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2025 Festival Program

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Synopsis

7th to 15th March 2025

Anchor 1

Friday
7th March 2025

Saturday

8th March 2025

Sunday

9th March 2025

Bart Players
Clontarf Players
The Whiteheaded Boy

By Lennox Robinson

The Last days of
Judas Iscariot

By Stephen Adley Guirgis

“The Whiteheaded Boy” is set in a typical Irish small-town household which is thrown into a frenzy, as the play begins, with the return of son Denis from Dublin’s Trinity College. He is the whiteheaded boy of the title – the apple of his mother’s eye and the butt of his siblings’ resentment as a result – who, we learn, has just failed his exams. Rather than face the shame of this failure, the family plan to ship him off to Canada; he just wants to marry his sweetheart, get a job and settle down in the country. Hijinks, marriage proposals, bribes and counter-bribes ensue as the family members exploit and misinterpret Denis’ situation. Simple on the surface, the play is in fact a pointed analysis of Irish culture that remains eerily relevant today.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a hilarious, poignant, thought-provoking work by Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis. Boasting a large, zany cast of characters, the play asks one of the most plaguing questions in the Christian ideology: What happened to Judas Iscariot? The facts (we think!) we know are these: Judas was the disciple of Jesus who betrayed his friend and teacher to the authorities. He is seen as the man responsible for Jesus’s death; afterwards, Judas fell into despair and hung himself from an olive tree; since then, he has been suffering for his deeds deep in Hell and will continue to do so for all eternity. Is that really fair? Was Judas the duplicitous master of his own fate, a much-suffering pawn used for Jesus’s ends, or just a man who made a mistake? Set in a courtroom in Purgatory, The Last Days puts Judas’ case to a hilarious, riotous, piercing trial, the results of which are sure to make the inhabitants of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory — and the audience — reconsider what each thought they knew about forgiveness, faith, and the human inside one of the history’s most infamous figures.

Theatre 3
The Cemetery Club

By Ivan Menchell

It's a simple story. Three Jewish widows, long-time friends, meet once a month for tea, then visit their husbands' graves. There's sweet Ida, happy in her memories of Murray and in no hurry to "move on"; nascent party girl Lucille, who's finally getting payback against her unfaithful Harry; and Doris, whose devotion to Abe, even in death, seems borderline unhealthy.

Things are going along swimmingly until the arrival of Sam, a shy butcher whose deceased wife is buried in the same cemetery as their husbands. Sam is immediately pounced on by a purring Lucille, but it's Ida that Sam has doe-eyes for. The budding romance threatens to destroy the women's friendship, first because Lucille wants Sam for herself later because Lucille and Doris make a horribly misguided attempt to save Ida from potential heartbreak.

Anchor 2

Monday

10th March 2025

Tuesday

11th March 2025

Wednesday

12th March 2025

Rosemary Drama Group
Can You ever Forgive Me?

By Ian MacDonald

Phoenix Players
Translations

By Brian Friel

Castleblayney Players
The Woodsman

By Steven Fletcher

Lee Israel took New York by storm with her Hollywood biographies. Then it all crashed. Jobless, penniless, a massive vet bill for her beloved cat tipped her to crime as a forger of celebrity letters. Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, Humphrey Bogart: she faked them all. And raked it in. But suspicions circled, and the FBI was closing in…

Outrageous, hilarious, touching and true—ish. Can you ever forgive her?

Set in the North West of Ireland, Friel’s classic explores, language, love, relationships, co-existence, colonisation, nationality, and identity. Showing how language can both connect and divide people, while also illustrating the broader historical struggle between different cultures.

While set in the first half of the nineteenth century, this play is as relevant in today’s World as it was in Baile Beag in the 1830s.

The action of this play takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag - an Irish speaking community in County Donegal. The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local community, from a semi-literate young farmer to and elderly polyglot autodidact who reads and quotes Homer in the original.

In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the British Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skilfully reveals the unexpectedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and ‘harmless’. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationships of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.

Walter is trying to rehabilitate into society after serving prison time for something no one can forgive him for, not even himself... molesting a child. He must battle his demons, resist temptation and confront his past on the impossible path to redemption.

Anchor 3

Thursday

13th March 2025

Friday

14th March 2025

Saturday

15th March 2025

Newtownstewart
Theatre Company
Newpoint Players
Bridge Drama Group
The remains of
Maisy Duggan

By Carmel Winters

Newpoint Players adaption of 
Ghetto

By Joseph Sobol

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

By Simon Stephens

“Now I'm dead there'll be changes. I won't keep rolling over. I won't wag my tail at every insult and injury”! 

Kathleen Duggan has rushed home to Ireland upon hearing the news that her mother, Maisie, has died. Only when she gets back to the house, she finds that her mother is alive and well. Almost. However, after a routine car accident, Maisie believes that she is now dead and wandering around the homestead, awaiting her funeral. Still able to talk to her childish adult son and her violent, temperamental husband, she will no longer be silenced by the male-dominated, pugnacious atmosphere that has kept her quiet all these years. So when Kathleen comes back for the 'funeral', Maisie expects to find her final resting place, safe from the threat of domestic violence once and for all. The Remains of Maisie Duggan received its world premiere on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in autumn 2016.

The true story of the flourishing of a theatre in a wartime Jewish Ghetto. Winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and the Critics Circle Award for Best New Play.

Set in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna, Lithuania, in 1942, and based on diaries written during the darkest days of the holocaust, Ghetto tells of the unlikely flourishing of a theatre at the very time the Nazis began their policy of mass extermination. Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto was first performed at the Haifa Municipal Theatre in Israel and the Freie Volksbühne, Berlin, in 1984. This English-language version, adapted by David Lan, was first performed in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre, London, in April 1989, directed by Nicholas Hytner.

Teenaged Christopher, stands beside Mrs Shears' dead dog. It is seven minutes after midnight, Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain, exceptional at maths, but he is ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched, and he distrusts strangers. But Christopher's detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that turns his world upside down.

© 2025 Enniskillen Drama Festival

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