Stage Review: Fallen Saints – The Body of Ciara Molly & Shady Yew Experience

For 2024, Force of Nature Productions offers the best installment yet of their annual Fallen Saints franchise.

Since 2016, Force of Nature Productions has been staging a distinctive mix of history and horror with their seasonal series, Fallen Saints, which has ranged from Jack the Ripper to the Salem Witch Trials. This year’s installment features the smoothest blend of ingredients to date, consisting of two separately ticketed events. The Body of Ciara Molly offers an intriguing play about a Dublin pub in 1866 threatened by supernatural forces during the Festival of Samhain. The Shady Yew Pub Experience acts as an entertaining companion piece – an interactive event which extrapolates on a few narrative threads from the play. Except for a little bit too much downtime in between, the two aspects form a satisfying combination.

Stage Review: The Body of Ciara Molly

Staged as an immersive play with audience members free to follow characters back and forth between two main rooms, The Body of Ciara Molly details what happens when an apparent murder victim is brought inside a pub only to revive with a confused tale of what happened to her. On a night when spirits are said to be roaming freely, suspicion soon turns to the supernatural – especially when a screaming banshee arrives – but the exact nature of the threat is a mystery the characters must solve if they are to save themselves.

After a slow start, with a bit too much dialogue from a patron complaining about people not believing his unbelievable tales, the play kicks into gear when the “body” arrives, and the characters struggle to figure out what’s happening. The script does a good job of dropping hints so that the audience starts to sense the solution as the characters are coming to realize the truth, leading to an exciting and fairly poignant finale.

Stage Review: The Shady Yew Pub Experience

Presented as a separate but related event, The Shady Yew Pub Experience is interactive as well as immersive. The audience rubs shoulders with a different set of characters in the pub, playing games and ordering specialty cocktails, listening to live songs, and even daring to have a one-on-one confrontation with a supernatural character lurking in a back room. The pub games are enjoyable, and the characters presiding over them are good companions even if some seem slightly sinister.

There is more going on. Toward the end, the banshee from the play reappears and forces an agreement with a Dullahan (a headless phantom) to summon spirits wandering the earthly plane. The fate of these ghosts turns out to be intertwined with the events of The Body of Ciara Molly; their reluctance to move on is the result of uncertainty what happened to loved ones who perished or disappeared inexplicably. It’s a satisfying way to further explore the fictional world while still offering something that stands on its own.

The headless character is very well done for a live show where the audience is…well, not quite face-to-face with the character, but you get the idea. His reluctant interaction with banshee is nicely handled, and the repetitive ritualistic incantation that summons each spirit in turn has a wonderfully authentic feel to it, sucking the audience into ethereal realm. It is, however, a bit too repetitive. Three is the number traditionally associated with magic, and three would have been a good number of spirits; for some reason, we get four here.

Stage Review: Interstitial Longueurs

The two pieces that make up this year’s Fallen Saints presentation, The Body of Ciara Molly and The Shady Yew Pub Experience are solid; unfortunately, the glue holding them together is not as adhesive as it should be.

If you arrive early to the play or hang around in between the play and the pub experience, you will interact with several púca (Irish spirits) in the parking lot, who chat, improvise, and tell a tale or two to fill the time. At first this feels like a good bonus feature while waiting for the real show to begin, but this filler goes on so long that it seems intended as a significant portion of the show. In a way this makes sense, because it introduces us to characters who appear in The Shady Yew Pub Experience; however, it goes on too long, even allowing for the fact that time must be needed after the play to reset for the interactive experience.

On the night we attended, the problem was aggravated by a procession led by Darkness (a recurring character in Fallen Saints, though she did not identify herself by name here) into the Shady Yew Pub. The characters in the procession sang a song, and after completing the song inside the pub, the pub owner started to tell a story to the crowd packed tightly inside. After waiting outside for half an hour, we wanted to relax with a cocktail and enjoy some pub games, not wait around shoulder-to-shoulder in a standing-room only situation. Once the tale was told, the experience we expected finally commenced, and it was great. The wait, however, was too long.

Stage Review: Conclusion

Longueurs aside, this year’s Fallen Saints is highly recommended. The Body of Ciara Molly and The Shady Yew Pub – each in its own way delivers a memorable experience; taken together, they are even better. Between the two, The Body of Ciara Molly stands on its own a bit more than The Shady Yew Pub; part of the latter’s impact comes from learning how the afterlife of these lost souls was impacted by the events of the play. The cumulative impact of the two is diminished by the wait time in between, but you are not obligated to wait or even to see both on the same night, so arrange your schedule to suit needs. And listen for that banshee scream – your ears will never be the same!

The Body of Ciara Molly and The Shady Yew Pub Photographs