“The cosy stage upstairs in Bewley’s Café Theatre is convincingly transformed into an East Wall living room this month, with the crocheted throw, mustard couch, and old paintings that you’d expect to find in any house belonging to a person in their seventies, complete with indoor crystal ashtray (props courtesy of Wilde Vintage Company Dublin). This living room is the scene for BULLIED; a story centred around the relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter as they navigate the issues facing them. Vinnie McCabe and Michael J. Harnett are the founding members of Dublin Touring Theatre, who are behind this production, with Harnett writing the piece and McCabe starring and directing.

Harnett has written a heart-warming little vignette in BULLIED that explores the importance of intergenerational relationships and how they can help both the young and the old to overcome problems. Grandad (McCabe) is recently widowed and struggling with the loneliness of losing a partner and living by himself in a world that is increasingly automated and computerised, and Anna, played by Shauna Brennan, is a transition year student whose parents are having relationship problems and who is being bullied in her new school. Grandad fumbles through phone calls with machine recordings and customer service staff who can’t seem to stray from their script to help him; the writing and performance are light-hearted and elicit a good few laughs, but lurking beneath is the fact that this is the grim reality for many people who grew up being able to speak to people face to face to resolve an issue. Anna is glued to her phone and the incessant messages and online posts that follow her home from school in a world where school bullying is now inescapable regardless of physical location.

Though the acting from both is solid – McCabe is convincingly and comically curmudgeonly in the role and Brennan embodies surly teenage angst to a tee, it’s the relationship between them that is the highlight of the piece. One can’t help but feel that without the intervention and persistence of her grandfather, Anna wouldn’t have an adult to share her reality with; speaking to the particular role that an elderly relative or adult can play in a young person’s life, one that is very different to that of a parent. It’s a very sweet watch that strays only marginally into the world of after school special à la East Wall and is recommended for the whole family.”

-Emma Devlin, The Reviewers Hub

BULLIED

“Michael J Harnett's Bullied (at the Viking in Clontarf) is a straightforward piece of everyday drama. In other words, it's a commentary for "ordinary" folk on "ordinary" situations that they face in their daily lives. Young Anna, miserable in the new school to which she has been transferred when her parents rise in the world, is dumped on her grandad for three days while the same parents head off to a hotel to thrash out their marital difficulties. Grandad spots the youngster's misery as she buries herself in her phone, and takes time off from his own infuriated dealings with energy providers and other tormentors of modern life. He is longing, of course, for the days when you got a human being at the end of the line, one who actually heard what you were saying and dealt with it: a paradise of times past when his beloved wife was still alive. The problem is that Anna is an easy target for picking on at school, and boy, is she being picked on. For her un-posh accent, her dyslexia, her un-doubted prowess as a junior footballer, and her friendship with a boy from "her past" who is the romantic target of one of her tormentors. A sad and simple little story, which she comes clean with to her grandfather. And in Harnett's play for his own company Dublin Region Touring Theatre, Grandad predictably manages to deal with it: simply, easily, with a wave of a loving wand. If only life were like that there wouldn't actually be the pernicious problem of online bullying of sidelined teens. Added to the fact, of course, that you can't legislate for popularity, and calling in parents of bullies is far more likely to find them defending their own nasty brats than condemning them. But Harnett is a master of charmingly realistic dialogue, and the piece trots gently and warmly along, with Vinnie McCabe (who also directs) as Grandad and Aine Collier as touching Anna.”

-Emer O’Kelly