KILCULLEN DRAMA GROUP AGM

A reminder that the AGM of Kilcullen Drama Group will be TONIGHT, Monday, 14 September, at 7:30pm in Kilcullen Town hall. 

All Welcome.

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IRISH FARMERS JOURNAL, APRIL 25 1970: BIG MAGGIE WIN

Members of Kilcullen Drama Group cheer Loreto Ginnity (best actress) for the name part in J B Keane's Big Maggie and Paddy Melia, producer, after the group had won the Premier Award and the Whelehan Trophy at the All-Ireland Rural Drama Festival at Loughrea. With them in the picture is Mr T P Whelehan, who presented the trophy. (Clipping courtesy Joe Murray.)

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Plaque in Heritage Centre remembers Fergal Sloan

Siobhan Dunphy, Laura Begley, Eilis Philips, Fiona Sloan Kelly, Ronan Collier and Philip O'Rourke.

A plaque to commemorate the late Fergal Sloan was placed in the Kilcullen Heritage Centre last evening by members of the Kilcullen First Responders, writes Brian Byrne. Fergal passed away in 2022, and the occasion was to mark the responder group's appreciation for the funding of a portable defibrillator, which had been raised in his name at a Carols by Candlelight concert after his death. 

Kilcullen Gospel Choir was one of the contributing performers at the concert, and last evening's presentation was attended by Fergal's wife, Eilis Philips, and his sister, Fiona Sloan Kelly, who are both members of the choir.

"It's the AED that we carry with us on every call, so he's potentially helping on every call we go on to save lives," Ronan Collier of Kilcullen Responders said at the presentation. "We just felt, when we heard it's his birthday tomorrow, that we wanted to make sure he has been remembered the right way."

The plaque features a photo of Fergal on stage in Kilcullen during a Heritage Evening presentation in August 2019. He was a stalwart of Kilcullen Drama Group for decades, appearing in many of their plays.

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First call for Culture Night

Culture Night 2026, a nationwide event, will be held this year on Friday, September 18th, writes Esther Reddy. Although this seems like a long time away, Kilcullen Drama Group and Friends are already planning a programme for Culture Night. 

Last year's event in Kilcullen Town Hall was an evening of great entertainment, including poetry, dancing, drama excerpts, and song. However, to organise an event for this coming September, Kilcullen Drama Group and friends need to hear from you now! They are calling on anyone who would like to get involved. 

Text or call 087 4707652 to log your interest so that a programme can be put in place. Don't leave it to someone else — text or call to make this year's Kilcullen event another resounding success.

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Maurice O'Mahony: 50 years on the stage

The many stage faces of Maurice O'Mahony — Clockwise from top left: With Fergal Sloan in The Seafarer, with Ray O'Donoghue in The Padraic Pearse Motel, with Esther Reddy in The Two Loves of Gabriel Foley, as Dinny in The Walworth Farce, with Gerry O'Donoghue in The Quiet Land, and as gravedigger Mick Dowd in A Skull in Connemara.

When Maurice O’Mahony was interviewed for his first job as a teacher by the then Kilcullen Parish Priest, Fr Keogh, he was asked if he had any interest in drama, writes Brian Byrne. As it happened, he had acted in a play while in college, and said ‘yes’. This year, Maurice marks five decades of involvement with Kilcullen Drama Group. “I think Fr Keogh was trying to work out if I would be more than a year in the parish before I moved on, and was signalling some areas of interest that might keep me here,” he says. 

After taking up the job, he spent a few years ‘kind of bedding in’ to the village. Around 1976, he joined the drama group, founded in the 1930s. “My first part was in Spreading the News, a one-act directed by the late John Martin. The group at the time was going through some expansion, and presenting a series of one-acts was the way to give new members some experience before putting them in full-length productions.”

Over succeeding decades, he took part in several productions. “Many farces, but also serious Irish plays like those from John B Keane. We began going to festivals, among them Naas, Leixlip, Littleton in Tipperary, and Kilmuckridge. It was all about finishing work, loading props and actors into cars, then driving around the country. I enjoyed that, and there were adjudicators, who we’d meet afterwards, and they’d give us more detailed information than had been said on the stage. I learned a lot from those sessions.”

Maurice doesn’t recall the total number of productions he’s been in, but some are highlights. “Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer was a good, strong play, for instance. I had a challenging but enjoyable role. Further back, Hugh Leonard’s play Da — I was in that twice. First playing the father, Mr Drumm, and later, in a Paddy Melia-directed version, his son, Charlie, with Bernard Berney playing the father. I really enjoyed that.”

At the end of the 1980s, the drama group became temporarily inactive when the Town Hall was closed. “Bernard Berney and I then got involved with a Dunlavin group, who put on plays in a local pub. We did The Field, Moll, The Year of the Hiker, and Translations, and we toured The Field to Kilkenny’s Watergate Theatre and Waterford’s Theatre Royal.”

The Kilcullen group reformed after renovations to Kilcullen Town Hall, and Maurice was elected chairman. “It became quite a vibrant group, and we put on some very good plays — sometimes with hitches. We were doing The Patrick Pearse Motel, which had two different sets. We could lift each set into the ceiling area, but during one performance, the set above, which had real windows in it, came crashing down. There was glass everywhere, and we had to stop the performance and clean it up. But the audience just accepted that and sat back until we opened the curtains again.”

What an audience gets to see is the final product of several months of preparation: script selection and learning, set design and building. Rehearsals a couple of times a week, and for each actor, learning lines can involve hours borrowed from home and, sometimes, work. When a new play is chosen, it’s often not easy to grasp at first. “Complex plays can take a number of rehearsals before you begin to appreciate relationships and situations. But you build an understanding of character dynamics over time.” He says some authors’ work is easier than others. “For instance, in John B Keane’s plays, the story is straightforward, with easy-flowing language. Others, like Brian Friel or Enda Walsh, can be much more difficult and less immediately accessible to audiences.”

Such was the case with the most recent production, Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. It earned several standing ovations, but it was probably the most challenging production the group had ever attempted. For Maurice, that was apparent when he first read the script. “I couldn’t make head nor tail of it — I really had to read it a couple of times. My main concern was that the audience wouldn’t get it.” After feedback from the preview show, a brief explanation of the production and how the actors shifted into other characters was given before curtain up. “I think that helped … the nights that we did that, people did get it.”

Maurice has fond memories of many fellow members with whom he has shared the stage. They include John Martin, who recently passed away, the late Bernard Berney, and the ebullient director, the late Paddy Melia. Actors Padraic Brophy, Patsy Aspell, and Bridie Maloney come to mind. “People in a drama group become a tight, supportive community,” Maurice muses, noting that working on stage brings trust between players, with sometimes complex scripts and demanding roles. The group is currently in a period of turnover, with lots of new people. “Sinead McKenna is the new chairperson, and we have a new treasurer and a new secretary. It’s good to refresh, and there’s a new enthusiasm.”

The group’s productions bookend key times of the year. Rehearsals in September and October give structure to the dark evenings, getting the players out when they might otherwise just stay home. “For the audience, the autumn play marks the move into winter, the spring event marks the move out. In that sense, the drama group also functions like a family ritual.”

For as far back as collective memory goes, drama in Kilcullen has been a place particularly for ‘incomers’ to get involved with their adopted community. Thus it was when Maurice O’Mahony came to Kilcullen. And so it is today for many of those recently new to the town. 

This article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.

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Standing ovations for The Walworth Farce

Their performances of The Walworth Farce by Kilcullen Drama Group were given standing ovations by audiences this week, including at last evening's Gala Night, writes Brian Byrne. Proceeds of the Gala Night went to Kilcullen Community Centre.

Our photos here show some of those who supported last night's show. There are still tickets available for the final performance tonight, Saturday.

"We have had very positive feedback from everyone who came," the play's director, Eilis Phillips, told the Diary, adding that the cast had done an amazing job in what she has described as one of the most challenging plays in the Kilcullen Drama Group's history.

Tickets from Woodine Books and on Eventbrite.

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Have you got your tickets for The Walworth Farce?

A reminder that there are still tickets available for The Walworth Farce for tonight, Friday, (Gala Night to benefit the Community Centre) and Saturday. 

Outstanding performances from all concerned in Kilcullen Drama Group.

Tickets on Eventbrite and from Woodbine Books.

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Don't. Miss. The Walworth Farce

The Walworth Farce has four actors, but 14 characters played by them, writes Brian Byrne. Which makes the play presented by Kilcullen Drama Group this coming week arguably the most challenging one in its around 90-year history, according to director Eilis Phillips.

Written by Enda Walsh in 2006 and first performed by the Druid Theatre Company, it's a play within a play, about a highly dysfunctional family of father and two sons, living in London. Each day, the trio put on a play in their flat — the 'Farce' of the title — that purports to keep alive their story of how they came to leave their native Cork. In their own 'Groundhog Day', they are condemned to exist in a repetitive life, with just one son, Sean, allowed to leave each morning to buy exactly the same set of rations in a nearby Tesco. One day, he takes home the wrong bag. 

The father, Dinny, played by Maurice O'Mahony with terrifying intensity, has the sons in real fear about the dangers of London, supposedly lurking in the cracks of the footpaths and waiting to rise and consume them. 

Blake, the older son, is portrayed with extraordinary versatility by Allan Clarke, with the most roles, including all the female parts. Sean is played by Adam Treacy, and his daily excursions for groceries may be slowly making him aware that all is not evil in the world outside. Hayley, played by Sinead McKenna with a perfect sense of how to project dramatic emotion, is the Tesco cashier who thinks she’s doing a good deed by returning Sean’s shopping bag, but soon finds herself in the middle of the family's nightmare. 

This is a high-tension, high-energy, very physical production that requires the actors playing the sons to switch instantaneously between their parts, mostly while staying on stage. The challenge is not just for the Kilcullen Drama Group players and their director, but also for the audience, who will need to concentrate. For those who keep up, there will be a real, if unsettling, satisfaction.

The Walworth Farce runs in Kilcullen Town Hall from 15th to 18th April. I've seen the preview, and it's a production not to be missed. Tickets are on sale now from Woodbine Books and Eventbrite.   

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An Unmissable Performance in Kilcullen

It’s rare that an amateur drama group brings a production to the stage that requires four actors to play a combined total of 12 characters, that requires role changing and rapid costume swapping onstage, and that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. It’s rare that an amateur group brings a production to the stage that has not often been attempted outside of the professional circuit because of the complexity of the content and performance. But that’s exactly what Kilcullen Drama Group is doing this month with The Walworth Farce, which runs from 15th to 18th April in Kilcullen Town Hall. 

“It may be our most challenging play yet,” says director Eilis Phillips, who was the brainchild of bringing Enda Walsh’s production to the stage in Kilcullen. Walsh wrote The Walworth Farce in 2006, and it was first performed by Druid Theatre Company. It won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe, which helped launch it onto international stages, where its dark humour and inventive theatrical style earned widespread acclaim.

The play is a play-within-a-play style of performance which revolves around three men and how they act out a distorted version of their past on a constant loop, until one day a stranger unexpectedly enters their flat and breaks the routine and their illusion of reality. In the play, we meet Dinny, played by Maurice O’Mahony, the tyrannical father who created the daily routine of the Farce. Dinny forces his two sons to re-enact how they left Ireland many years ago, in a bid to keep his family safe from the horrors of the outside world. Blake, the older of Dinny’s two sons, is played by Allan Clarke. Blake, trapped in his father’s story, plays the most roles within the play, including all the female parts. Sean, the younger son, is played by Adam Treacy and is the only member of the family who can leave their flat every morning to buy the same groceries required for their play. And finally, Hayley, played by Sinead McKenna, is the naïve Tesco cashier who thinks she’s doing a good deed by returning Sean’s shopping bag, but soon finds herself trapped in this nightmare scenario. 

The stakes are high in this play, both for the characters and for the four actors with such a high-energy, physical performance. The inclusion of the word “Farce” in the title suggests slapstick comedy, and while there is an element of that style, there are far more layers to this play, with the psychological tension being ramped up from the beginning and an ending that will leave the audience thinking about it for days afterwards. 

The Walworth Farce runs in Kilcullen Town Hall from 15th to 18th April and is a production not to be missed. Tickets are on sale now from Woodbine Books and Eventbrite. 

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