About
The Safety Catch started life as a stage play, imagining a moment before the 2019 TT as, during a dialogue with his late father's best friend and mechanic Liam Beckett, Michael Dunlop decides whether to race on or not. During 2024, the team created a film of the production at its original theatre in Manor Hamilton and this is now being screened at the Erin Arts Centre during TT 2025.
Written during lockdown as we all re-calibrated our attitude to risk, the characters weigh the obvious mortal danger of road racing against Michael's dedication to a sport that for him, and many others, makes life larger than most of us can dream of. First performed in 2022, the stage production has played successfully in Dublin and Derry, and has enjoyed a sell-out week at the Belfast Lyric in autumn 2023.
Joe O'Byrne, director of both the play and the film, describes it as "full of emotion, passion and dark humour, an ode to adventure, to ambition and ultimately a true affirmation of life". Writer Nick Snow says: "A conversation in late 2018 about the death of William Dunlop made me think about all the glory and the tragedy of the Dunlop story, intertwined with the profound drama of road racing. Add in the theme of everyone's recalculation of their own risk versus reward profile in the pandemic, and I had to try and bring it to the stage."
