By Neil Hickey, Contributor
The year is 1980. A former movie actor, Ronald Reagan, whose great-grandfather was an emigrant from the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, is the newly-elected, 40th president of the United States. That same year another emigrant, Ciarán O’Reilly from County Cavan, was performing in an off-Broadway play called
Summer by the Irish writer Hugh Leonard, where he met an actress, Charlotte Moore – granddaughter of expatriates from County Wexford – who was a fellow member of the cast.
Thus begins the origin story of the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the most renowned theater company in the U.S., devoted exclusively to staging “the works of Irish and Irish-American classic and contemporary playwrights” (according to its mission statement) and providing a hearth and a home for audiences to savor the work of dramatists from Goldsmith, Synge, Wilde, and Yeats, to Beckett, Shaw, Friel, and Behan, as well as musicals with an Irish tilt:
Last modified on Mon 15 Mar 2021 14.22 EDT
Betty Willingale, who has died aged 93, was one of the pioneers of British television drama. As a BBC script editor from the 1960s onwards she brought the works of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola and DH Lawrence to small-screen serials.
Later, as a producer, she had success in turning modern literature into popular television with the BBC’s big-budget Fortunes of War (1987), Alan Plater’s adaptation of Olivia Manning’s novels, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as newlyweds caught up in the aftermath of Hitler’s advance across the eastern front, and ITV’s long-running detective whodunnit Midsomer Murders (from 1997), based on Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels.
Ronald Pickup: a theatrical great from a golden generation theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Fabulous February begins at the Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise
Reporter:
news@leinsterexpress.ie
Dunamaise Arts Centre is closed but the team is bringing you plenty of virtual creativity for lockdown );
);
The Dunamaise Arts creative team os looking forward to Fabulous February with the launch of the Dunamaise on Air!
The team has compiled a brand new series of podcasts called A Word in Your Ear as well as new cultural films and a play by the award-winning theatre company Druid for you to stream.
“We ve been working really hard over the past months on finding ways of connecting artists and audiences and we re so happy to be able to send the arts home to you until we can be together again.