Imagining Home: Into Europe
Wednesday 30th March, 8pm
Room: Main Auditorium
Prices: €39.50, €29.50, €22.50
Tickets on sale Monday 23rd November, 10am
Priority Booking for Friends opens Thursday 19th November, 10am
Lisa Dwan performs Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Footfalls.
Fintan O’Toole on Roger Casement and human rights.
Barry Douglas (piano) and Camerata Ireland
Additions announced today 15th March
• George Bernard Shaw’s Treason on Trial performed by Owen Roe (world premiere)
• Fintan O’Toole’s The Nightmare of Empire/The Dream of Europe performed by Olwen Fouéré (world premiere)
Inspired by the European identity of the Irish republican tradition, Into Europe explores Ireland’s place in European culture. Samuel Beckett, John Field and Roger Casement spark an evocative evening of word, performance and music.
Lisa Dwan is mesmerising in these late Samuel Beckett works, which played to sold-out houses at the Royal Court and Barbican in London. ‘Like nothing else in theatre’ (The Times), the short plays transport audiences to a strangely beautiful, unsettling space where death and decay are never far away. Dwan makes the pieces her own in a virtuosic performance that is chilling and absorbing in equal measure.
Irish composer John Field was very highly regarded by his contemporaries for his playing and compositions across early 19th century Europe. As well as performing Field’s works, Barry Douglas (winner of the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition), will perform Schubert’s Du bist die Ruh (arranged by Franz Liszt for solo piano) and also celebrates his long-standing collaboration with the acclaimed Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki with a performance of his landmark piece, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.
Treason on Trial by George Bernard Shaw will be performed by Owen Roe, and The Nightmare of Empire/The Dream of Europe by Fintan O’Toole will be performed by celebrated actress Olwen Fouéré (commissioned by the National Concert Hall). Both world premieres are centred on the plight of the 1916 figure Roger Casement.
“Summoning Casement but also the wider republican tradition that is our most important European heritage: the idea of a universal human dignity. It looks outward as well as inward from the rights of tenant farmers in Mayo to the rights of rubber collectors in Peru. It acknowledges woman and children as full
citizens. It dreams of a society in which we can all look one another in the eye without reason for fear or deference.”
Fintan O’Toole
Media Partners The Irish Times & RTÉ Radio 1
