Bell

You are invited to the rehearsed reading of

Ob Gob by Roderick Ford,
Directed by Donal Gallagher
Friday, June 21st 2019, 6pm • Free
Triskel Arts Centre, Cork City.

A fictive Europe. An emerging facist state, where the weak and disabled are killed by mobs.

Yulia and her three daughters - Ob Gob, Caoimhe and Neon, have survived by isolating themselves from society, and are bound by a mutual determination to keep the crippled Ob Gob and Caoimhe hidden at all costs. Their situation is about change when Neon gets a chance to leave for college.

Rich with magic realism, gothic theatricality and dry humour, the play presents the women's progress through necromancy and ventroliquism into a sexual and moral decline.

The 16A

The bus is full and thick with fug:
we’re all bundled up for winter. I take a hankie
from my pocket and wipe the misty window.
A young woman standing at a bus stop looks up at me
and I’m back in last summer’s Luxembourg Gardens,

where a young woman standing by a hedge
drops her jeans and underwear,
bends at the waist and grips her knees —
a long rope of urine shoots out of her in a glittering arc
and drums loudly on the lawn behind.
I look away, but later wish I hadn’t.

The bus stops and everyone get out:
old women who can raise storms,
children who can jump and count up to sixty,
men who know the name of the next winning horse
and smell of smoke, mums with covered prams.
I may never see them again, but their breath
is tucked in my pocket, soaking my handkerchief.
List of poems – click / tap to toggle
  • A Plate of Holes
  • Amber
  • An Old Woman Weeds a Grave
  • Auntie
  • Bees
  • Birds of Paradise
  • Bon Voyage
  • Cairo
  • Curve and Swoop
  • Duskfall
  • Fiddler's Croft
  • First Love
  • Ghostwood
  • Giuseppe
  • Grandpa's House
  • Jessica
  • Lay my Corpse
  • Milf
  • Miss Johnson
  • On Hearing that the Bees are Dying Out
  • Room of Red
  • Rosa
  • The 16A
  • The Body
  • The Carpenter’s House
  • The Child
  • The Creature by the Sea
  • The Dinner Guest
  • The Fish
  • The Ghisi Miniatures
  • The Gorgon’s Palace
  • The Iron House
  • The Nails
  • The Old Mirror
  • The Old Train
  • The Other Side
  • The Piano Tuner
  • The Shadow Garden
  • The Spinner
  • The Thorn Tree
  • The Uncles