Waking Dreams at the Riverside

This is what 18-year-old Becky starts to hear in her head in Waking Dreams, the new play by Chris McQuillan at the Riverside Theatre in Coleraine.

It is a gripping battle of wills – Becky is in control one minute and beaten down, the next. For a teenager she’s been through a lot: alcoholic parents, death of her best friend and fly-by-night buddies at university. It’s only when her dead friend reappears that she starts to grab her life back.

Creator of SCIHeaven.net, Chris McQuillan says he was inspired to write Waking Dreams by a scifi cult classic series FireFox - written by Joss Wheldon who also wrote Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel and is known for including themes of mind control in his work. Co-incidentally the latest film release Inception also addresses this matter, perhaps reflecting a younger section of society questioning its values and beliefs.

Chris insists that his writing is all about the characters – messy, visceral and confused, as most people are in real life. His previous works Skyline and Everything was Forever are firmly rooted in the present and reveal a remarkable emotional intelligence for a twenty year old.

Traditionalists will be pleased with a tight plot, sensationalists will revel in the emotional complexity and sceptics will be won over by the professionalism throughout. A young cast keep the action moving while Chris keeps a directorial eye on production.

Keen to write scripts for both theatre and television, and with several new plots in hand, McQuillan has the talent to take this “paradigm shift for Northern Irish drama” much much further - which is why his third play is currently in production with the support of the Riverside Theatre.

Waking Dreams appears for one night only at the Riverside Theatre on Saturday, August 28 at 8pm. Tickets 10 from the Box Office on 028 7032 3232 or online at www.riversidetheatre.org.uk