The All Ireland Drama Festival
Inklings
By Brian McLoughlin
There’s dysfunction, pre-adolescence obsession, the Troubles, stabbings, radium poisoning, witchcraft hangings, infidelity, political shenanigans and Margaret Thatcher. Yes, it’s the All-Ireland Drama Festival in Athlone. The last six editions have been won by Ballyduff, Prosperous, and Dalkey groups and they’re among the favourites this year with defending champions Dalkey qualifying in first place. Here’s the running order, from Thursday May 2 to Friday May 10.
(May 2) The Wake, Bridge Drama Group. A wake to awake, set in the nineties. A woman, living in New York, returns to Ireland for her grandmother’s wake, and is locked in a hotel with her childhood Romeo and her scandal-giving brother-in-law. It’s by Tom Murphy, which means family dysfunction, loneliness, humour and devastating truth.
(May 3) How I Learned to Drive, Wexford Drama Group. A 1997 play by Paula Vogel who was inspired by the novel Lolita, finding herself sympathising with the middle-age man, and not the adolescent girl. Paula said the play’s aim is "to get the audience to go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking".
(May 4) The Ferryman, Ballyduff Drama Group. A 2017 play by Jez Butterworth, set in 1981 during the Troubles, it’s about the family of a former IRA terrorist, living in their farmhouse in rural Armagh, inspired by a true story.
(May 5) A View from the Bridge, Prosperous Drama Society. By Arthur Miller, A View From the Bridge is set in a 1950s Italian-American neighbourhood, where a man develops an obsession for his wife’s orphaned 17-year-old niece. He is dismayed by her courtship with his wife’s cousin who arrives as an illegal immigrant from Italy. It all ends badly.
(May 6) Radium Girls, Clontarf Players. DW Gregory's 2003 play is a fast-moving, highly theatrical ensemble piece about Radium, the miracle cure with deadly side-effects, and one woman’s journey to prove that the miracle cure is causing a terrifying rash of illnesses. An unflinching look at the peculiarly American obsessions with health, wealth, and the commercialisation of science.
(May 7) The Crucible - Dalkey Players. Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1693 is an allegory to McCarthyism, where the US government persecuted people accused of being communists, and it made Miller an official persona-non-grata. The play has people arrested and hanged for witchcraft which covers a multitude of other sins including—you’ve guessed it—another Lolita romance.
(May 8) In the Shadow of the Glen, reimagined by Seán Treanor and Newpoint Players. In the Shadow of the Glen, by JM Synge, a poetic tramp finds a wife tending to the corpse of her husband. The wife’s unfaithful; the husband's pretending to be dead and he casts her out. The story is elaborated and expanded in the re-imagined version (2024) to bring depth and contemporary nuance.
(May 9) Out of Order - Ballycogley Players. A 1990 farce by Ray Cooney, Out of Order features a naughty junior minister who has to lie his way out of an embarrassing situation with the help of an innocent side-kick who gets more and more embroiled in the increasing entanglement—all in a posh London hotel suite.
(May 10) Margaret, Ballyshannon Drama Society. A 2022 play by Shaun Byrne about the only Margaret. The former icon and British prime minister, near the end of her life having bouts of clarity along with confusion regarding her past issues with miners, the Irish, and the vegetables (her cabinet). “If you have no enemies, then small is the work that you have done.”
Brian McLoughlin is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 11am in the Annebrook House Hotel.