World-class theatre festival for New Ross is launched
THE inaugural Eugene O’Neill International Festival of theatre was launched on Wednesday in New Ross and is expected to draw hundreds of people into the town during the quiet shoulder season in October.
Award-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill will be celebrated in the festival which runs from Thursday, October 10, to Sunday, October 14. Eugene’s father James O’Neill was born in nearby Tinneranny in 1845 and emigrated from New Ross to America as a young boy in 1851. The festival was announced by festival organisers and a cousin of Eugene’s, Mrs Alice O’Neill-McLoughlin. Alice said: ‘I am delighted to represent the O’Neill family in celebrating the life and works of Eugene and James O’Neill at the very first festival to honour their contribution to film and literature here in Ireland.’
Festival Chairperson Sean Reidy said: ‘Eugene O’Neill informed his son Eugene Jr in 1946, “The one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish”. We are therefore very pleased to honour his Irish heritage and to collaborate with the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in California in offering some of his best works and celebrating his life and his father’s life at their ancestral hometown this October. O’Neill remains the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize and also four Pulitzer prizes and we look forward to showcasing some of his greatest works which are rarely performed here in Ireland.’
The historic St Michael’s Theatre will be the main venue of the festival which will open with a special screening of The Count of Monte Cristo accompanied by an illustrated talk on the relationship between James and his son Eugene. It will also be accompanied by an especially created musical score by WIT music lecturer and performer Phil Collins. O’Neill’s tale of two lonely strangers in ‘Hughie’ will be staged and directed as an especially reimagined piece by Eric Hayes, artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation in Danville, California.
An epic production of ‘mourning becomes Electra’ will be staged on the afternoon of October 13 as O’Neill’s great trilogy of plays is directed by Ben Barnes with a strong cast in a two-part staged reading of this rarely performed masterpiece with music composed and performed by Eleanor McEvoy and the Irish soprano, Clodagh Kinsella.
On Sunday, October 14, Don Wycherley stars in the touching and entertaining My Real Life by Wexford writer Eoin Colfer. And daily from October 11 to 14 The Glencairn Plays will be staged on board the replica famine ship the Dunbrody. O’Neill’s cycle of one-act plays will be directed by Paul Walsh set aboard the fictional ship the ‘SS Glencairn’, Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home and In the Zone.
Also on offer is a series of lunchtime talks at New Ross Library. The expert-led talks and discussions will be on Eugene O’Neill’s influence on modern Irish theatre and on the Graves Shipping Company and the New Ross diaspora. He retired to Tao House in Danville, California in 1937 where he then wrote four of America’s greatest plays including his autobiographical masterwork, Long Days Journey Into Night. At Tao House in Danville this September and at St Michael’s Theatre in New Ross this October, in a partnership the festival organisers call ‘One Festival, Two Countries’, a celebration of the life and works of both James and Eugene O’Neill take place in their adopted and ancestral countries. Tickets to the festival weekend at St Michael’s Theatre in New Ross are available at €100. Tickets for individual events will issue on September 1 (subject to availability).
For further details see www. eugeneoneillfestival.com.