John McCarthy: 'I definitely haven’t felt that theatre is dying on its feet'
John McCarthy's play CITY is available to stream via the Everyman on April 16-25.
Like most actors, John McCarthy feeds off the thrill of performing in front of a live audience, the adrenaline rush of only having one performance every night to get it right, the delicately-poised interaction with castmates. His latest stage role, however, was a completely different prospect, performing to an empty Everyman Theatre in Cork with a skeleton crew and four cameras for company. McCarthy is in the unusual position of having already performed his new solo work, CITY, which will be available as an on-demand video stream.
“We were all figuring out this hybrid form. Performing was strange at first because I went from ‘oh, let’s just pretend there are loads of people in the empty stalls’ but that becomes a very strange performance. Then you start to think of the camera lens as being the audience, it becomes a different skill, I suppose. I felt like the character in Fleabag as I am often looking down the barrel of the lens to the audience,” he says.
