Smack your beach up

Bridget O’ Connor’s play The Flags deals with two guys’ fantasy to be lifeguards on the perfect beach with “exposed flesh as far as the eye can see”.

More seriously, it also addresses what happens between two guys when any “young woman comes to the beach with surprising intentions” and creates the inevitable rift. As Bridget explains, that’s part of the premise behind the play, which gets its Irish premiere at the Andrew’s Lane Theatre after a four star Guardian review and successful run in Britain.
“Well, first I have to say that you imagine lifeguards to be bronzed and healthy,” she says, “but these guys eat pot noodles and Mars Bars and they are trying to change all that, because one of them has been to America, and has seen the real thing on a California beach, rather than on Baywatch. He’s longing to find a similar beach in Ireland. So he wants to get back to being the main man, with girls everywhere, instead of at this scabby beach they work on now. But they do speak like Americans and are into being ‘buddies’ and ‘dudes’. The younger guy in his 20’s kind of hero-worships the slightly older guy, though both are past the lifeguard age and spend most of the week in a chicken factory. So they’re not really Baywatch boys, they’re men, pursuing a dream.”
Bridget, who is a Londoner and whose parents are from Cork, used to go to Banna for her holidays as a young girl and did fall for one of its lifeguards at the time.
“I have gorgeous memories of Banna as a very beautiful place where lifeguards are like rock stars and they have their own gangs and are like beach boys,” she says. “And the one I fell for was the older guy in this play, in a way. But what I experience doesn’t necessarily have a direct bearing on the play in the sense that the woman who comes along in Flags is not all there. She is a little bit deranged and that has a knock-on effect. This woman is the catalyst because one of the two guys is in love with her and the other guy, the older guy, used to be the one who got all the women. But the older one still has a certain glamour, and the young guy kinda worships him, so it all becomes so corrupt. That, too, is what the play is about.”
O’Connor is delighted at the response the play received in Britain and says, “it’s great to be here in Ireland with it, where, hopefully, The Flags will get another life. We are running for more than a month, right up until late October. I hope people will come, because this really is a funny play, though it gets very dark in parts – I’d rather not say how! – and I think people will enjoy it.”

The Flags, directed by Greg Hersov, will be running at Dublin’s Andrew’s Lane Theatre from September 26th – October 28th