A host of actors turned up for Tom Murphy's latest play, The Drunkard, which opened in Dublin this week. Rosaleen Linehan, David Kelly, Barbara Brennan and Anne Byrne were among the guests.
John McColgan and the artist and designer Robert Ballagh, who has a show opening in the Crawford Gallery in Cork on Saturday, August 30th, were also there for the event. The Drunkard, whose cast includes Pauline McLynn, Stephen Brennan and Nick Dunning, will run at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College Dublin for two more weeks. The show had its première in Galway last month.
Town planner Sharon Duffy and solicitor Maeve Seery, both Galwegians, came on foot of the recommendations they'd received from their friends back home. It's powerful and gripping, they said at the interval.
Also attending the play's opening in Dublin were the writer Ali White, who has just written an episode of The Clinic, a new series being produced by Parallel Films for RTÉ, to be screened later this year, and actor Deirdre Molloy, who has completed a series of radio plays by Roger Greg. The series begins on RTÉ Radio 1 on Thursday next at 8 p.m..
The actor, Laurie Morton, was struck by the difference between the Murphy play and an American melodrama of the same title by W. H. Smith and A Gentleman, from the 1830s, which inspired it."This is a different kettle of fish altogether. This is brilliant, and dark," she said, recalling her experience of that play's production when it was staged in 1958.
As photographer Brenda Fitzsimons, of The Irish Times, recorded the Dublin opening, few knew she will be honoured in her home town of Galway this Monday with a mayoral reception hosted by Mayor Terry Flaherty, in Galway's Civic Offices, in recognition of her presidency of the Press Photographers Association of Ireland (PPAI) and her photographic work, for which she won the Photographer of the Year Award 2001. The reception coincides with the opening of the AIB/PPAI's 2003 exhibition of the 120 winning images in NUI Galway.