Month: December 2019

We are delighted to confirm that award-winning director Ann Mc Hugh has announced plans to stage ‘Faint Voices’, a one-act play, by John MacKenna in March 2020 (pending the successful acquisition of performing rights). There will be an open reading on Monday the 16th of December at 8pm in the Abbey Arts Centre. All welcome. The play is based on the love affair between Frank Ledwidge, the Slane poet who was killed in 1917 in the Great War, and Ellie Vaughey, a member of a well-to-do farming family from just outside Slane. Ledwidge worked at a variety of jobs in and around Slane in the early years of the twentieth century. His poetic talent was encouraged by Lord Dunsany, a…

This year, the Allingham Festival Committee invited Ballyshannon Drama Society to collaborate on a new production for the Allingham Festival, and the fruit of that collaboration was a wonderful performance of ‘The Bread Man’ by Frank Mc Guinness, with the playwright himself visibly moved by the performance. Once Mc Guinness had been confirmed as the guest of honour at the festival, he offered the committee the revised script of his 1990 play ‘The Bread Man’, which he hadn’t seen produced in nearly thirty years. Carl Duggan approached the other members of the drama society to gauge interest. With Keith Robinson available to direct, auditions were held, and a cast of 13 embarked on months of rehearsals. ‘The Bread Man’ is…