WAITING FOR THE OFFO OUT NOW!!!

Launch day baby

The wait for Waiting For The Offo is over, and the book is now available on Amazon 👇👇👇👇

The Story

Sir Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in Waiting For Godot on Broadway

The idea for ‘Waiting For The Offo’ came to me in a flash of inspiration while reading Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with a crippling hangover from too many pints of Harp. The endless cynical gallows humour of the play reminded me of the conversations I’d taken part in just a few hours before on the session. It was a strange idea, that a play written in 1953, a perennial myth of nihilism and absurdity, would still be playing out in the lives of young Irish people today?

Austrian Psychologist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl said, “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure”. Hedonism was the default solution to the Western meaning crisis in Dublin when I was growing up. Drinking and drugs and socialising all went hand in hand and offered a temporary relief to the dogged purposeless that marked our modern lives. Unfortunately, hedonism is a solution that leads to even greater desolation and hopelessness than before, and Waiting for The Offo is a story of several young people who become caught in the depths of that desperate cycle.

The session lifestyle is not quite alcoholism or a drug addiction but an addiction to the dramatic cycle of rising and falling, boom and bust, like a gambler who is hooked on losing more than winning. Nothing encapsulates this ritual of self-destruction more than waiting for the off-license to open on a Sunday morning. This moral dilemma, pushing past the edge of sobriety to go back into intoxication, consciousness to unconsciousness, night into day, in order to just keep partying, causes a pause for reflection.

It is this strange and liminal space which this play invites you to ponder, not quite sober, not quite drunk, not quite a session but still going - a place of stalled transformation, a rebellion against the march of time itself, seeking a liquid utopia. Waiting For The Offo is a secular purgatory, that ends when the liquor goes on sale once more, but never seems to quite hit the spot.

The Play

My own story with the session began in my early teens drinking in fields and before discos. However in my early twenties, graduated from university and confronted with the challenges of growing up and becoming an adult, the session monkey on my back started to feel heavier and heavier. By the time I wrote the play in 2018 during my creative writing MA in Belfast, I was already considering giving up and felt at some stage myself and the session would part ways - unfortunately, then I ended up writing about it for the next five years...

The play was accepted into the Dublin Fringe Festival 2020 and awarded the prize for the Fringe Lab Fifty. Thanks to the kindness and generosity of 120+ donors and Michael and Conan’s guidance, the play was ready for a debut performance. But of course, if you are familiar with history, or more than two years old, you will know that 2020 was also the year of something else, a certain global pandemic. The world was closed, and our hopes of a 2020 production went down in flames. The theatres shut, and we had plenty of time to ask ourselves, should we keep going with this play? Would there even be a point to it after 2020? What would the world look like then?

Throughout the pandemic and rejections from theatres we had lots of opportunities to quit on this play but quitting was never an option. We felt like the play had something to say about the session and the nihilism of the lives of young people in Dublin which was important and worth fighting for. In 2023, through an agreement with the New Theatre in Templebar and the tremendous support of the owner Anthony, we finally managed to actually stage the play for a week long run. Before the opening night the entire run was sold out (which I was told rarely happens) and everyone that say the play thought it was ‘surprisingly’ good. Here what people who saw the production had to say:

“This play has it all, except booze. There’s friendship, attempts at romance, crazed drug dealers. Not to mention deep existential conversations about life, direction etc...Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, Mahon McCann gives the idea a fun modern twist while retaining the existential philosophical nature of the idea.” @Dramatic Dublin

“It’s like watching your own life up there on the stage” @WildState

“We need rebels like McCann and McIvor. New voices making unconventional theatre in unconventional ways. Waiting for the Offo shows talent, passion and promise.” @The Arts Reviewer

“Big shout out to everyone involved with the play Waiting for The Offo, which I absolutely loved . I really appreciated that so much of the art I encountered from current Irish artists is grappling with the country’s intense alcohol intake. This play grappled hilariously and brilliantly.” @Abdi Nazemian, Stone wall and Lambda literary award-winning author.

The Book

Unfortunately, despite the appetite for the story and the play, we did not get funding to take Waiting For The Offo on the road for a tour around Ireland. Essentially if you can’t get funding from the Arts Council for a tour, you are dead in the water, so the people who saw the first run of the play would be the only ones! It seemed a shame though when so many people liked the story and the play to let it go to waste and so after much wrangling and procrastination, I finally got the book together for Amazon. There the story and the play of Waiting For The Offo can live on as a book (albeit a book of a script) with additionally the writer’s and director’s notes on the production, as a cautionary monument to the hedonistic-nihilism of the early 2000’s and the 2010’s which many young meaning crisis’d people in the West found solace in.