About This Show
The English premiere
“There’s a lock o’ new houses down in the village and there’s a Sinn Féin advice centre and the shop’s a Spar now, but nothin’ much else is different. The whole world is changin’ and Gentry stays the same.”
Rural Northern Ireland, 1999. Proud IRA man Fra Maline returns home – released early from prison under the Good Friday Agreement – and to celebrate his daughter, Theresa, throws a party at the local community hall on McQuillan’s Hill.
Unknown to the revellers the hall has been bought by Fra’s sister, Loretta, who turns up ready to demolish it after a twenty-year absence across the water.
With peace on a knife-edge, bitter memories, family secrets and lies long buried in the bog threaten to resurface as an accidental family reunion descends into pitch black farce…
A vicious satire from a playwright hailed as “Ulster’s Martin McDonagh” (The Guardian), On McQuillan’s Hill gets under the dirty fingernails of small town Northern Ireland, confronting the horrors of abuse and the corrosive legacy of conflict with explosive wit and an insider’s eye for detail.
Originally produced by the renowned Tinderbox Theatre Company in 2000 at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, On McQuillan’s Hill now receives its long-overdue English premiere.
