Colm Tóibín in line for a ‘Tony’ for Shaw play

Irish author Colm Tóibín has been nominated for a Tony Award, one of the world’s most prestigious prizes for theatre.

The critically acclaimed Broadway production of a dramatisation of his novella, The Testament of Mary, has been nominated for best play. The one-woman show stars Cork actor Fiona Shaw as the mother of Jesus, telling the story of her son’s crucifixion.

There were also two other technical nominations for the production which premiered in 2011 at the Dublin Theatre Festival. UCC’S Mel Mercier was nominated for best sound design and Jennifer Tipton for best lighting design.

The Broadway premiere is a fictional imagining of the mother of Jesus as an older woman seeking to understand the events that become the narrative of the New Testament and the foundation of Christianity.

The New York Times described the play as “beautiful and daring” while the New York Review of Books called it “subversive and ruthless” and praised it for its “sensational theatricality”.

Dr Mercier, head of the school of music and theatre at University College Cork, has also been nominated for a Drama Desk Award, another prestigious New York theatre award, for outstanding sound design in a play.

Directed by Deborah Warner, the production has received international acclaim since it opened last week at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. It runs for another seven weeks.

Mercier, a composer, performer, and academic, is the composer and sound designer behind the score accompanying The Testament of Mary. The son of original Chieftains bodhrán player the late Peadar Mercier, he plays bodhrán, bones, and a range of international percussion instruments. He teaches Irish, African, Indian, and Indonesian music at UCC, where he is a senior lecturer in music.

Shaw completed a BA at UCC in 1979. Widely acclaimed in the world of stage, screen and television acting, she will be familiar to fans of Harry Potter in her role as Harry’s Aunt Petunia.

Warner and Shaw have worked together for 25 years on projects, including their staging of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land which played Off Broadway in 1996, and a revival of Happy Days, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008.

Mercier’s next theatre project in the US is Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a one-woman show also starring Fiona Shaw and directed by Phyllida Lloyd. It is due to run at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music in December.

Mercier has also penned the music to Setanta which is currently on tour in Ireland and comes to Cork later this month.