McKenna play for Riverbank

The Mend and Make Do Company will present John MacKenna's play My Father's Life at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge on Saturday 7 October.

The production is three stories in one play. It’s the story of the English peasant-poet John Clare who grew up in Northamptonshire and had brief fame with his first two books of verse before being committed to an asylum where he spent the last two dozen years of his life.

It is also the story of Eliza Clare, John’s daughter, who is left to pick up the pieces of her father’s indiscretions and his insanity and who, as the story unfolds, reveals the things in her own life that mirror those in her father’s.

And it is also the story of an Irish inmate in Northampton asylum. A man who left Ireland in the early 1800s to find work in England but found, instead, a home in a mental hospital and a gift from Jesus, a man who dreams of the house he left on the corner of a road.

The play is a gentle story of love lost and love recovered in the realms of memory. Eliza Clare is played by Sarah Maher, whose stunning performance as the young supermarket assistant in Breathless – also with Mend & Makedo – last year drew rave reviews.

She is supported by Noel Lambe (as the Inmate) and John MacKenna (as John Clare). Lighting is by Killian Martin.

The performance begins at 8pm. Admission €15/€12.