Route 66 Big Band Live in Concert
Sat 20 Sep 2025
, 8pm
Main Auditorium
Book NowIt was an accident!
When Wendy jumps off the family piano and shatters her mam’s favourite glass table, she doesn't just break the glass, she cracks open a whole other world. With the shards packed into her backpack and emotions bubbling inside her, Wendy follows her dad through a trapdoor and into another world.
The Leap takes us to a place where ancient wrongs may be righted, new worlds are created and a young girl’s sad heart may be cured. It might be possible to piece together what’s been broken. But only if she chooses.
Starring Emmet Kirwan as Dad & Penny Morris as Wendy, with Shauna Harris and Mary-Lou McCarthy.
Directed by Veronica Coburn.
Join us for a Post Show Talk on Saturday the 11th after the 4pm show.
Chair: Maria Fleming and
Panel: Gavin Kostick and Veronica Coburn.
Creative Team
Written by: Gavin Kostick
Directed by: Veronica Coburn
Set & Costume Design: Deirdre Dwyer
Lighting Design: Suzie Cummins
Composer & Sound Design: Denis Clohessy
Puppet Design and Fabrication : Maeve and Ger Clancy
Production Team
Producer: Laura MacNaughton
Assistant Producer: Evie Mc Guinness
Production Manager: Eoin Kilkenny
Stage Manager: Steph Ryan
Chief LX: Archer Bradshaw
Assistant Director (The Lir): Chloe Naomi
Sound Assistant: John Norton
ISL interpreter: Ela Cichocka
Deputy Production Manager: Laura Murphy
Marketing: Allie Whelan
Artwork: Steve McCarthy & Publicis
PR: O’Doherty Communications
Executive Director: Eva Scanlan
Emmet Kirwan
Emmet is an actor and playwright from Tallaght in Dublin.
He studied at the Samuel Beckett Centre Trinity College Dublin. For over twenty years Emmet has worked in Irish and British Theatre, performing on many stages including Project Arts Centre, Abbey Theatre, Gate Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, National Theatre and Soho Theatre, as well as working with leading Irish theatre companies such as Landmark, Rough Magic, Fishamble, THISISPOPBABY, Gúna Nua, Pan Pan and Barabas.
Over the last ten years he has been a collaborator and associate artist with THISISPOPBABY. His most recent works as a playwright and performer is Accents, a spoken-word verse play in a musical collaboration with Eoin French (who performs as Talos) and directed by Claire O’Reilly of Malaprop Theatre, and the video-shop set hit comedy play Straight to Video for Landmark productions, directed by Phillip McMahon. Emmet’s play Dublin Oldschool, directed by Phillip McMahon, won the Stewart Parker Award for playwriting. It has toured internationally and transferred to The Dorfman in The National Theatre for a sell-out run.
Dublin Oldschool was also adapted into a feature film with Element Pictures which opened in Irish and British cinemas in 2018 and at international festivals including BFI London.
Emmet is also known for writing and starring in the RTÉ 2 comedy series Sarah and Steve.
Penny Morris
Penny is a Dublin-based actor and recent graduate of The Lir Academy, joining The Leap in the role of Wendy.
Recent screen credits include The Last Disturbance of Madeline Hynde (Nuncle Films) and Silent Witness 28 (BBC) as Ms. Brady.
On stage, Penny was most recently seen as Joe in Just Being Open With You by Conor Kelly at Smock Alley Theatre.
Other recent theatre credits include Joe in I Had a Dream I Shot You in the Head, but the Calibre Wasn’t Very Big by Conor Kelly at Smock Alley Theatre and Jessica in Geoff O’Keefe’s The Merchant of Venice at the Mill Theatre.
Mary-Lou McCarthy
Mary-Lou McCarthy is an actor and theatre-maker who has worked extensively across stage and screen, with a focus on new writing, physical theatre, and work for young audiences.
Stage credits include Me, Mollser (Abbey Theatre – national and U.S. tour); The Heiress (Gate Theatre); The Blue Boy (Brokentalkers – Dublin Theatre Festival and international tour); Factory Girls, Lovers/Winners (The Everyman), BidKidLittleKid, Still Here (Anna Newell/Civic Theatre); Bees! A Musical (Willfredd/The Ark), RECORD (Dublin Theatre Festival), and Gach Áit Eile (Abbey Theatre). She also performed in Bodies in Urban Spaces (Cie. Willi Dorner, Dublin Dance Festival).
On screen, Mary-Lou played the recurring role of Úna in the IFTA- winning series An Klondike (TG4/Netflix – international title Dominion Creek) and appeared in Wolf (Focus Features), Pursuit (dir. Paul Mercier), Fair City (RTÉ), The Mario Rosenstock Show (RTÉ), Corp + Anam and Aifric (TG4). She played the lead role in Penny, which won Best Drama at the Fastnet Film Festival.
As a writer, she was commissioned by The Civic Theatre’s Ready, Steady, Show! initiative to develop her play The Dead Letter Office–exploring migration and belonging for ages 9+–which premiered in October 2022 and toured nationally in 2024.
Mary-Lou was Artist in Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris supported by Draíocht, and was a 2022 recipient of an Arts Council Next Generation Award.
Mary-Lou is a Creative Associate with the Arts Council and facilitates drama workshops for young people in schools, Youth Theatres and other youth settings in both the English and Irish language. She is an Associate Artist with Branar Theatre Company, Galway for 2025 where she will be developing new projects for young audiences.
Shauna Harris
Shauna Harris is a multidisciplinary artist, actor, and writer. Her theatre credits include The Giggler Treatment (The Ark), Passports (Dublin Fringe / Project Arts Centre), Hive City Legacy: Dublin Chapter (Dublin Fringe / Hot Brown Honey) - winner of the Dublin Fringe Festival Judges’ Choice Award - and Monsters (Dublin Fringe / The Lir Academy), which she also co-wrote.
Shauna was a mentee on the 2024 Screen Ireland x Writers’ Guild of Ireland Black Irish Screenwriters Mentorship, and a 2023–24 Dublin Fringe Festival WEFT Studio artist. She was also a collaborative recipient of the 2023 Romilly Walton Masters Award and a residency from Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris in partnership with Dublin Fringe Festival. Currently she is a mentee on the artist in the community mentorship award with Create.
Her screen credits include Trasna na Líne (RTÉ / Reblis Films), Breeders (Fantastic Films), and 500 Miles (Origin Pictures).
Gavin Kostick
Gavin Kostick is a playwright, literary manager and independent dramaturg.
His works have been produced nationally and internationally. Favourite works for Fishamble include The Ash Fire, The Flesh Addict, The End of The Road and Invitation to a Journey (with CoisCeim and Crash Ensemble). The Leap is Gavin’s first play for children.
Further works include This is What We Sang for Kabosh, Fight Night, The Games People Play and At the Ford for Rise Productions and Gym Swim Party with Danielle Galligan in co-production with the O’Reilly Theatre. He wrote the libretto for the opera The Alma Fetish composed by Raymond Deane, performed at the National Concert Hall. As a performer he performed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Complete, a six hour show for Absolut Fringe, Dublin Theatre Festival and the London Festival of Literature at the Southbank.
Gavin is currently the literary manager of Fishamble: The New Play Company, a tutor in playwriting and dramaturgy in both The Lir Academy and Trinity College Dublin as well as being a core mentor on the Tenderfoot Transition Year programme for young writers at the Civic Theatre.
Particular favourite projects that Gavin has initiated and delivered with Fishamble include Show in a Bag (with Dublin Fringe and The Irish Theatre Institute), The New Play Clinic, The Dublin Fringe New Writing Award, Tiny Plays for Ireland and A Play for Ireland.
Both for Fishamble, and as an independent dramaturg, Gavin’s projects and works he has supported have gained significant national and international award recognition including amongst others Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, BBC Stewart Parker Trust, Zebbie Awards, Dublin Fringe Awards, Business to Arts, Olivier, Scotsman Fringe First, Herald Angel and Archangel and New York Critics’ Pick.
His own plays have also received similar national and international award recognition. Gavin has recently completed a new version of The Odyssey, supported by Kilkenny Arts Festival, ClassicsNow.
Veronica Coburn
Veronica Coburn is a theatre artist of some 40 years’ experience.
She has acted as Artistic Director on a number of ambitious, large scale visionary projects. Draíocht Arts Centre’s HOME THEATRE (Ireland) in 2018 which saw 30 professional playwrights paired with 30 people, Hosts, who lived in Dublin 15. Each playwright wrote an original piece, 20 minutes long, inspired by their Host. All 30 original plays were performed in the Hosts’ homes, their kitchens, their living rooms, mapping the stories of the people of D15. And NEST, Draíocht’s follow up project to Home Theatre (Ireland). All NEST hosts were children and young people, the youngest Host was 20 days old and the oldest Host was 23 years old. Nest culminated in a festival, Spréacha SOAR, in March 2024 to celebrate the lives and worlds of our youngest citizens.
Veronica has completed a number of big participatory projects in The Civic Theatre. Songs of Change, a response to life under lockdown, culminated in 10 original songs inspired by the lived experience of people in South Dublin County and Ghost Hares, an SDCC Public Art Commission, celebrating the people and landscape of South Dublin County using spoken and sung text and original song.
She served as Artistic Director of The National Youth Theatre from 2018 – 2021 with the task of articulating an artistic vision for the programme. In that capacity she directed both Carys D Coburn’s Ask Too Much Of Me & Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s AFTERTASTE. She also established ARTiculate, Youth Theatre Ireland’s young playwright programme designed to support and empower young playwrights and theatre makers. ARTiculate was facilitated by Carys D Coburn and culminated in the production of Like We Were Born To Move by ARTiculate graduate, Eimear Hussey, for NYT 2023.
Veronica has been Programme Director of TENDERFOOT, The Civic Theatre’s apprentice theatre programme for transition year students since its inception in 2007. A volume of Tenderfoot plays, plays written by and for young people was published 2015. A book documenting the work of Tenderfoot, The Mess, will be published in 2027. Veronica is a Civic Theatre Associate Artist since 2017.
Veronica’s directorial work includes Absent The Wrong, Carys D Coburn’s play about adoption and family in Ireland (Best Production DFF 2022), Bernarda’s House, her own red nose version of Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba, Amy Conroy’s Eternal Rising of The Sun and Break, Ruth Lehane’s The Lehane Trilogy, and Wicked Angels’ I’m Not A.D.H.D. I’m B.O.L.D. She also directed Carys D Coburn’s This Is A Room for DTF 2017.
Veronica recently directed Noelle Brown’s In Plain Sight, an exploration of Ireland’s history of Mother and Baby Homes through the lens of architecture. She is currently working on a piece exploring the legacy of Article 41 of the Irish Constitution in collaboration with composer, Sinéad Diskin and actor/dancer, Sibéal Davitt.
Veronica is the author of Clown Through Mask – The Pioneering Work of Richard Pochinko As Practised By Sue Morrison, written in collaboration with Sue Morrison and published by Intellect Press, currently being translated into Spanish. She has been awarded the Prix Europa/Radio France, World Gold Medal Status New York, and a Writers’ Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award for her work in radio drama.
