Dec 24, 2024
Oct 09,2024
Actor and writer Fionn Foley's Drama On One radio play Helen Wheels has won this year's IMRO Award for Best Radio Drama - listen to Helen Wheels above,
The play is a comic tale of narcotics, fast-food delivery and a mother’s love for her son, set in Belfast at the height of the pandemic.
Below, Fionn remembers how the ‘new normal' of 2020 inspired a story of one mother’s night on the wrong side of the law...
When I wrote Helen Wheels back in 2020, I had no idea how quickly it would fall into the category of 'period piece'. In many ways, stories that revolve around those first few disorientating weeks of the pandemic carry with them a certain sense of fatigue and dread. And no wonder, says you.
What started off as a flurry of myopic damage control (My wife and I absconded to Leitrim for a grand total of five days, thinking we'd wait the thing out) quickly evolved into something that would turn regular life on its head for much longer than even the most pessimistic of us could have anticipated.
So to those who wince at the mention of the P-word I say, fair enough. However, I think many would agree that those early fruit-wiping, Zoom-wrangling weeks of the aforementioned global crisis also brought out the best in people. Off-licenses may have never been busier (though I would have no idea about such things) but there was also a palpable, albeit improvisational effort to try and keep the train on the tracks.
It's probably just a tad too early for some of us to want to look back and laugh, but putting Helen Wheels together as a new radio play nearly four years post-you-know-what is me doing just that.
Helen is a forty-eight-year-old Belfast woman who lives with her son Lorcan on the Glen Road. One morning Lorcan falls in the door, having taken full advantage of Downing Street's ambiguous/non-existent restrictions on pub openings. Helen makes it clear that he won't be leaving the house again until they can be sure he hasn't contracted the mysterious new virus.
Her son is a delivery cyclist for 'SpeedyEatz' and protests that he'll be in serious trouble if he doesn't turn up for work. A good old-fashioned mother-son screaming contest ensues and gets their shared period of self-isolation off to a less that ideal start. But when Helen roots through Lorcan's delivery bag and finds it full to the brim of distribution-ready cannabis, she realises that his complaints of potential employer 'trouble' could be serious indeed. In an effort to save her son's hide, Helen takes to the streets to complete her son's drug run- like any sane person would.
It's probably just a tad too early for some of us to want to look back and laugh, but putting Helen Wheels together as a new radio play nearly four years post-you-know-what is me doing just that.
As I writer, I work mostly in the field of musical theatre, so on those occasions that I venture outside that genre I am - subconsciously, perhaps - looking to eke out the natural music of language and equally, of comedy. If you had told me that Helen Wheels would come together as something of a physical comedy for radio prior to recording, I'd have told you to get on your bike (pun intended).
But thanks to the work of our outstanding director Conall Morrison and equally outstanding cast, that's more or less how the piece feels. A madcap journey through the empty COVID-ridden streets of Belfast, propelled entirely by that maternal instinct that seems to override almost any other human impulse. At its core, I suppose it's a bit of a tribute to the resilience of mothers everywhere.
Listen to more from Drama On One here.
