Search Results for 'Walter Macken'

A SHOW celebrating Judy Garland, Bernadette Peters, Barbra Streisand, Elaine Stritch, Patti Lupone and Angela Lansbury, takes place in An Taibhdhearc this weekend.

WALTER MACKEN, one of Galway’s most famous writers, was born 100 years ago this May, and An Taibhdhearc and Galway’s West End community will hold commemorative events.

The Toft family were associated with Eyre Square for many years since 1883 when they first brought a carnival there.

AN TAIBHDHEARC is seeking new writers for the stage through its Walter Macken Award which has prize money of €1,000.

For three years after the opening of the Gate Theatre in Dublin Mícheál MacLiammóir continued to work for An Taibhdhearc. He travelled to Galway as often as three times a week. Despite the Gate's rave reviews for its first play Peer Gynt, for which Mícheál designed its 'symbolic' scenery, money was slow to come in. Mícheál needed the salary that An Taibhdhearc offered. The Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe (who was soon to take over the running of the Abbey Theatre), and who had taken such interest in the fledgling Galway project, urged its directors to offer MacLiammóir full-time employment. But MacLiammóir felt that his destiny was in Dublin. The Gate opened later in 1928, the same year as An Taibhdhearc, offering Dublin audiences the best of European and American theatre, and rapidly becoming a venue for a new wave of talented Irish writers.

As we approach the centenary of Walter Macken’s birth next year the opportunity arises for a creative innovative theatrical person to fill the role that he once held as Artistic Director of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe.

The history of theatre in Ireland goes back to the start of the 17th century. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of plays written in Irish and that movement was given a significant boost with the opening of An Taibhdhearc on August 27, 1928. It is the oldest operational theatre in Galway and is Ireland’s National Irish Language Theatre. The title is made up of two Irish words, taibh meaning ‘spectacle or ghost’ and dearc meaning ‘behold’.

WALTER MACKEN, probably the author most associated with Galway city, would have been 97 today. What is not generally realised is that he had strong east Galway connections, his mother hailing from Cappatagle near Ballinasloe.

On the 1820 map of Galway, the site of the Taibhdhearc was part of the then Augustinian Church. When the present church was built in the 1850s the site became derelict. The late Ned Joyce remembered a large tree growing on the site, a tree which stretched across the street to a tenement known as ‘The Windings’. The occupants used to hang their washing on the tree on fine days.