the past year with audiences across Ireland, the US, and Canada is definitely up there. There has been such an incredible amount of support for the piece, and I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such a brilliant creative team to bring it to life. It’s a real honour to be touring it across Ireland at the moment, and I’m really excited to share it with Longford audiences later this week in the Temperance Hall.
Nature plays a big part in your work. What has inspired this?
I grew up in rural Longford next to a bog, so I think inevitably that landscape has had a major impact on my artistic sensibility. I’m interested in creating performances which have a positive environmental legacy beyond the moment of live encounter with an audience. The work I make often has a strong environmental pulse at it’s heart – I’m driven to create gentle, subversive interventions which respond to the climate crisis in a meaningful way, and tend to lean away from the anxiety, greenwashing, and didacticism that often revolves around this topic in the mainstream media.
Your shows tend to have an immersive aspect to them. What is it about this type of show/experience do you love the most?
As an artist, I’m always really interested in finding unusual and surprising ways to tell a story to an audience. With Distillation, the initial impulse behind the project was to try and immerse the audience in an Irish bog without actually being there. Over the last few years, the physical landscape in Longford has undergone huge change as a result of the peat harvesting industry coming to a close – the goal for me was to find a form of storytelling that could facilitate the tapestry of different perspectives that exist on that landscape, and present them to an audience in an emotionally compelling, and interesting way.
What can people expect when they come to see Distillation this weekend?
I think audiences can expect an intimate encounter with the Irish bog which is both surprising, and thought-provoking. As part of the creative process, I collaborated with renowned perfume-maker Joan Woods to create a custom-made perfume from botanicals collected from the Irish bog. Each audience member will get to sample the perfume as part of the performance, while seated around a large sculptural table composed out of sustainably-sourced peat from the Irish Midlands (created by the sculptor Ger Clancy). I think the performance will particularly resonate with nature lovers, and those interested in the environment.
Distillation || Fri 20th & Sat 21st || 8pm