‘He meets people all the time. That’s his job. But if you meet him and you get on with him, then the next time he has a job that you’d be good at, you’d be top of his list of people he’d give it to.’

Looking at indeterminacy, randomness and the role of fate, Newcastlewest is a new comedy by Dick Walsh.

Marya is a woman really struggling with today.

She lives in a house with her father. He is getting old. She is getting old. He’s a pain in the hole. Her thighbone is decaying. She’s got no job, or even the prospect of a job. Then a local man done good comes to tell them about his position in Brussels.

Nominated for the Stewart Parker Trust Awards 2016

“What’s the meaning of it all if everything is just random shit?” asks Marya. The play and the production seem to correspond with her predicament, guided in their construction by chance operations and execution by onstage manipulators. Yet even the most outré moments, such as Marya’s infectious Berimbau recital, are teasingly accessible.”

Peter Crawley, The Irish Times

“Dick Walsh’s dark and funny script may deliberately court randomness, but there’s nothing haphazard about it. There’s a lively intelligence at work and the dialogue captures the viciousness and selfishness of soul destroying men who mentally, emotionally and physically abuse….Gavin Quinn’s direction deliberately strips away any suggestion of conventional realism with some clever staging and strong performance choices….. But Newcastlewest is anything but normal. It’s a brave, clever and funny production that strives to realise something of a new aesthetic. Does it succeed? Well yeah like, you know babes, totally.”

Chris O’Rourke, The Irish Examiner

“Pan Pan’s Newcastlewest at Smock Alley falls squarely within that company’s primary mission of pushing at the edges of theatrical conventions.”

Ian Shuttleworth, The Financial Times

“And in the tiny studio theatre at Smock Alley – as we gather to watch Pan Pan’s truly unnerving 85-minute family nightmare Newcastlewest .”

Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman

“In Pan Pan’s new play, the writer Dick Walsh has created the most memorably obnoxious character seen on a Dublin stage for quote a while. Aongus, played with chilling realism by Des Neaon…a fascinating piece of theatre.”

Fiona Charleton, The Sunday Times

“The characters provide plenty of laughs as they struggle to make sense of the world around them, wavering between the random and the contrived. Realism turned on its head, this entropic piece seeks to measure the disorder in the everyday world and what we lose in trying to do so. If the universe is ordered chaos, then Newcastlewest is a microcosm of that.”

David Keane, The Reviews Hub

“There are some disturbing and invigorating moments and Dick Walsh’s script moves from comedy to drama, always impossible to pin down. To define the script, one could call it a kitchen sink drama, but the joy in this production is its liquid form – Newcastlewest refuses to be about a family in a house, more about the feelings of a family in a house.”

Siobhan Corcoran, Meg.ie

Playwright: Richard Walsh

Director: Gavin Quinn

Designer: Aedín Cosgrove

Cast: Una McEvitt, Des Nealon, Annabell Rickerby, Dick Walsh

Sound Design: Vincent Doherty

Photography and Videography: Ros Kavanagh