A new play focusing as much on the good times that were had at the Stardust, as on the terrible tragedy that occurred there, is now running at Bewley’s Café ­ Theatre. Carissa Casey talks to director and writer of '48', Gemma Kane.

At 29, Gemma Kane was born long after that horrible Valentine’s night in 1981 when 48 young people lost their lives after fire broke out in the Stardust nightclub in Artane, Dublin. But it cast a shadow over her childhood. Both her parents were there that night and the emotional scars of living through such a traumatic event, have never fully left them.

“My dad would have been very cautious with us, as all parents are in general. But he was very scared of candles, and heat being on too long, or any of us near anything like that. To be honest, I couldn't put the exact day, or time, or year when I found out about them being in the fire, but I just feel like it was something that I always knew,” she says.

Her play, 48, is inspired as much by the strong and enduring love her parents share, as by the fire. And it’s a comedy, for a reason, she explains. “It was the biggest tragedy in the history of the State and the biggest tragedy of my parent’s life. But my Dad says he feels that everything else prior to that night was discounted. All the fun they had there, all the laughs. He had his first pint there, all the dances and all the gigs.

Unfortunately, because of that night, it's all just gone and discounted. That's what I try to bring back to life, to celebrate and honour the good of the space and the people who were there.

She - fortunately - wasn’t around in Ireland of the 1980s, but admits “it sounds pretty grim”. Nights out were the highlight of her parent’s lives, a break away from the dire economic reality of day-to-day life. “It's peppered with looking for a job in Dublin in 1980 and people going over to London or just trying to start fresh all the time. And it just seems like the only solid stuff they had around that time, my Ma and Da, and their two friends was the Stardust. It was a complete escape for them during a time when Dublin just wasn't a very nice place to be I suppose.”

She uses music throughout the play to bring people back to that time, songs like Blondie’s Call Me. And at the centre of it all is the love story between two couples, Tom and Sarah (played by Gemma and Ruairí Lenaghan) and Maggie and James (played by Emily Fox and Eoghan Collins).

The scenes tell the story of their lives in the week leading up to that night.

“The comedy is told in dialogue and the tragedy is shown through movement. We had a great movement director because I just thought it'd be easier for survivors and victims' families to digest the horror visually rather than audibly, if you get what I mean,” she says.

EMOTIONAL TRAUMA

Survivors and the families of those who died have seen the play and, while it was understandably a highly emotional experience for them, it was in some small way cathartic.

She conducted extensive interviews with people who were around at the time including, of course, her own father. “I interviewed guards and nurses, even people that weren't there, but were affected. My aunty, for example, was nine at the time. So she wasn't there but I interviewed her about what it was like when my grandma said there was something happening and my grandfather ran out the door to find my mother. No one had a phone back then. So he was just running around looking for her.”

“My aunty looked out the window and she could see the fire and see the smoke. There were people running through the streets. She just said ‘Coolock was screaming’ that night.”

Her parent’s experience was just one of so many. Aside from the 48 deaths, some 214 people were injured that night, including her mother.

Gemma's parents, Tony and Sandra Kane started going out with each other when they were just 12. On Valentine’s night 1981, they were 19 and 20. As was custom at the time, Tony went to the Stardust with his group of friends and Sandra went with hers. Then they paired up. “That was the night that he had decided that he was going to ask her to marry him,” says Gemma.

“She and my dad were chatting away at the bar and he said, ‘look, Sandra, I have something to ask you’. But she said, ‘wait here two minutes, I'll be back’.

As soon as she went to the bathroom, the fire started.”

“He knew the place like the back of his hand and he was trying to get over to the bathroom to my mother. Everyone was kind of trampling on each other and dragging each other, and he ended up getting pulled along by people and got dragged outside.”

At this point the place was in flames and a fireman tried to stop Tony from going back in.” So he knocked out the fireman and headed back in,” says Gemma.

“The whole place was on fire, pitch black smoke. He couldn't see anything but somehow he found her. It's a complete miracle because there were over 400 people there. They’d been slagging my mother’'s dress or something, it was like a velvety-type thing. He could just feel her, he knew her body, he knew her hair, he knew the dress she was wearing, and he just found her in the bathroom and dragged her out.”

Not surprisingly, the aftermath of that experience was incredibly difficult for Sandra. “She was really devastated at the time. She was burned. Her hair was burned off with her eyelashes and her eyebrows.” While the physical scars have healed the emotional ones are still there.

Like many other survivors, both parents have seen the play. This is Gemma’s first major production, although she has worked in the past with the acclaimed director Joe Dowling. She has another play in development and, between writing, she has worked as a stunt woman on Netflix’s Valhalla (formerly Vikings).

“Primarily I make a lot of my own work because I am tired of waiting for the phone to ring if you know what I mean.”

“It's something I love as well. I absolutely adore it. No, I don't make all the money in the world but I’m happy.”

48 runs to 26 February at Bewley’s Café Theatre on Dublin’s Grafton Street. For tickets visit eventbrite.ie