New Writing By Zoë Comyns, OWING TO THE FAILURE OF Comes to Dublin Fringe 2018

Multi award-winning radio producer Zoë Comyns offers a bold new hybrid live reading/quadraphonic audio fiction event for Dublin Fringe Festival.

Synopsis: A podcast producer finds a book of codes that she starts to read obsessively and twists into her own life story.

Almost one hundred years ago in 1919 The Marconi International Code books were published. They list codes and their translations across a number of languages. They were used to improve international business communication via telegraph. In themselves the codes form extraordinarily poetic lists and around them Zoë Comyns has wrapped dramatic meaning in a riveting story about a woman's increasingly fractured state of mind, her work as a podcast producer and the piecing together of her family history. The drama charts a crumbling relationship from its origins, via a history of sound, telegraphy and communication and a flight into family madness.

This event blends audio drama and found text, biographies and voices all thematically linked through the audible in our lives. It mimics a podcast style to use scenes, voiceovers, experts, interviews and field-notes intercut with interior monologues and recorded dialogues drawn from the codes in the Marconi books. It dramatises radio history, is playfully told yet delves into mental health, relationships, radio and sound history. It explores the ways in which we create intimacy and communicate with each other, through codes, secret languages and gestures.

The show is delivered through a mix of recorded sound and music which alternates with a live reading. This is a sound intensive hybrid reading which creates an immersive experience. The quadraphonic setup allows the audio to move around the room surrounding the listeners - it is also unsettling as the story unfolds, arguments escalate and the main character unravels.

The sound design has been crafted by Brendan Rehill and Brendan Jenkinson. The show features the voices of Jose Miguel Jimenez, Regan Hutchins, Michael Comyns, Emer Horgan and Fionn Davenport.

Zoë Comyns runs an independent production company (www.newnormalculture.com) that produces documentaries, dramas and series such as Inside Culture and The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is currently working on programmes for BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4, Lyric FM and other broadcasters. She has been published in Gorse journal, long-listed for the Bristol Short Story Prize and Owing to the Failure Of was published in the prestigious Australian literary journal The Lifted Brow (#39 September 2018).

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