Shows on the Rise 2018: If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You

The VAULT Festival is coming to town! From January 24th to March 18th, over three hundred new shows explode across a festival of festivals in their Waterloo home. With new venues, new bars, new food and plenty of surprises, VAULT 2018 is the biggest, fairest platform in London for artists to present innovative, daring work. Here we have a catch up with Thomas Martins, director of the wonderfully-titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Loved You (try saying that after a couple of pints), and the linguistic challenges he faced when dissecting the show.

I first directed If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You in London, in 2016, and its characters – hot-headed Mikey and desperate, damaged Casey – have been rattling around my head ever since. I’m delighted, then, that I get to revisit this raucous, winning love story: this year it plays not only Dublin and Galway, but also takes the characters home to Ennis, where the play is set. In February we re-introduce Cocaine to London – as part of the brilliant VAULT Festival – so I thought I might give English audiences a small insight into what it’s like to be Casey, an English teenager suddenly stranded in a very different world (or me, an English director suddenly wrestling with an Irish play). What follows is a glossary of a few Irish words it may or may not be useful to know while watching Cocaine:

‘shift’ – ‘to kiss’, but sloppily like a teen.

‘savage’ – great.

‘deadly’ – also great.

‘rapid’ – a different kind of great.

Meanies – like slightly denser Monster Munch, very good in sandwiches.

‘craic’ – it is categorically impossible for an English person to define what ‘craic’ or ‘the craic’ is.

‘so’ – this, affixed to the end of a sentence, means ‘therefore,’ but it’s predictably followed by me asking: ‘…so…what?’

‘yolks’ – nothing to do with eggs, this is a term for drugs, and specifically Ecstasy.

‘chicken fillet roll’ – not, as I mispronounced for a week, a ‘chicken filler roll’ (even though it’s a roll filled with chicken). A savage pair with some Meanies

‘gowl’ – ooh this is a naughty one.

And here ends today’s lesson. Watching Cocaine at VAULT Festival will be a deadly test of your learning today, but if nothing else: watching a play in a tunnel, when it’s meant to be set on a roof, will be some craic. You gowl.

If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You is performing at the VAULT Theatre in Waterloo as part of VAULT Festival from the 14th to the 25th of February at 19.40. Tickets and more information can be found here.