CONTROVERSY, COMEDY, mayhem, music, storytelling, puppetry, saga, and satire will be unleashed on the city when the third Galway Theatre Festival opens next Monday.
The festival will run up to and including Sunday October 31 with plays being performed in the Nuns Island Theatre, the Town Hall studio, and the Druid Lane Theatre.
The festival begins with Fregoli Theatre’s production of Shane McDermott’s The Idiot Box at 8pm in Nuns Island Theatre.
Banjaxed Theatre Company present Blasted by Sarah Kane [see separate article]. Over in the Town Hall Studio, Dog & String Theatre indulge in a much softer affair with Seeing and Dreaming, which depicts the lives of two elderly people using shadow theatre and puppetry.
In Tackling Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, Anam present a devised piece of theatre deeply rooted in the story’s characters, at Nuns Island Theatre. Adapted by teacher and former Moscow Art Theatre student, Sarah O’Toole, Onegin will transport the audience into a world of duels, balls, and unrequited love.
The week also features award-winning playwright David Mamet’s Oleanna, Little John’s revival of The Derry Boat, and Aindrias De Staic’s new ensemble show The Mackralaytors.
The festival will also stage the Irish premieres of Colm Byrne’s Freefall: Heroes and Judy Kiss’s Face to Face With the Enemy; there will be storytelling theatre with Clare Muireann Murphy; Bluepatch’s collaboration with musicians and actors in Memory Palace; and PJ O’Connor Award winner Tara McKevitt’s play Grenades [see separate article].
There will also be a free cross over discussion with the TULCA Festival of Visual Art and, on Sunday, the rehearsed reading series Stage Write.
Audiences are invited to join theatre companies at the nightly Festival Club in Massimo on Sea Road for post-show refreshment and revelry.
Admission is €12/10 to all shows. For more information see www.galwaytheatrefestival.com, the Galway Theatre Festival Facebook page. Also look out for some vocal theatre practitioners in flash mob form this Saturday.
