Drama Group to mark 50th anniversary with Wilde play

WEXFORD DRAMA GROUP is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a production of Oscar Wilde’s ‘ The Importance of Being Earnest’ at Wexford Arts Centre from Wednesday, October 26, to Sunday, October 30, at 8pm each night.

Drama Group events have been a regular feature of the Wexford opera festival fringe programme since the group was formed a half century ago.

For many years, the group’s three one-act plays were a hot ticket, with large crowds gathering in Whites Hotel and later the Talbot Hotel, where members performed right up to the 1990s.

More recently, the group has set up home at Wexford Arts Centre and has delighted audiences with October productions of plays such as Bombshells, Da, The Shadow of a Gunman and last year’s sell-out staging of The 39 Steps.

This year, the group is performing Oscar Wilde’s most famous work, ‘ The Importance of Being Earnest’, which was first performed on February 14 1895 at St James’s Theatre in London. The play is still as entertaining and hilarious now as it was on that St Valentine’s Day over a hundred years ago.

Wilde’s brilliant comedy takes a satirical look at the lives of two bachelor friends, the adorable Algernon MEMBERS OF THE Wexford Festival Chorus and Orchestra will present the 17th-century composer Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (The Limbs of Jesus) in a choral concert in the O’Reilly Theatre at the National Opera House on Saturday, November 5, at 11am under the baton of conductor Errol Girdlestone.

Membra Jesu Nostri is an intensely personal composition consisting of seven symmetrically contstructed cantatas, each describing Christ’s agony on the Cross through a different part of his body.

The management of contrasting textures and timbres, both vocal and instrumental is masterly. Moncrieff (Stephen Byrne) and the utterly reliable John Worthing (George Percival), who lead double lives to court the attentions of the exquisitely desirable Gwendolyn Fairfax (Sarah O’Connor) and Cecily Cardew (Aoife Beaumont Howell).

The gallants must then grapple with the riotous consequences of their deceptions and with the formidable Lady Bracknell (Adrienne Meyler). The cast is completed by the arrivals of Dr Chasable (Richard Connolly) and Miss Prism (Jennifer Boyd). The parts of Merriman and Lane are played by Michael Murphy.

The experienced cast of Wexford performers has been rehearsing since August under the guidance of director and group chairperson Carol Long.

Book at wexfordartscentre.ie or 053 9123764.