Dark play keeps it in the family

A darkly comic tale of abandoned psychiatric patients will be a visceral experience for audiences, says Enter Juliet writer Ronan Fitzgibbon of Broken Crow Theatre Company.

Fitzgibbon says he was inspired by a war story he read about. “I think it was the Yugoslav war. There was an asylum on a lake between two disputed areas of territory. All the staff had left the asylum and the inmates were on their own, with bombs flying overhead. I was trying to imagine what kind of bedlam that would result in, so I latched onto that story.”

Enter Juliet has a play within the play, which, says Fitzgibbon, is a bit like a mongrel version of Shakespeare. “One of the characters has found bits of Shakespeare text. He has cobbled the bits into a Shakespeare-type play, weaving them into a narrative. This play has various Shakespeare characters in it, such as Caliban, Iago and Juliet.”