Search Results for 'John Millington Synge'

A specially commissioned window seat in memory of the late, very great Mick Lally, was unveiled at the Druid Lane Theatre yesterday evening.

The highly successful Lady Gregory Autumn Gatherings continue in Coole Park, Gort, Co Galway, running from Friday to Sunday, 23 to 25 September, and will this year recognise the remarkable influence of Lady Augusta Gregory on the development of Irish theatre and literature.

At last filming The Quiet Man began in June 1951, during one of the sunniest summers on record. Everything went smoothly. There was a genuine outpouring of goodwill from the people of Cong and everywhere in Ireland, towards the project. The crew and cast were happy. The actors were generous with signing autographs, making guest appearances at charity events, and had an excellent working relationship with the director John Ford. Ford was in wonderful good form. He had exorcised his war ghosts by making an astonishing 10 movies in only six years. Now he was relaxed and cheerful, beaming to be in Ireland with great actors, many of whom were his friends, and a script which he clearly liked. He had already worked out changes which he had discussed with his friend and adviser Brian Desmond Hurst in their rented house in Spiddal.

JM SYNGE is best known as a playwright but he was also a keen photographer and his photos are currently on exhibition in the Áras Éanna Arts Centre on Inis Oírr.

The award winning Irish writer Thomas Kilroy is coming to NUI, Galway next week, where he will be the subject of a public interview.

I find it hard to imagine that not everyone liked Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park. What few readers there are of the Diary, I am told, sigh with exasperation when they see her name appear. They know that I will eulogise endlessly about how her home at Coole became a ‘workshop’ for writers, poets and artists during those exciting days at the beginning of the last century, leading to such remarkable talents as WB Yeats, John M Synge, Sean O’Casey and others to stand as giants on the European literary stage. She was the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, its director and organiser during its shaky early days. She was a substantial playwright, journal keeper, folklorist, scholar, etc, etc, and, in my opinion, this amazing Galway woman never got the recognition she deserved.

There is often more drama in the board room of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, than what is presented on its stage. Following a famous conversation in Doorus House, Kinvara, one rainy afternoon in 1897, Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, Edward Martyn of Ardrahan, and the young poet WB Yeats agreed to set up the Irish Literary Theatre. Theatre at the time was mainly influenced by the popular British music hall variety; and melodrama. It was agreed that day in Co Galway that the new Irish theatre would ‘embody and perpetuate Irish feeling, genius, and modes of thought’.

Following their popular staging of Monty Python’s Life of Brian before Christmas, Dreamstuff Youth Theatre are getting ready for itheir busiest production year ever in 2009.

You might think that those at the core of the Irish literary renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century, were one big happy family beavering away in their rooms at Lady Gregory’s home at Coole, Co Galway. In those early days it was a house full of voices and sounds. Sometimes you heard WB Yeats humming the rhythm of a poem he was cobbling together; or the click-clacking of Lady Gregory’s typewriter as she worked on another play for the Abbey. There was the sound of the Gregory grandchildren playing in the garden; the booming voice of George Bernard Shaw, as he complains that he is only allowed to have either butter or jam on his bread, but not both to comply with war rations (He cheated by the way. He put butter on one side of his bread, and when he thought no one was looking, piled jam on the other!); or the voices of the artist Jack Yeats and JM Synge returning from a day messing about on a boat calling out to a shy Sean O’Casey to come out of the library for God’s sake and enjoy the summer afternoon.

The Playboy of the Western World, by John Millington Synge, is arguably the Irish playwright’s greatest masterpiece. In order to mark the centenary of JM Synge’s death – he died, aged 37, on March 24 1909 – the Erris Players, under the direction of Bridie Quinn, will be staging a powerful performance of this noted drama in Belmullet and in Bangor Erris. Interestingly, this is not the group’s first performance of the play – they first staged it 17 years ago and that very successful production is still recalled by local actors and audiences alike.