Search Results for 'Robert'

‘Dearest beloved - It is such a beautiful morning that you ought to be here and we should be walking in the garden …and if we were, what more should we do where the bushes hid us?’ These intimate words were written by the British politician, later prime minister, Ramsey MacDonald, to Lady Margaret Sackville whose initials are on the famous autograph tree at Coole.

In April 1902 Augusta Lady Gregory was working hard at her home at Coole, translating from Irish the myths and legends of Ireland. Somebody had dubbed Coole ‘the workshop of Ireland’, and the phrase went straight to her heart. Her pride in it glows in her letters to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, her one-time lover and life-long friend, and admirer.*

It may seem out of place that the name Robert (known as Robbie) Ross is associated with probably the best known literary monument in Ireland, namely the autograph tree at Coole Park. With the exception of two soldiers’ names, all 24 others are poets, writers and artists all of whom Lady Gregory believed were worthy to be included in her particular and original ‘hall of fame.’

WHAT DO you want in life? Money, success, possessions, love? Are these vital to our wellbeing, or are they social constructs we have been persuaded into thinking are the ultimate goals of existence?

Augusta Lady Gregory, and her husband Sir William, were away in Italy in May 1888, when her former lover Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was imprisoned in Galway for participating in an anti-eviction rally at Woodford the previous October. I described last week, that within two days of her return to Galway she visited his empty cell, and remained sometime.*

The Mai is a richly-woven story of four generations of women in one midlands family. At the centre of the household is The Mai, a 40-year-old woman torn between her wayward husband and her family’s happiness in a play that brims with passion and poetry, love and lyricism, heartache and hope.

Week III

Throughout the centuries the islands of Lough Mask have stood silently and helplessly by as they played host to many extraordinary events. This week I am able to touch on just some of those events chronologically.

One hundred years ago there were a series of truly terrible battles on the Western Front which were watched anxiously in Ireland as elsewhere. On June 7, near the Belgian village of Messines, the Allied army won a substantial victory. It gave hope, which turned out to be tragically false, that perhaps this was the beginning of the end of the war. With the capture of the Messines ridge, the Allies were confident they could clear a path all the way down to Passchendaele, and capture the Belgian coast up the Dutch border.

Rosemount Amateur Drama Group is delighted to present Don't Dress for Dinner by Marc Camoletti, adapted by Robin Hawdon.