Search Results for 'Marie Mullen'

A PLAY about love, about art, about relationships, ambition, desire, the declines of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and the emergence of a new society - Anton Chekhov’s tragi-comedy The Seagull, in the acclaimed adaptation by Thomas Kilroy, is all of these things.

DRUID’S PRODUCTION of The Seagull may have sold-out, but Galway will still be able to see the internationally acclaimed company in action, as the shows will be recorded for streaming in September.

It is hard to believe that it was 46 years ago this week that Druid Theatre first tread the boards. The location was the Jesuit Hall and the play was The Playboy of the Western World. The following night, they put on It’s a two foot six inches above the Ground World by Kevin Laffan and on the third night, it was The Loves of Cass Maguire by Brian Friel.

DRUID THEATRE Company will return to Coole Park this summer for a series of live outdoor performances of Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Garry Hynes.

COMEDIAN TOMMY Tiernan will be the first of 10 performers reading works by some of Ireland’s greatest poets in Druid’s Coole Park Poetry Series.

This month way back in the mists of time in the 1980s, I found myself starting college here in Galway. Sharing the joys of life with a group of lads in a house in Renmore Crescent, by the side of Lough Atalia (found through the pages of the Galway Advertiser). It was to be the start of the rest of my life; a new beginning, a time when you set aside that which had got you that far, and swapped it for something new.

Augusta Lady Gregory, writer, folklorist and great patron of the arts, who died at her home at Coole Park in 1932, reappeared during the Druid production of five of her plays each evening this week. Druid is no stranger to magic, and such is their skill that Lady Gregory (Marie Mullen) makes several appearances inviting the audience to follow her for yet another of her plays performed in different locations around her home. From the edge of Coole lake to the old stables and yards, her ghostly figure seductively beckoned. The audience followed enchanted, moved by the strange power of her deceptively simple plays.

IT HAPPENED with Tom Murphy, it happened with JM Synge, it happened with Shakespeare. Now it is the turn of one of the major lights of the Irish Literary Revival - Lady Gregory - to get a Druid cycle.

THEATRE DIRECTORS Sarah Baxter and Emily Foran have been chosen as this year's recipients of Druid's Marie Mullen Bursary for Female Artists.

DRUID THEATRE'S award-winning 2005 production of The Playboy Of The Western World by JM Synge is now available online for free as a resource for those studying the play for the Leaving Cert.