Press cutting from "Munster Express" 31/08/11

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Press cutting from "Waterford Today" 31/08/11

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BREAKING NEWS - Cast List is here

We're really happy to announce the fantastic cast we've assembled for our production of Edna O' Brien's The Country Girls. They are:

Holly Browne as Kate
Caoimhe O'Malley as Baba
Peter Hanly as Mr. Gentleman
Charlie Bonner
Simon Boyle
Rachael Dowling
Georgina Miller
Aileen Mythen
Michael Power

We're all delighted to be working with such a talented group and looking forward to this exciting show.

Watch this space for further updates.

Mikel Murfi - Director

Mikel Murfi is an actor, writer and director from Sligo. He trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris. He was a founding member of Barabbas ... the company, with whom he performed and directed over a period of eight years. 

As an actor he most recently appeared as James in Tom Murphy's, The Morning After Optimism, and Christy Mahon, in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, both at The Peacock Theatre. In the Abbey theatre he has performed as Stefano in The Tempest and Dromio of Syracuse, in  The Comedy of Errors.

With Barabbas ... the company, he appeared in eight shows. Most of this was devised, original work such as Sick, Dying, Dead, Buried, Out and Strokehauling.  He played multiple roles in  the company's production of Macbeth and Jupiter in a version of Von Kliest's Amphitryon adapted for the company by John Banville and entitled God's Gift. He played Martin Kriebal in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration by Vaclav Havel with Druid Theatre Company and multiple roles in the Rough Magic Theatre Company production of Oscar Wilde's  Lady Windermere's Fan.

Mikel has appeared in many film and television projects. These include Butcher Boy, The Last September  and Ella Enchanted.

For more information Click Here

FUND IT! Campaign Officially launched

Friends,

The countdown has now started and our fundraising campaign has kicked off,  it will run for 28days and the hope is to raise 8,500euro to fund this amazing project.

A show like this, giving a world-class script based on a classic Irish novel the treatment it deserves - with a cast of nine top-notch actors, the best designers and the highest production values – would stretch the resources of a production company at the best of times. In these times of scarcity, diversifying and fundraising have become essential in order to maintain our commitment to quality. The more we raise thanks to your generosity, the more it'll allow us to see this production bloom like it deserves and honour the vision of thes extraordinary artists involved.


http://www.fundit.ie/project/world-premiere-of-the-country-girls

We’ve put together some fantastic rewards, and hope they will encourage you to support the production.
This is a great moment in the Arts, when an important modern Irish novel and theatre production at its finest come together. Thank you for being a part of it.

On behalf of Red Kettle, Thank you so much for supporting the Irish Arts!
Steve (FUND IT CO-ORDINATOR for Red Kettle)

FUND IT submittal

 







 


Steve McCarthy - FUND IT campaign Co-ordinator


Today, I recorded Holly Browne doing a voiceover for our forthcoming FUND IT campaign which you can see below. Once having edited and created the final promotional video.

John & I sat down and checked we had all elements of the FUND IT submission form covered so all it took then was to add the details requested and click SUBMIT.
I now await contact by the FUND IT, and then our fundraising Campaign begins.

Added 24/08/11 17:00
Having adjusted and edited the necessary aspects of our FUND IT campaign, I've just resubmitted it.
Fingers Crossed we go LIVE ONLINE tomorrow.

WATCH THIS SPACE!
Steve McCarthy

Press cutting from "Waterford Today" 17/08/11

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Press cutting from "Munster Express" 17/08/11

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Press cutting from "Dungarvan Observer" 17/08/11

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Press cutting from "Waterford News & Star" 16/08/11

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Edna O'Brien - Author & Scriptwriter

 Edna O'Brien - Author of the book The Country Girls and Author of the script of the stageplay also.

Edna O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, in 1930, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed." According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for some time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise a family. O'Brien was the only child of 'a strict, religious family.' In the years 1941-46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy - a circumstance which contributed to a 'suffocating' childhood. "I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I'm glad it has gone."

In 1950, she was awarded a licence as pharmacist. She married, against her parents' wishes, in the summer of 1954, the Czech/Irish writer Ernest Gébler and the couple moved to London - "We lived in SW 20. Sub-urb-ia." They raised two sons, Carlos and Sasha, but the marriage was dissolved in 1964. Gébler died in 1998. In Ireland she read such writers as Tolstoy, Thackeray, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In London, O'Brien bought Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot, and has said that when she learnt Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an autobiographical story, it made her realise, 'where she might turn, should she want to write herself: "Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories." In London she started work as a reader for Hutchinson where, on the basis of her reports, she was commissioned, for £25, to write a novel.

She published her first book, The Country Girls, in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country Girls Trilogy) which also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication these books were banned, and in some cases burnt, in Ireland, due to their frank portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. In the 60s she was a patient of R D Laing: "I thought he might be able to help me. He couldn't do that - he was too mad himself - but he opened doors," she said later.

She has received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 (for The Country Girls), the Yorkhire Post Book Award in 1970 (for A Pagan Place), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern Slides. In 2006, Edna O' Brien was appointed adjunct professor of English Literature in University College, Dublin. In 2009, Edna O’Brien was honoured with a special lifetime achievement award - the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award - at a special ceremony for the year’s Irish Book Awards in Dublin. According to the novelist Andrew O'Hagan, her place in Irish letters is assured. " She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international." And in the words of the novelist Colum McCann she has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.

 Ben Hennessy - Artistic Director of Red Kettle

We are just delighted to have been chosen by Edna O’Brien.  This is a very difficult time for any theatre company with the economy, arts cuts and all the other bad news and so this is just such an uplift and endorsement of what we have achieved.  It has really lifted the spirits of everyone and we’re working on it already. We’re delighted to have Mikel Murfi – arguably Ireland’s finest theatrical director - on board, and the cast includes many well known Irish actors.  

You’ll be hearing lots more about that in the weeks to come.