Sean Walsh

Penny for Your Travels (2)

PENNY FOR YOUR TRAVELS

‘Available on Amazon Kindle. Amazon.com   Amazon.co.uk

Also on Smashwords.com

Also, the fifth chapter, Notes on the Past Imperfect. Paperback, Amazon.

‘Caused quite a stir when broadcast on RTE Radio One in the early 90’s. ‘Carried by Clive Geraghty. What a performance! I couldn’t have asked for better! Got the local accent to a T. And his interpretation of the text was quite something…

‘Should have been RTE’s entry for the Prix Italia that year but Petty Politics intervened. Wheels within wheels, etc.

Translated into German and broadcast on WDR, Cologne. Then re-broadcast on Austrian radio. Head of Drama, Vienna, wrote to tell me what a gem it was, that he always cited it at his Creative Writing workshops…

 

Irish Times. 23.6.1993.

Penny for Your Travels. (RTE Radio 1, 4.02 pm)

Sean Walsh’s highly autobiograpical play, a beautiful two-hander about growing up in Dundalk during and after the war.

In an unusual but simple structure, young actor, Daniel McGee, stars as the boy chatterboxing with his silent father and their dog in the frosty woods, swimming in the Loch and going on long drives across Ireland.

Clive Geraghty plays the boy’s much older self and takes most of the lines, but this is far from the sentimental, moralising territory of The Wonder Years.

 Walsh’s dialogue is rich in childhood logic and local similes (a neighbour has “a face on her like a wet Democrat”) with not one but two aching moments about coming to terms with death.

Play of the month, with a superb production by John Penrose.