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Actor and director Gabrielle Breathnach worked with a group of eight local people, whose regular meetings resulted in the writing of a full-length play together. After months of editing and work-shopping with other playwrights and directors, including Peter Sheridan and Jimmy McCarthy, the production 'Rita's Last Stand', which told the story of a resident who refuses to leave her old flat for life in a new house, was produced and performed to full houses in Axis.
The play diverged between reassuring reflections on the nature of community and on the neighbourliness in the early days of life in the flats, to the devastation caused by the arrival of heroin and sense of abandon experienced by the residents. The reluctance by some members of the present-day community to move from flats may not be easily understood but was well treated in the play, the first act of which observed the contrast between tenement life in the inner city and the utopian idyll of the brand new 1960's flat in Ballymun.
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