8pm_Friday October 15th

St. Michael’s Theatre

The New Ross Drama Workshop will present a staged reading of three of Eugene O’ Neill’s plays at the opening night of the festival.

Under the capable artistic direction of two of the groups directorial protagonists Margaret Rossiter and Peggy Hussey, the members of the group will present rehearsed readings of ‘Recklessness’, ‘Where the Cross is Made’ & ‘A Wife for a Life’.

The plays, part of the authors early work, allow the words of O’ Neill to hold centre stage as themes of maritime adventures, prospecting in the wild west and the intricacies of love emerge.

3.30pm_Saturday, October 16th

St. Michael’s Theatre

The play, as one commentator has put it, offers “a vision of American history which borrows from the past in order to create images of the present and future.”

The play features the familial tensions, the jealousies and resentments that typify O’Neill’s work and surface so memorably in his play Long Day’s Journey into Night, composed as O’Neill’s interest in the eleven play cycle waned. The play also examines the great figure in O’Neill, “the possessor self-dispossessed” (as the subtitle of the eleven play cycle puts it) or the man who gains the world only to lose his soul, a tragic phenomenon O’Neill explored repeatedly through his work.

3.30pm Part 1

8.00pm Part 2

8pm_Sunday October 17th

St. Michael’s Theatre

The Beauty Queen of Leenane, a blackly comic modern Irish classic from renowned playwright and Golden Globe-winning filmmaker Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri). It portrays the manipulative Mag and her virginal daughter Maureen as they play out a battle of mutual loathing against the beautiful but unforgiving backdrop of the Connemara hills.

Ben Barnes directs a cast led by Irish stage legend Marion O’Dwyer (as Mag), with Sarah Madigan, Mark Fitzgerald and Tiernan Messitt-Greene.