SKYE LONERAGAN

Skye Loneragan is an award-winning writer/performer, performance poet and theatre director. Her first solo work Cracked won an Edinburgh Fringe First award,  her seventh solo work, Though This Be Madness, toured to the Scottish Highlands & Islands, supported by Creative Scotland. She is developing a new play, May Contain Nuts (*), (shared as a work in progress with Scottish Mental Health and Arts Festival through Creative Scotland funding). Skye is a published performance poet and creator of ‘q-poetics’ (poetry in places/spaces of waiting, queues). Skye has worked in many different contexts as an artist-in-residence, most recently with Remembering Together, Edinburgh, a Covid memorial art trail at Wardie Bay, funded by the Scottish Government. Her work tends to begin with a question that becomes a quest. How we can best nurture our collective sanity?….. For more information about Skye and her work please click here.

MAY CONTAIN NUTS (*)

Skye is currently developing a new work called May Contain Nuts (*) with the Scottish Mental Health & Arts Festival, the research and development of which was supported by Creative Scotland, for  Scottish Mental Health and Arts festival’s Manifesto day. 

It is born of the time I had to see a psychiatrist to prove to a BBC commissioning editor that my father’s schizophrenia, which I had fictionalised in a play, was considered realistic. At the time, the editor had described the inclusion of this particular mental illness as a ‘hot potato’. If I wanted my play to progress beyond that pitching round, and be selected for broadcast, perhaps I could verify that the illness was an accurate, an authentic one? Perhaps I could provide proof that my father’s illness, fictionalised in a play, was real? So, I found myself seeing a psychiatrist. I asked them to please verify that what they read seemed real, once I had made it up. And to please put that on Letterhead.

Click here for more information on May Contain Nuts (*)

THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS

Skye has just concluded a child-care friendly slow-tour of the Scottish Highlands & Islands, with Though This Be Madness :

Once Upon a Time…

I Don’t have Time!

told by a recovering new mum who is attempting to …finish a sentence  – post-natally depressed and sleep deprived, someone trying to soothe a baby to sleep whilst bouncing on a pilates ball. She’s trying to tell you many tales of sisterhood and struggles with mental health, and to reach her sister Ophelia, who wrestles with pyschosis. The play became  Though This Be (Online) Madness!!!  with SMHAF during Covid lockdowns. The slow tour was designed to make plausible the child-care realities of making, performing and parenting. A theatre show set in a lounge room, Though This Be Madness is adult content open to babe-in-arms. It was oginally part of the 2018 Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) and due to tour in spring 2020, re-scheduled for 2022. It has been supported by Creative Scotland Touring Fund and SMHAF.

“Loneragan is such a gifted and engaging performer, both in words and movement, that the quiet integrity of her unadorned staging finally comes to seem like a gift; in a show that talks of madness, but also of how women’s lives, honestly described, always tend to defy the norms of our culture – including our ideas of sanity and exactly what it might look like.” (Joyce McMillan, Scotsman, THOUGH THIS BE MADNESS)

“A tiny, but almost perfect show….a haunting reminder of some of the big questions asked”  (Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, CRACKED.)

“In a kind of acute free verse rendering that might’ve come from Shakespeare were he alive today and on uppers, Loneragan poses provocative questions with the most vigorous, surefooted delivery imaginable”  ( Crickey, THE LINE WE DRAW)

“…a colourful litany of love lost and found and the comforts of madness in the face off an all too serious big, bad world of adulthood. ….take your time to be small is Loneragan’s overriding instruction…”  (The Herald, Neil Cooper, THE LINE WE DRAW).

“…no one notices that Mish Gorecki has actually gone missing. No laughing matter, and yet writer Skye Loneragan contrives, without being facile, to flip the potentially grim scenario of Mish’s messy existence into something genuinely life-affirming and hilarious to boot” (Mary Brennan, The Herald, MISH GORECKI GOES MISSING.

“It takes an artist of some budding genius to generate an idea this simple and this brilliant” (Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman UNSEX ME HERE)