2024 Festival Program
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Synopsis
1st to 9th March 2024
Friday
1st March 2024
Saturday
2nd March 2024
Sunday
3rd March 2024
Newpoint Players
In the Shadow of the Glen - Reimagined
By Sean Traynor
after J.M. Sygne's Original
Bridge Drama
The Wake
By Tom Murphy
The play, “In the Shadow of the Glen”, written by J.M. Synge and performed in the first days of the Abbey Theatre Dublin, tells the story of an unfaithful wife Nora, married to an aged man Dan Burke. The story follows how the husband tricks his wife into revealing her true feelings and her ambitions for when she will be a widow. In this reimagined version, Sean Treanor explores these themes of earthy, ‘animal passions’ and the turbulent underbelly of life and nature, which can be detected in the subtext of Synge’s original and in Synge’s better known play, “The Playboy of the Western World”
Set in small town Ireland in the nineties, The Wake tells the story of Vera O’Toole who has been living, alone and adrift in New York for many years. When Vera hears of her beloved grandmother’s death, she returns home to pay her respects, only to discover her family has been keeping secrets from her.
Dunmore Amateur
Drama Society
Faith Healer
By Brian Friel
Throughout the remote and forgotten corners of the British Isles, Frank Hardy offers the promise of redemption to the sick and the suffering. But his is an unreliable gift, a dangerous calling which brings him into conflict with his wife Grace and his manager Teddy. Their competing accounts of past events reveal the fragility of memory and the necessity of stories as a means of survival.
Monday
4th March 2024
Tuesday
5th March 2024
Wednesday
6th March 2024
Clarence Players
Newtownstewart Theatre Company
Ballyshannon
Drama Society
Gaslight
By Patrick Hamilton
The New Electric Ballroom
By Enda Walsh
Margaret
By Shaun Byrne
This is a powerful story of Bella Manningham, a young woman psychologically dominated by her husband Jack. While Jack is out on the town each evening, his wife stays at home alone believing she is losing her mind. She cannot explain the disappearance of familiar objects, the mysterious footsteps heard overhead nor the ghostly flickering of the living room gaslight. But then questions about her husband’s behaviour and true identity are aroused following the unexpected arrival of a police detective.
Trapped in the years that have passed since their halcyon days at the New Electric Ballroom, three sisters in a remote fishing village are still obsessed by the darker memories of some resembling romance. The play is a glittered dusted, dark fable of the emotionally stultifying effects of a small-town life.
Margaret is in her 80's. At times she is her old self, sharp, lucid, clear; other times confused, frightened and frustrated. She talks to an imagined Denis, to herself, to the audience.
The play joins her near the end of her life and explores her troubled relationships: with the Irish, the miners, her children, the public, her male cabinet; as past demons, guilt and successes return to torment, flatter and deceive her.
‘You have no enemies you say? If you have none - Then small is the work that you have done.’
Thursday
7th March 2024
Friday
8th March 2024
Saturday
9th March 2024
Enniskillen
Theatre Company
Dooega Drama Group
Clontarf Players
The Lonesome West
By Martin McDonagh
The Cripple of Inishmaan
By Martin McDonagh
Radium Girls
By D.W. Gregory
The Cripple of Inishmaan is set on the small Aran Islands community of Inishmaan (Inis Meáin) off the west coast of Ireland in 1934. The island inhabitants are excited to learn of a Hollywood film crew’s arrival in the neighbouring Inishmore (Inis Mór) to make a documentary about life on the islands.
‘Cripple’ Billy Claven, eager to escape the gossip, poverty and boredom of Inishmaan, vies for a part in the film, and to everyone’s surprise, the orphan and outcast gets his chance … Or so some believe.
In 1926, radium was a miracle cure, Madame Curie an international celebrity, and luminous watches the latest rage—until the girls who painted them began to fall ill with a mysterious disease. Inspired by a true story, Radium Girls traces the efforts of Grace Fryer, a dial painter, as she fights for her day in court. Her chief adversary is her former employer, Arthur Roeder. As the case goes on, however, Grace finds herself battling not just with the U.S. Radium Corporation, but with her own family and friends, who fear that her campaign for justice will backfire.