Creedon’s play is well onside!

“It’s always a mighty feeling when a Cork team travels to Clare and brings home the silverware!”

The words of Leeside playwright Cónal Creedon whose play ‘When I was God’ recently swept the boards at the inaugural Clare Drama Radio Play festival awards.

Directed by Denis O’Sullivan and starring Brian McCarthy and Donie Walsh, the play took home the top prize of Best Production as well as bagging Best Director and Best Actor.

Performing Creedon’s play was the award-winning Kilmeen Drama Group from Rossmore in West Cork.

Hosted by Clare Drama Festival and Scariff Bay Radio, 20 productions from drama groups across the country competed over the course of six weekends during March and April.

Part of Creedon’s ‘Second City Trilogy’, ‘When I Was God’ has already been making waves on distant shores having picked up numerous awards in New York while receiving rave reviews as far away as Shanghai.

One shining review from That’s Shanghai Magazine in China called the play the “highlight of last year's theatre in Shanghai”.

“Powerful, yet punctuated with humour, lyrical and richly colloquial,” the review read.

A review in the New York Times read: “As written by Cónal Creedon, such moments resound with wince-inducing authenticity before they are eclipsed by an inspirational twist.”

The play tells the story of Dino Keegan, a soccer referee who is officiating over his very last game before retirement – the FAI Cup final.

At half-time, as he sits in the dressing room, his mind revisits the pivotal moments in his life that set him on the career path to become a referee. The spotlight of self-doubt shines directly down on him as the ghosts of his past visit him in his dressing room.

Having been recorded during full lockdown, the actors were unable to meet in person to rehearse and perform. They instead had to record their lines separately to be mixed together afterwards.