Search Results for 'Mike Diskin'

AT EVERY arts event in the city he would be there, the jolly man with the glasses and the long hair, a smile and good company, enthusiastic for what he, and we, were about to see that night, be it theatre, music, literature, visual arts - and he usually had an important role in supporting it.

A new show from Little John Nee is always to be savoured and, on September 4, Druid’s Mick Lally Theatre hosts the premiere of Radio Rosario, a serious comedy about frustration, foreboding, and fulfilment, and an ode to “the magical wireless”.

WHILE NEXT week sees Druid open its 20th anniversary revival of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 1996 also saw the premiere of another iconic Irish play which launched a stellar writing career; Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs.

ON THE night of Thursday February 1 1996, Galway’s newly refurbished Town Hall Theatre officially opened with the world premiere of Druid’s production of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

Out back in the darkness, back beyond the velvet and the drapes and the flats that hold up the set, there are the steep stairs, bounding down them, throwing your lines together in your head, rubbing makeup into your neck, the smell of sweat and talc and panic and calmness. Up here, you can hear nothing, ‘cept for the occasional applause. And as you exit that far flung dressingroom, with your costume change completed, you struggle not to be distracted by the lane outside. Up here you could be anywhere, but in a minute you’ll be on stage in front of 400 souls. And when you wait in the green room and keep an eye on the monitor to see where your fellow cast members are at in the story you are telling your audience, you can feel the hairs rising and you rise and stretch and go through your routine, before completing the journey down to backstage. Back here in the darkness, you wait for your cue, you get into the mental space, you feel the reassuring squeezes of your fellow cast members. And you wait.