Search Results for 'Tom Murphy'

The Galway Arts Festival Box Office will open in Merchants Hall, 1-5 Merchants Road, Galway at 10am on Monday.

To celebrate the opening of the renovated Druid Lane Theatre, Druid will present a photographic exhibition in Artisan Restaurant, Quay Street, during the Galway Arts Festival.

THE TOWN Hall has unveiled details of its programme for the next three months and, as ever, there is a wide variety of music, theatre, dance and -film from both home and abroad - to tempt our fancy.

ONE OF the definite highlights of this year’s Galway Arts Festival sees the welcome reunion of playwright Tom Murphy with Druid Theatre for a new production of his great play The Gigli Concert, directed by Garry Hynes.

Druid is planning a special evening to celebrate the opening of its newly refurbished theatre at Chapel Lane on Friday July 17.

It is exactly 30 years since Thos McDonogh and Sons presented Druid Theatre, for a peppercorn rent, with an old warehouse in Chapel Lane, in Galway’s Latin Quarter. It was far from a Latin Quarter at the time. Like other parts of the old city most of it was falling apart. Old 18th and 19th century buildings were roofless and derelict, a home for cats and rats. But it had a rough diamond look about it too with its pawnbrokers, ‘Nora Crubs’, the always warm Tigh Neachtain’s (if you could get in!), the Pedler and Kenny bookshops, Sonny Molloy’s very modest women’s undergarments shop, and the larger than life Mrs Mc Donagh, who showed us all that there was more to the fish industry than a stinky grilled herring, fried mackerel, and the auld cod.

WEEK ONE of the Galway Arts Festival delivered some memorable productions from both home-based and visiting companies in plays that dealt with such diverse themes as familial neuroses, under-age sex, the Iraq war, murderous teenagers, and a property tycoon who wants to sing like Beniamino Gigli.

Only for Druid and the Galway Arts Festival, Galway city may never have become a thriving place of business with bustling streets, shops, and bars. In short, the arts are essential to a healthy economy.

Speaking at the official opening of the new Druid Theatre last Friday evening, the award winning writer Colm Tóibín firmly placed this Galway theatre at the centre of “ the very life of the country itself, in its shifting sense of itself, in its very reality”...

FOLLOWING ITS highly successful versions of The Importance of Being Earnest and The World’s Wife, Mephisto Theatre Company is to stage Tom Murphy’s The Morning After Optimism at the Black Box in August.