IASH and the Traverse Theatre are delighted to announce the joint awardees of the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship for 2022-23, Michael Patrick and Oisín Kearney. They will begin their Fellowship in July 2022, working on a new play, The Union of Craic.
We are delighted to have been selected for the IASH/Traverse Creative Fellowship. As co-writing playwrights, we can spend many hours staring at each other and talking about fictional characters… it will be so welcome to be able to interact with real people in the real world.
We are so grateful to be able to access academics, a dramaturg, and an office in IASH and to become part of a community to share and develop ideas. For our previous plays, we’ve conducted a lot of research; speaking with professors of Irish history for The Alternative, and for The Border Game, we interviewed 100 people who live and work along the Irish border. We are very excited to take this approach to the next stage with IASH.
Through the Fellowship, we will develop a play that explores nationalism - one of the world’s most dominant and powerful ideologies. With the constitutional makeup of the British Isles facing uncertainty and nationalist ideals on the rise around the world, we want to write a play that responds to urgent questions of independence and nationalism, whilst also having a bit of fun with it.
Living between Ireland and Scotland, we are particularly interested in the shared history and mythologies of the two nations, the interplay of Irish and Scottish nationalism, and how they are perceived at home and internationally. We plan to explore this through a fictional Union of Craic, a new political entity, joining Scotland with the island of Ireland. Perhaps we will finally settle the debate on the correct spelling: whiskey or whisky?