Coosan native, Lisa Dwan, will formally open the 70th All-Ireland Drama Festival this evening (Thursday, May 5 ).
The Athlone stage, film and television actress, director, and writer, best known for her performances and adaptations of the work of Samuel Beckett, will open the nine day festival which will provide a nine day veritable feast of amateur theatre with participating groups and their wealth of supporters flocking to Athlone to embrace what is certain to be a convivial atmosphere.
Dwan is most well known internationally for her performances and adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s works - Kate Kellaway has called her an “Irish actor and Beckett interpreter of the first rank”.
She performed in Beckett’s Not I in London’s Battersea Arts Centre in 2005, and was interviewed with Billie Whitelaw, whom Beckett called the “perfect actress”, as part of the Beckett celebrations on BBC Radio 3.
Beginning in 2006, Whitelaw mentored Dwan on her work on Beckett. Dwan performed the piece again in July 2009 at the Southbank Centre in London in a time of nine minutes and fifty seconds, and again at the International Beckett Festival in 2012.
Beginning in 2013, Dwan toured with “The Beckett Trilogy”, consisting of Not I alongside two of Beckett’s other short plays, Footfalls and Rockaby, under the direction of Walter Asmus at the Royal Court Theatre, West End, The Barbican Centre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and performed sold-out shows at various international locations.
In a review of her performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ben Brantley wrote that Dwan “is an instrument of Beckett, in that way saints and martyrs are said to be instruments of God”.
In October 2016, Dwan adapted and starred in No’s Knife, a one-woman production adapted from Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing at London’s Old Vic and Abbey Theatre Dublin. Dwan is the first woman to perform Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing.
The Coosan native has also received acclaim for her television drama work, starring opposite James Nesbitt in ‘Bloodlands’ and in two series of ‘Top Boy’ on Netflix.
The All-Ireland Drama Festival concludes with a gala awards presentation ceremony to take place in the Radisson Blu Hotel on Saturday, May 14.
Tickets are currently on sale and can be booked through the Dean Crowe website at http://www.deancrowetheatre.com/ or at the theatre box office, phone (090 ) 6492129.
