One Hour Theatre Company

Anything for a Laugh, by Tom Hall, with Victor Merriman as Marty Downes. Sound design and direction by WeZ Nolan.

Anything for a Laugh was presented as a radio play in a theatrical setting, offering WoWFest 2024 audiences a unique collective listening experience.

Marty Downes has never been far from his hometown, Wexford, in the South-East of Ireland, where he lives unostentatiously among people he’s known all his life. He enjoys the predictable rhythms of small-town living and amuses his neighbours in their local pub, The Ibex. Marty can always be relied upon for a funny story or even a song. And then, one evening, without warning, as the National Lottery numbers are called out on the pub television, everything changes …

Anything for a Laugh is Tom Hall’s second play for WoWFest; his Bartleby: A Tale of Wall Street, featuring in the online festival in 2021. Tom was born in Vermont, USA, and has lived in Ireland since 1995, following periods in Mexico, where he began writing.

Author’s Note- Anything for a Laugh

Many years ago, I lived on the street in Wexford, Ireland, that became the street where Marty Downes had been born.  There I met people who shared his contradictory qualities of naivete and worldliness, and it may even be that my writerly interest in the problem of innocence stems from that residency.

Any dramatic writing that has real ambition behind it must give us characters through whose eyes we see more, and more clearly, than they do themselves. When this condition is fulfilled, the innocent, in particular, reveal to us the world, as if to ask us what it means.

We tend to think of innocence as an uncomplicated affair.  Our leading authors prefer to dwell on the contortions of knowledge and guilt in the human personality, but innocence carries its own contagion.  In his novel, The Quiet American, Graham Greene writes “- innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.”

I don’t suggest everything that befalls Marty or that he encounters in this play is somehow a consequence of his guileless condition.  But he does serve as an unwitting catalyst when his neighbours pin their own hopes on an unconfirmed report that he’s suddenly become wealthy.  In a similar vein, Marty’s impromptu voyage to the desert kingdom of Las Vegas places him fortuitously at the heart of an apocalypse. 

My thanks are due to sound designer and director WeZ Nolan as well as Daniel Harper for their expert work in editing and recording this production.  I wish especially to thank Victor Merriman for his indispensable role in putting the project together as actor, dramaturg, producer and true friend. 

Lastly, the author dedicates this little exercise in audio disinhibition to Snots, Amby, Rose, Dessie, Angela, Roger, Marty – of course – and even Richie Snell: people of Wexford who rise up and live, in the Bullring, the Faythe, and far, far beyond. ENDS

Click on this link to hear Part I of Anything for a Laugh:

https://soundcloud.com/one-hour-theatre-company/anything-for-a-laugh-pt-1

This is Victor Merriman’s fourth event at WoWFest, following his book launch and reading (2019), his curated Tales of Everyday Phrases (2020, online) and Bartleby: A Tale of Wall Street (2021, online), in which he directed David Llewelyn. He is Professor of Critical Studies in Drama at Edge Hill University, and a founder-director of One Hour Theatre Company

WeZ Nolan is a Creative Industries all-rounder from Wexford Town, whose career spans radio, theatre, live television, film, music and festivals. He is a craft educator currently Programme Leading in Media and Production at Liverpool Screen School, LJMU.

Merriman’s vocal track for the 70-minute audio play was recorded at Edge Hill University’s Creative Edge studios by Daniel Harper.

Audience responses, by email, included the following observations:

I very much enjoyed the work, laughed a lot, and was captivated throughout. The recording encouraged me to pay close attention to detail, activating my imagination to create each scene in my mind. 

It was a great bit of work and I enjoyed the challenge of having to listen attentively with nothing to look at. It made me think of Rita’s retort to Frank in Educating Rita when asked how to stage Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: ‘Do it on the radio’!

I really enjoyed it and was completely unprepared for the script’s dystopian turn. I had assumed that Marty would remain a bit of an idiot, but he turned out to be a sensitive, bright (in an untutored way) and completely decent character; a real working-class pillar of his community.

The play and performance was great, and I really valued the experience of receiving it in that communal way with the lights, the spoken word and sound design. An antidote to the modern world where we struggle now to find the time or patience for a radio play!