GAIETY’S NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION KICKS OFF WITH ‘CRIPPLE’

The Gaiety managing director, Caroline Downey, has announced that from January next it’s branching out to produce top class Irish works itself instead of always just staging outside productions. First up is The Cripple of Inishmaan by the multi-award-winning Martin McDonagh, set to run from January 25 to March 9. Caroline Downey says she hopes to make this production the first in a long collaboration between director Andrew Flynn, Martin McDonagh and the theatre. Set on the small Aran island of Inishmaan, the play covers the effect on the local inhabitants of a Hollywood film crew arriving to make a documentary about life on the islands. Central to the story is the attempt by ‘Cripple Billy’ Claven to get a part in the film. The first-class cast includes Catherine Walsh, Phelim Drew, Rosaleen Linehan John Olohan, Ruairí Heading, and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell as Helen. Tickets, from €18.50 include the €1 restoration fee. Donal O’Kelly is undertaking a national tour of his 1988 play, Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son, that will take in 30 performances in 19 venues to celebrate 30 years since the first performance, that runs in The Axis Ballymun on December 7, and finishes in Siamsa Tíre, Tralee on March 14. Rabbit is a self-made haulage magnate with a problem. His dead father was a Citizen Army volunteer who worked in a pawn shop. Two contrasting personalities with different outlooks; and there’s a struggle between father and son, reality and imagination, involving flashbacks, in a play about the generation that led to boom and bust.