Luke Casserly: Dublin Theatre Festival show brings common scents to Ireland's peat story

Distillation is by no means a conventional play, but Casserly has worked with a parfumier to bring the ecologically-minded project to the festival

Mon, 25 Sep, 2023 - 02:00

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Luke Casserly’s hope for his Distillation project at Dublin Theatre Festival is that it will - largely through the sense of smell - transport the audience to the bogs of his native Co Longford.

“I grew up in Lanesborough, where my family have been farmers for generations,” he says. “My first memories of that landscape would have been of turning over sods of turf in the summer, and, of course, all the rows that went with that, with my father trying to coerce me and my brothers into working with him.”

The disagreements may have been a factor in determining why Casserly chose not to pursue a career in farming, opting instead to study for a BA in Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. On graduating, he stayed on in the capital, establishing himself as a self-styled “multidisciplinary performance maker,” and creating shows such as Efficacy 84, which was inspired by the Kerry Babies controversy of 1984, and The Lonely Trumpet, which dealt with the mystery surrounding the burning of St Joseph’s Orphanage in Co Cavan in 1943.

It was only during the Covid lockdowns that Casserly returned to Lanesborough for any significant period of time. “I had been away for years,” he says. “But when I moved home, I started going for long walks in the bogs, and something was ignited in me when I really tuned into the ecological situation. It was around this time that Bord na Móna started shutting down its peat harvesting operations, and I was really excited and energised by the environmental potential of the landscape, now that it was going to be left alone.”

In January 2021, Bord na Móna announced an end to all peat harvesting on its lands, having already closed all its peat-fired electricity stations. The decision was largely driven by an acknowledgement of the role the boglands play in absorbing carbon. “If you put all the world’s bogs together,” says Casserly, “they actually absorb more carbon than all the world’s rainforests. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but I found that fascinating.”

There are, he points out, many different opinions on how the peatlands should be managed, going forward. “The tradition of turf-cutting has a sort of culture surrounding it, and now that culture is disintegrating, I suppose the question is, what is the new culture?”

This was the subject of some discussion between Casserly and his father. “We’d see the landscape through very different prisms, and those prisms are really connected to our separate emotional experiences of that place. So for example, my dad would, through his farming practice, have a very particular view on what the landscape should be used for. And I would have a slightly different perception or experience of it, which would inform how I think it should be used.

“But, in making this project, I really wanted to bring in all those different viewpoints, and not shut anything down. They’re all important, and all part of the story of that landscape.”

One of the things that came back to Casserly during his lockdown walks was that the boglands are full of wonderful smells. The realisation compelled him to invite the perfume maker Joan Woods to collaborate on his show. “Over the past year, Joan and I have created a unique distillation of the botanicals we’ve collected in the landscape.

“It's a very particular scent, you know. It's not like a commercial perfume, you wouldn't wear it to a special occasion or anything like that. But what I was really interested in was how the smells of that place are so potent. There’s the smell of gorse flowers. There’s also a sort of coconut scent, and a lot of citrus. And of course, there’s that damp earthiness, when you get your nose into the place itself. What I really wanted to do with the project was to try and translate that landscape for an audience through scent.”

Distillation, he emphasises, is not a drama, or a traditional theatrical production. "There's no stage, and no actors. It’s a very handmade, DIY, performative encounter for the audience. It's not just me involved; there's a whole host of amazing collaborators, including the sculptor, Gerard Clancy, who has created a custom made table, which the audience are going to be seated around.

“This table is composed of peat that we’ve collected from three different bogs throughout the island of Ireland. The premise is really simple. It's me talking about the boglands in Co Longford, and giving them a sense of what it is and what it means to me. So I'm coming at it from an autobiographical lens, I suppose. But it's more about this incredible place than it is about me.”