Curlew Theatre at Renvyle House

Curlew Theatre Company perform for our guests, one evening each midweek before dinner.  They have a selection of five ‘plays-for-voices’  devised, written, and directed by Eamon Grennan. Each of these […]

Curlew Theatre Company perform for our guests, one evening each midweek before dinner.  They have a selection of five ‘plays-for-voices’  devised, written, and directed by Eamon Grennan. Each of these takes a crucial element in Irish history and explores it in depth. The duration of each of these pieces in performance is just under an hour.

Curlew Theatre have performed throughout Ireland, toured in the U.S.A. and are willing to travel anywhere with these ‘plays for voices’, supplying light, sound and stage set-up.

Curlew Theatre choose their play to be performed at Renvyle House for our guests and feedback is wonderful.  Highly skilled actor and production make for a most enjoyable cultural experience.

J.M. SYNGE’S ARAN ISLANDS

A Play for Voices Performed by Curlew Theatre Company. Adapted and directed by Eamon Grennan.
First performed at Clifden Arts Festival “Give up Paris…..go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression”  – W.B. Yeats to J.M. Synge 1897
This ‘Play for Voices’ is partly a romantic lyrical evocation of this wild place, partly a series of anecdotes, partly an almost anthropological study of the people’s lives, their habits , their folk-tales and so on.
With the sparest of props, Coyne and Knowland put on a conjuring act in their dramatic performances of Grennan’s ‘Plays for Voices’ at the Yeats International Summer School Sligo”  – Professor James Pethica

THE LOVES OF LADY GREGORY

Most Irish people know a bit about Lady Gregory, Anglo Irish, The Ascendancy, The Big House, The Abbey Theatre, Coole Park, Yeats. Some even have read a bit or seen her plays (The Rising of The Moon). Since she lived from 1852 to 1932 she was a witness and participant in so much of our recent history. So what Curlew Theatre do in this piece is try to touch on her private and public lives.

“Mostly we hope to let her tell some of her stories in her own voice. As with our other ‘plays for voices’ the aim is to bring matters of Irish History and Irish Literature to a convincing human level because they speak to us in an immediate and human way. In this piece also use audio over voice to color our portrait, a small self-portrait of her ladyship.”

THE MUSE & MISTER YEATS

Man is in love and loves what vanishes.”  – W.B. Yeats
The Muse & Mister Yeats is a “play for voices”–performed by Tegolin Knowland and Seán Coyne, written and produced by Eamon Grennan. It presents, one by one, the various women with whom W.B. Yeats was romantically involved, each one chosen in her turn as his “Muse”–inspirer and receiver, that is, of some of his best-known lyric poems.

By voicing a number of these poems, and by presenting the women themselves offering their own comments on their various “situations,” the play sketches a portrait of Yeats-in-love. The critical book, W.B.Yeats and the Muses by the American Yeats scholar, Joseph Hassett, as well as various biographies, were used as sources in the composition of this hour-long dramatic work.


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