Oscar Bravo
Updating Oscar Wilde for the web 2.0 generation and showcasing some tasty up and coming bands – a new RTE young person’s show is breaking all the rules and having fun along the way.
Anne Sexton, 08 Nov 2011
If you’ve been watching early evening television, you might have noticed an unusual Irish produced drama. It airs at 6.30pm on RTÉ 2. I choose the word unusual because The Importance Of Being Whatever is certainly that. Written by Iseult Golden and David Horan and directed by brothers Rob and Ronan Burke, Whatever is a series of 27 three-minute episodes featuring a young cast and some of Ireland’s best new music.
Whatever is a romance, loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Ernest. Tobi Okocha is a Leaving Cert student. His mother is struggling to make ends meet, and between his studies and his part-time job working for his estranged father, Tobi doesn’t have much time for fun. When he meets Emma, Tobi follows her to drama class. To impress her, Tobi joins the cast who are rehearsing Oscar Wilde’s play. Inspired, he invents an alter ego, ‘Harry’, who is the opposite of the responsible Tobi. Between school, work and his double-life, Tobi has a difficult balancing act especially as Emma is more than a little drawn to the ultra-cool Harry.
The three-minute format presents a challenge to create engaging characters and a storyline, says Rob.
“You need to step things up very fast. You have to find a way to hook the audience in to keep them coming back.”
“You have to start the story almost immediately,” continues Ronan. “You don’t have the luxury of time to set the tone. The first couple of episodes are very pacy as you’re trying to convey a lot of information quickly and introduce the plot.”
“One thing that really helped was having a narrator orientate the audience. She explains what’s going on and recaps a little bit,” says Rob.
The story is told from the point of view of a blogger, Cocobeans. In some ways Cocobeans acts as a one-woman Greek chorus for the internet age, filmed in shadows and commenting on the action and characters. Who exactly is she?
“She’s a mysterious character, but her identity will be revealed,” says Rob, who is not giving anything away.
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