Seventy-first Annual Ballymoney Drama Festival

March 6 – March 13

FESTIVAL time has rolled round again and as usual there is a varied programme of plays from seven of the top amateur companies in the province all of whom are old friends and firm favourites with audiences. This year's festival will run from Saturday 6 March until Saturday 13 March.

The honour of opening the festival on the first Saturday goes to former winners the Omagh Players. We missed them last year as they had a very unwieldy set which they could not get on to our stage. We are glad to welcome them and their fine producer Kathleen Hinds back again with that ever popular classic play The Plough and the Stars by Sean O'Casey. This is set in a Dublin tenement in the weeks running up to Easter 1916. Jack Clitheroe is a member of the Irish Citizen Army. His wife Nora is ambitious to move out of the tenement and to prevent her husband from involving himself further in politics. Humour is supplied by Fluther Good, a seldom sober handyman, along with Nora's Uncle Peter and her cousin the Covey. We see how the inhabitants of this tenement house are all affected by the Easter Rising which is going on around them.

On Monday 8 March old friends Theatre 3 Newtownabbey return with the latest play by American playwright Edward Albee probably best known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Three Tall Women has been called the best play he has written. It takes place in the bedroom of a sick and forgetful old woman "A". In the first act she is cared for by a middle-aged companion "B", and visited by a young woman "C", sent by the lawyer to settle some financial affairs. A is imperious and acerbic; B, practical and compassionate; C, impatient and curious. In the context of A's life, they discuss the human condition with its love, pain, wit, sex, and inevitable decline. Albee portrays aging and human frailty with insight, wit, and a complete absence of sentimentality, while introducing a dimension of forgiveness and reconciliation not seen in his earlier work. In the West End the part of "A" was played brilliantly by Maggie Smith. We can always expect a top quality show from this group and their producer Alan Waugh.

Belvoir Players Belfast arrive on Tuesday 9th with a very modern thought provoking play which recently premiered in Dublin to rave reviews. Unravelling the Ribbon tells the funny and touching story of Lola, Rose and Lyndsey and the impact breast cancer has made on their lives. Lola is fifty and wants to sell her home. Nobody ever calls and she has stopped opening her post. Rose is thirty-four and lives on a farm with her husband and two children. She worries she may have married too young. Lyndsey is eleven and her best friend has stopped sitting beside her in art class. When breast cancer touches their lives, everything starts to unravel – Rose's marriage falls apart, Lola gets arrested and Lyndsey hides a cooked ham in a thorn bush.

Booking arrangements

Season tickets: 40 (concession: 30) will be on sale in McCurdy Hamilton Travel Agents only on Saturday 27 February between 10 am and noon and not thereafter.

General booking: also at McCurdy Hamilton is from Wednesday 3 March until Friday 5 March (10 am until 12 noon and 2.pm until 4pm). Tickets: 7 (concession 5)

During the Festival booking may be made daily at Ballymoney Town Hall between 9am and 5pm and nightly at the box office at the Town Hall from 7.30 pm. Forward booking at Main Interval only.

Organised parties of 10 or more: 10% reduction

Refreshments available at main interval. We witness how these women interact, separate and come together in a moving tale of friendship and survival.

The Irish playwright Lennox Robinson has perhaps been forgotten by some but we are pleased to see Bart Players Belfast will be bringing us his most popular comedy, Drama at Inish, on Wednesday 10 March. The play is set in the Seaview Hotel in the small seaside town of Inish where actors Hector de la Mare and Constance Constantia are travelling players whose lofty demeanour is at once as awesome and absurd as their names. The story plays out in a town so dull, "there wasn't even a decent dog fight”. The hotel proprietor has booked a repertory company to stage "high-class" works by the likes of Chekhov and Ibsen. Not only do the villagers enthusiastically respond to this highbrow entertainment but life soon begins to imitate art. A "queer madness" takes hold of the once-lethargic town. People begin "acting" in unexpected ways. The same kinds of scandals that permeate the onstage dramas begin to occur in the village. Although the script never takes itself too seriously, it makes gentle observations about the suggestive, sometimes subversive, power of art.

Brian Friel’s wonderful play Dancing at Lughnasa is next on Thursday 11th brought to us by long-time audience favourites Clarence Players Belfast. Loosely based the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal it is set in Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It depicts the late summer days when love briefly seems possible for three of the Mundy sisters (Chris, Rose, and Kate) and the family welcomes home the frail elder brother, who has returned from a life as a missionary in Africa. However, as the summer ends, the family foresees the sadness and economic privations under which they will suffer as all hopes fade. The narrator Michael, now an adult, recounts the summer in his aunts' cottage when he was seven years old.

Friday 12th March sees the return of our most faithful supporters, Rosemary Drama Group Belfast, with Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The play shows how, as we go through life, we fail to appreciate things around us. We miss or dismiss the importance of seemingly small events. We think things are boring or slow or that life is depressing when each day is just meant to be lived to the full. It is a story about an average town's citizens in early twentieth century America as depicted through their everyday lives (particularly George Gibbs, a doctor's son, and Emily Webb, the daughter of the town's newspaper editor and George's future wife). The Stage Manager introduces the audience to Grover’s Corners, a small town in New Hampshire. The year is 1901. In the early morning only a few folks are about.

Long-time supporters of the Festival, winners of many trophies in the past and always to be relied on to bring gripping performances are the Newpoint Players and their producer Sean Treanor. On the final night Saturday 13th they bring us Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. This is a fictional account of an actual event during World War II. In 1941, German physicist Heisenberg paid a visit to Bohr. The two spoke very briefly before Bohr angrily ended the conversation and Heisenberg left. Mystery and controversy have surrounded this historic exchange. About a decade after the war, Heisenberg maintained that he visited Bohr, his friend and father-figure, to discuss his own ethical concerns about nuclear weaponry. However, Bohr remembers differently; he claims that Heisenberg seemed to have no moral qualms about creating atomic weapons for the Axis powers.

The audience learns early on that all three characters (Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe) have been dead for years. With their lives now over, their spirits turn to the past to try to make sense of the 1941 meeting. During their discussion, the talkative spirits touch upon other moments in their lives – skiing trips and boating accidents, laboratory experiments and long walks with friends.

We are pleased to welcome back as this year’s adjudicator Marie O’Sullivan who was last with us in 2007. Formerly head of Speech and Drama at Silverhill School in Bristol Marie has a very busy life coaching students for university and drama school entrance, as well as adjudicating and directing full length and one act plays. She has adjudicated before in the Irish Republic, England, Wales and the Isle of Man. We welcome her warmly to our province and our Festival for a second time while she is delighted to be returning to Ballymoney.

Sponsors

Ballymoney Borough Council, Ballymoney Property Holdings,

Gemini Homes Ltd,

Glebeside Spar,

M Hasson and Son,

Henry, Ballymoney,

Kelly’s of Ballymoney,

McAfee Properties,

HA McIlrath and Sons Ltd,

James McMullan and Son, Funeral Directors,

Lindsay Ford, Coleraine,

Northern Bank, Ballymoney,

O’Neill’s Caravan Sales and Distributors Ltd,

JW Pinkerton and Son,

R&F Mechanical Services Ltd,

R Robinson and Sons Ltd,

Ulster Bank, Ballymoney

Zing Design and Print