BAFTA-nominated writer John Fitzpatrick’s brand new play Reared will debut at Theatre503 this April. With unfailing humour, Reared tackles intergenerational conflict, postnatal depression, and the role of the Irish mother in the ‘sandwich’ generation caught looking after both their children and their parents.
Featuring Shelley Atkinson, Daniel Crossley, Paddy Glynn, Rohan Nedd, and Danielle Phillips, Reared will come to Theatre503 from Wednesday 4th April until Saturday 28th April.
Under one roof, three generations of Anglo-Irish women try to find space for a fourth. As Caitlin waits for life to begin, her grandmother Nora fears the end and Eileen frets about them both.
Between her mother-in-law’s incipient dementia and her daughter’s struggle for independence, Eileen finds herself battling to adjust her household and wrangle her husband.
The Constitution of Ireland holds that the family is the cornerstone of society and at the heart of the family is the mother. As Eileen struggles to find some sort of control over her life she begins to see that the enemy might not be a controlling mother-in-law or an ineffectual husband but rather the roles they have been forced into.
Writer John Fitzpatrick comments, “At the heart of this play, I hope there are warm, funny, hardworking women. Society has set them against one another and yet, through their resilience, they manage to deeply care for and protect each other. Reared had to be funny because the women I’ve grown up with in Ireland are the wittiest people I know and I’d be doing them a disservice if my characters didn’t at least try to match their level of humour.”
