Kilkee to stage second annual playwright festival

KILKEE will stage the town’s second annual playwright festival this weekend. The festival, which will be directed by Jenny Bassett Walsh, will be held in the Culturlann Sweeney Theatre. The theatre is part of the refurbished Kilkee library.

 

The festival will be launched at 7.30pm on Friday and will be followed by a presentation of Colours of My Mind by the Creative Energies Group in Kilrush. This group consists of mental health patients in Kilrush have who have taken the brave and imaginative step of writing their own material and performing regularly on stage.

The Creative Energies Group, who are facilitated by Kilrush-based Community Mental Health Clinical Nurse Specialist Breda Latham, performed in Belfast at the 21st National Conference on Arts and Care last May.

All of the material in the production is written by the group, with the song Colours of my Mind performed in unison by every group member.

“We thought wouldn’t it be great to bring it on and actually write about mental help. So we took the theme Colours of my Mind. The idea is it’s like the rainbow. You can have lots of different moods and moods can have different colours. That’s how our song Colours of My Mind evolved,” Breda Latham explained.

This production will be followed at 9pm on Friday by Uncomfortably Numb, a workshop presentation, including an acoustic set with Dylan Tighe.

Dylan is a theatre-maker, actor, writer and musician from Dublin. He holds a BA in Spanish and Italian from Trinity College Dublin and a MA in Performance from Goldsmiths College London. Recent work includes The Trailer of Bridget Dinnigan a new version of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba featuring 11 Irish Traveller women, and No Worst There is None (for The Stomach Box) at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival in 2009.

This was a site-specific performance inspired by the life and late work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was awarded Best Production at the 2009 Irish Times Theatre Awards.

Other recent work from Tighe includes Journey to the End of the Night, based on Dylan’s personal diary of a journey on the Trans-Mongolian Express filtered through Céline’s 1932 novel, (Absolut Dublin Fringe, Forest Fringe, Tour) and Medea/Medea, (Gate Theatre London, recipient of the 2009 Gate/Headlong New Directions Award). In 2011 Dylan was artist in residence at the Irish Cultural Centre, Paris.

Uncomfortably Numb is a workshop presentation by Tighe about his theatre project RECORD, which uses as its starting point his personal history of mental health diagnosis and treatment.

RECORD involves the release of hiss debut album, an alternative opera based on the songs from the album which draws on Dylan’s psychiatric records, autobiography, fiction and 16mm film, and a series of discursive events.

RECORD premiered at the Cork Midsummer Festival in June 2012 and was described by The Irish Independent as creating “a new theatrical form for a new way of thinking” and by the Irish Times as “sharply poignant, politically provocative and deliciously wry”.

Using video and live songs, Tighe will discuss the origins, motivations and composition of the project and explore ways in which a theatre project can contribute to the re-conceptualisation of mental health. His presentation will be followed by a question and answer session.

The festival will continue on Saturday from 2pm to 4pm with playwright workshops. This will be followed by the presentation of Sparks by Pat Hynes at 8pm in Culturlann Sweeney Theatre. The festival will continue on Sunday with rehearsed readings from 3pm to 5pm.

The readings will include To Make a Ghost by Shane Burke. It is based on the life of WW2 poet Keith Douglas. It is December 1943 and Douglas is back in England having fought as a tank commander in North Africa.

Aged 24, Douglas is one of England’s most talented and promising poets, attracting the praise of TS Eliott among others. Nevertheless he is largely unknown and convinced that he will be killed before the war ends. With this in mind he aggressively pursues a publishing house that has signalled an interest in his work. Here he meets a sophisticated and troubled young woman who challenges him to take a hard look at his life and writing.

To make a ghost is an unsentimental look at the life of a poet as he grapples with the big questions of love, life and mortality.

Shane Burke is a Galway-born playwright whose previous work for the stage includes Flipside (2011) and The Horse Trading Diaries (2012). He is the founder of Run Amok Theatre Company Sunday’s events will include a short tribute film in honour of the late writer John Arden at 7pm.

Later on Sunday evening Banner Productions will perform some rehearsed readings, which will be followed by Conversations of the State by Margaretta D’Arcy. For additional Kilkee Playwright Festival details contact 087 3621042.