Dancing With Mrs Murphy

18/08/2018

Wake up, Dan - time to post your Facebook review! FB makes it easier to post reviews these days. We're really pleased to have heard from people who liked Dancing With Mrs Murphy - by posting and tweeting, you give Citadel a wider reach and help us put on plays, events and living memory workshops. (Thanks to Eric Robinson for this photo of Sean Fitzpatrick and Laverne Edmonds in Dancing with Mrs Murphy.)

16/08/2018

Last dance with Rose Murphy as the cast gave a final performance for another sold out house this afternoon.To all who took part - well done for making this powerful and demanding play come to life. And thank you to our audiences and to everyone who liked and followed our page, retweeted our tweets, displayed our leaflets and posters, filled in our feedback forms, and told family and friends about Dancing With Mrs Murphy - you've made this a great return to the Fringe for Citadel, and we hope you'll follow us for future events.

15/08/2018

Photos from last night's sellout performance of Dancing With Mrs Murphy. One more matinee to go, tomorrow 2pm at Leith Dockers Club, 17 Academy Street - reserve tickets at [email protected], but they're going fast. Mark Kydd directed, Laverne Edmonds, Debbie Cannon and Sean Fitzpatrick are the cast - and Vince Maguire wrote the play after hearing the stories of very poor people when he worked for a health charity in the Dockers Club building.

14/08/2018

A slideshow from yesterday's opening performance with Laverne Edmonds, Debbie Cannon and Sean Fitzpatrick. Tickets are still available for today's two shows at 2pm and 7:30pm, but reserve a ticket on [email protected], especially for tonight's performance.

14/08/2018

Opening matinee at the Dockers Club - an enthusiastic audience and brilliant acting and staging from the cast and crew. Lisa Sibbald of the Southside Advertiser, our first reviewer, gave us four stars.
http://www.southsideadvertiser.biz/EF18-Dancing-With-%20Mrs-Murphy.htm

13/08/2018

Last debrief with Mark and the cast after the tech and dress rehearsal yesterday - and now, the opening matinee is about to start.

12/08/2018

The Tech and Dress Rehearsals happened late yesterday afternoon after a long day of work for the cast and crew. Eric Robinson's photos capture the richness of the costumes and lighting. Opening day is today at 2pm at the Dockers Club and thanks to everyone who shared and retweeted our posts or told someone about the performance - we hope to see you there!

12/08/2018

Mark Kydd has directed and acted in many plays for Citadel. Here he's seen directing a whaling scene in The Guid Doctor, directing Laverne Edmonds as Rose Murphy, and playing Disaster Davy in Leith Docks: A Way of Life. He is also a playwright, wrote and staged his show There Were Two Brothers, and appeared in Outlander and Taggart on television. As rehearsals for Dancing With Mrs Murphy began he said he thought each scene in the play was like a dance between the characters, and I asked him to expand the idea:
As we worked on this play, I became interested in the idea of dancing as metaphor; in addition to its social connotations it can represent freedom, the promise of a new life. I thought of each scene as a dance between two participants - who is leading, do the characters dance close together or far apart, what kind of dance is it? And what happens when a third participant is introduced? '

11/08/2018

Sean Fitzpatrick, in and out of character as Dan, rebel son of iron lady Mrs McCarthy. Sean has also performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Flashdance as a dancer and singer, in The Producers - and he's worked as an entertainer on Silver Sea and P&O cruise ships. This is his first Fringe role.

10/08/2018

Scroll to the end to find a preview of Dancing With Mrs Murphy's sound track - and a boost for the Dockers Club as one of Leith's few Fringe venues.

My first Wild Card Wed­nes­day cer­tainly lived up to its name with what must be one of the most hi­lar­i­ous and up­lift­ing re­sponses to the move­ment. I’m prob­a­bly not the tar­get de­mo­graphic for a “se­quin-clad, cham­pag­ne­fu­elled, cos­m...

08/08/2018

Debbie Cannon, who plays Margaret McCarthy, Rose Murphy's boss, is a writer and actor. She wrote her own Edinburgh 2017 Fringe show, Green Knight, and also performed it at the Buxton Festival Fringe. She's also the voice of Edinburgh buses and trams. There's more about her acting and writing on her website: https://debbiecannon.org/ The part of Margaret, she says, is a challenge - she's 'infuriating and fascinating -very much a woman of her times.'

08/08/2018

Vince Maguire has written his first play for the Fringe. Why did he choose to write the story of Rose Murphy and her fight to live down the hardship of her early life?
' I worked for a public health charity. It was based upstairs at the Dockers Club where the play is being performed. The people we worked with lived lives of ingrained poverty. Their health improved improved, but I never saw anyone escape that poverty. You need power to escape, and I wanted to write about a character who did escape.'
Vince's play is set against the background of Leith in 1956, explored in many of Citadel's living memory projects such as the most recent one at Gordon Court Sheltered Housing, and against the disturbingly familiar Suez Canal crisis.