Montforts’ director thrives on pantomime

Director of the Montfort College of Performing Arts Trevor Ryan is up to his eyes in pantomime, which is his favourite genre of theatre.

As well as co-directing Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for the Montforts, Ryan is playing Jafar, Aladdin’s nemesis, at the Cork Opera House. He is also directing Chatty-Boo’s adult pantomime, Pinocchio Gets Bigger, at the Spailpín Fánach. But Ryan isn’t complaining. He thrives on the feelgood factor associated with pantomime and is appreciative of the hard work that the child performers from the Montforts put into their annual Christmas show.

While there is plenty of competition on Cork’s pantomime circuit with Jack and the Beanstalk at the Everyman as well as the Cork Opera House extravaganza, Ryan says that what is unique about the Montforts’ pantomime is that it’s performed exclusively by children. The older ones, aged 12 to 18 years, play the principal roles on alternating nights, forming a cast of 40 performers. Over the ten performances, some 600 children, aged between three and 11 years, will be on the stage of the Firkin Crane as the chorus. They all attend the Montfort College of Performing Arts, which operates all over Cork city and county.

Because of Ryan’s heavy workload this year, he is co-directing Snow White with Laurie O’Driscoll. Appointed as co-director of the Montforts two years ago, Ryan recently left his full time job with a travel agency to concentrate on what he loves best. Now 51 years old, the Montforts, established by Eileen Nolan, is staging its 26th pantomime. Ryan directed the Montforts’ first pantomime when he was 21 years old.

Ryan loves working with children. “They’re absolutely wonderful to direct. We threw the script at them six weeks ago and within a fortnight, they were all off-book, having memorised their lines. They’re like sponges, soaking up the information and the direction.”

Between solo numbers and ensemble numbers, there are 14 song and dance sequences in the show. Ryan has put the show together through “taking the best bits of four or five scripts of Snow White. It’s essentially the traditional tale.” There are references to the Government and local references “including Roy Keane, as well as race walker, Rob Heffernan. It’s very Cork.”

The cast has had a lot of input to the script. “There are references to Miley Cyrus and other popular cultural references that I may not have been totally in tune with. For the fight sequence at the end, where good triumphs over evil, we’ve not having a traditional sword fight. Instead, we’re basing the fight on the video game, Street Fighter.”

This year, Ryan decided to cast two girls as Snow White — they perform on alternating nights. “I wanted to use a young girl as well as an older one. We have 12-year-old Kayleigh Burke-Nagle who is matched up with 12-year-old Rory Collins. Our older Snow White and the prince are 16-year-old Alison Teahan and 18-year-old Antoin Gorman.”

There are also two dames who rotate every second night. They are Timmy O’Mahony and Eoghan Moloney. Moloney, a past pupil of the Montforts, is studying drama at Stella Adler Academy in New York. “Eoghan came home to Cork for this. He always had an ambition to play a pantomime dame.”

Pantomime is, after all, about wishes coming true.

* Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is at the Firkin Crane from Jan 2-12.