HotForTheatre & Galway International Arts Festival presents Luck Just Kissed You Hello

Three men gather at the bedside of their dying father, Big Ted Donovan. Big Ted was a larger than life presence in their lives, but now he is a dying man in a hospital bed, and decisions have to be made. A eulogy has to be given but there is more than one view of this man, and as this play makes clear, of any man.

Mark (Amy Conroy) is now a man, but growing up he was Laura, a “girlish boy” who never fitted into the small town or her father’s view of who she was expected to be. Mark has been away a long time and he is back with reluctance and great emotion to sit by his dying father’s bedside and deal with a life left behind and blacked out like tin foil on windows.

Alongside Mark we meet his twin brother Gary (Will O’Connell) a gay businessman. He didn’t live up to Big Ted’s ideals either, but he has built a successful business and an international life, as far from the small town as it is possible to be. He too resents the strict and fierce upbringing that Big Ted gave the two children, after their mother died giving birth to them.

The third character is Sullivan, their childhood friend taken in by their father and the one who stayed at home. He has looked after their father, and in turn their father has looked after him. His memories are good memories, he can see the good in Big Ted and he loved him. Sullivan married a local girl and together they looked after Ted like family.

There is a childhood trauma at the heart of the play, a vivid, violent memory that all 3 characters experienced from different perspectives, and it drives the story forward relentlessly, until forgiveness can begin. Was this display of strength from Big Ted a threat, a punishment, a lesson or all three? How can any of us begin to unravel the complexities of our childhood memories and the individual moments we remember and polish as our own.

This is a play about what it means to be a man, and the complicated nature and fluidity of masculinity.