UPDATE: First Chapter drama group present ‘Farewell Forever' in Delvin

UPDATE: This event has been postponed due to illness.

Fans of live theatre are in for a treat when the ‘First Chapter’ drama group from Kells take over St Patrick’s Hall in Delvin for two nights with their play ‘Farewell Forever'.

Doors open at 7pm on Saturday and Sunday September 10 and 11, and tickets, at €20 apiece, are available on the door.

The play is set in the early 1970s, and it focuses on a group of Travellers.

“It portrays issues such as emigration, discrimination, family life, with lots of humour, singing and dancing,” says Jeanne McGovern, the director of the play, and also the writer behind the drama.

The two main characters are Mikey and Rosie, a married couple, who move to Manchester to escape the poverty and hardship of their lives in this country.

“When they’re faced with discrimination, hostility, loneliness, Mikey has to take matters into his own hands and he decides enough is enough when he actually gets to Manchester and that’s where the whole mystery of the story lies,” Jeanne explains.

Jeanne is delighted to have secured the services of actor Michael Collins to play the main role. Michael, who was awarded a Lifetime achievement award in 2011, has previously featured in Glenroe, Trojan Eddie, Man about Dog, Paveen Lacken, Killinascully and King of the Travellers.

While the story is fiction, it is inspired by real-life experiences of Travelling people: “Our family here in Kells would have had a lot of contact with Travelling people: my father used to go around delivering sweets and minerals from the back of a truck and a lot of his closest friends would have been Travelling people. So we had a lot of contact with them, and heard the stories that would have been told, and I just got the inspiration to write this.

“I would have been guided a lot by Nell McDonagh [of the Navan Travellers Workshop] and I worked a lot with the Travellers themselves.

"So it would be very true to life about everything that would have been happening – the discrimination and you know, all the humour in it as well, and the emigration and everything, so I think it is true to life, not only to Travelling people, but to the settled community as well.”

First Chapter were set up four years ago and the membership is made up of a mix of Travellers and settled people. In 2019, they began travelling with Farewell Forever, but their progress was interrupted by the pandemic.

Back on the road, they are looking forward to their two performances in Delvin.