The Tricycle theatre is bringing a little bit of Ireland to north London this summer as it hosts Mosshouse’s production of Lay Me Down Softly and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast’s The Absence Of Women.
Lay Me Down Softly, written and directed by the multitalented Billy Roche, takes audiences into the darkly comic and colourful world of a 1960s travelling carnival, exploring the fights and the fortune-tellers, the bookies and the bloodshed.
Running from 11 July to 6 August, it stars Gary Lydon and Michael O’Hagan, both of whom previously appeared in Roche’s The Wexford Trilogy at the Tricycle, alongside Simone Kirby, Pagan McGrath, Anthony Morris and Dermot Murphy.
The Tricycle brings the summer to a close with its second Irish transfer, Owen McCafferty’s The Absence Of Women, which runs from 13 September to 8 October.
A touching, witty play about the lives of two ordinary men, it follows a pair of Belfast labourers facing the end of their lives in a London hostel and discussing the present while contemplating the past.
Rachel O’Riordan, who previously directed Everything Is Illuminated at the Hampstead theatre, directs The Absence Of Women, though casting is yet to be confirmed.
The Tricycle theatre is currently staging the world premiere of Tactical Questioning, the latest in the theatre’s series of tribunal plays, which explores the public enquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a suspected insurgent arrested by the British Army in Iraq in 2003.
MA