Search Results for 'Abbey Theatre'

Greenfields Hockey Club enjoyed a comfortable 4 - 0 win over Yeats County in their Connacht Senior League fixture in Sligo on Sunday.

Coole Park hosted a conferring ceremony for graduates of the NUI Maynooth certificate in local history last weekend, the first ceremony of its kind to be held at the park. The course was run as an outreach programme at Coole by the NUI Maynooth department of modern history, in association with the university’s adult education office. Nineteen students were conferred on the day.

Yeats College has recently been recognised as the highest ranking school outside of Dublin to provide students to UCD. The college has performed extremely well on a national level, coming in 10th in a recent study of the top feeder schools to UCD for 2010.

I find it hard to imagine that not everyone liked Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park. What few readers there are of the Diary, I am told, sigh with exasperation when they see her name appear. They know that I will eulogise endlessly about how her home at Coole became a ‘workshop’ for writers, poets and artists during those exciting days at the beginning of the last century, leading to such remarkable talents as WB Yeats, John M Synge, Sean O’Casey and others to stand as giants on the European literary stage. She was the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, its director and organiser during its shaky early days. She was a substantial playwright, journal keeper, folklorist, scholar, etc, etc, and, in my opinion, this amazing Galway woman never got the recognition she deserved.

JEFF O’CONNELL, the author and Galway Advertiser columnist, will give a series of six talks on poets and novelists in Johnston’s Hall, Kinvara.

What would have happened to James Joyce had he come to the relative comforts of Coole, instead of opting for hardship and exile and the life of a wandering artist in Europe?

Mike Scott, Steven Wickham, and an international mix of talented musicians will visit the Royal Theatre in November, bringing their tour, The Waterboys: An Appointment With Mr Yeats, to Castlebar. A selection from at least 25 of WB Yeats’ poems and plays, spanning both famous and lesser known works, will be put to music.

There is often more drama in the board room of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, than what is presented on its stage. Following a famous conversation in Doorus House, Kinvara, one rainy afternoon in 1897, Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, Edward Martyn of Ardrahan, and the young poet WB Yeats agreed to set up the Irish Literary Theatre. Theatre at the time was mainly influenced by the popular British music hall variety; and melodrama. It was agreed that day in Co Galway that the new Irish theatre would ‘embody and perpetuate Irish feeling, genius, and modes of thought’.

Yeats College provides fifth year, sixth year and repeat leaving certificate programmes to students from Kilkenny at their Waterford based campus, which is now only a half an hour from Kilkenny city with the opening of the new motorway.

With summer in full swing Coole Park is offering guided walks on Sunday afternoons, and children's nature activities each Wednesday afternoon during July and August.