Singer and actor Naomi Louisa O'Connell’s "go-for-broke" performance as Mary Motorhead in Emma O’Halloran’s monodrama was hailed by the LA Times as "stellar—a great operatic impersonation of the ecstatic driving force of an inner being, the ordinary becoming extraordinary."
Following its critically acclaimed world premiere at New York’s Prototype Festival and LA Opera last year, Irish National Opera and Kilkenny Arts Festival will co-present the European premiere of Mary Motorhead in a double bill with Emma O’Halloran and Mark O’Halloran’s Trade at Kilkenny Arts Festival this August, ahead of a national tour in October.
Naomi Louisa O'Connell introduces Mary Motorhead below.
Mary Motorhead, created by playwright Mark O’Halloran, and brought to vivid musical life by composer Emma O’Halloran, is the kind of role that is a gift to a performer. There’s nowhere to hide in her. She’s raw, straightforward, passionate. Explosive, dangerous. Her logic is her own. She’s greedy. It’s rude almost, how she stalks from her prison cell back into the ugliest corners of my past and lugs back a memory of my own private shames and resentments. She juggles them in front of me, taunting, "Here, see, you’re not so very different. It could’ve been you. If you had lived through what I lived through, this could’ve been you."
To play a character like Mary is to be in conversation not only with what’s on the page—musically, dramatically—but to be in touch with some of my darkest personal moments. Some characters demand that. That’s the job. I’m lucky that my acting teacher taught me how to do it reasonably safely. We zip up the character after the show, make a little ritual of taking off costumes, step consciously in and out of character, learn when to dial them down. (F sharp approaching, breathe, girl, breathe!)
Oh, but she’s a noisy one, Mary. The neat circular structure placed on the composition has her caught in a perpetual loop, striving to understand herself and her past. And, night after night, she almost gets there. She’s a puzzle. There is strength in her defiant posturing against the world—which she sees as a bleak, flat landscape broken only by water towers and mental hospitals—and yet an immense vulnerability when she talks about the few people in her life who showed her love. She digs into stuff we’d rather not think about.
There are some glorious landmarks in Emma’s score which I look forward to again and again; one teetering moment, awash in orange light and the early memory of her love for Red O’Brien, where we see what Mary could have been had she chosen something different. But it never sits down long enough. We’re galloping off into the next memory, searching, searching for a reason—any reason—at a time when all reason has abandoned us.
'There's nowhere to hide in her.'
This is a show about actively living with consequences. About learning to make peace with yourself, even if you don’t like yourself that much.
I’m looking forward to getting Mary back on the stage again to see how she’s changed in the two years since I’ve last lived with her. More of her will become illuminated. New musicians in the orchestra will change certain angles in the score, each audience uncovers something new in her. That’s the magic of live performance. She’s never quite the same. It’s an adventure to meet her there—this wild, untameable, terrifying person, and watch how she takes over and fills the room. It’s a gift, a real gift to get to play her.
Mary Motorhead and Trade are at the Kilkenny Arts Festival from 8th - 11th August - find out more here.
