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    • FIGHT NIGHT
    • The Black Wolfe Tone
    • Pat Kinevane Plays
      • KING
      • Before
      • Silent
      • Forgotten
      • Underneath
    • OUTRAGE
    • BREAKING
    • TAIGH/TŶ/TEACH
      • TAIGH/TŶ/TEACH Programme
    • Mustard
    • "Certain Individual Women"
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  • Artist Supports
    • Cruising the Boards Workshop
    • Transatlantic Commissions Residency
    • Big Ambitions
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    • Fishamble New Writing Award
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  • Tiny Plays
    • Tiny Plays for a Brighter Future
    • Tiny Plays for a Brighter Future Challenge
    • Tiny Plays 24/7
    • #TinyPlayChallenge
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland and America
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland 2
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland
  • Support Fishamble
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3 Great Denmark Street
Dublin 1, Ireland
D01 NV63

[email protected]
+353 1 670 4018
@fishamble



Registered Charity
No. CHY 20103958.
​
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News

Celebrating Fishamble's 30th Year

30/4/2018

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On Saturday 28th April, we celebrated Fishamble's 30th Year in Belvedere House surrounded by many familiar faces, and some new ones too! We began the day with our very first workshop for A PLAY FOR IRELAND, meeting playwrights from our 30 chosen projects together for the first time. We then enjoyed a celebratory afternoon tea party with food and drink kindly provided by Tesco's Finest, to launch their sponsorship of A PLAY FOR IRELAND from 2018-2019. We were graced with a beautiful speech by Laureate for Irish Fiction and playwright Sebastian Barry, and messages from many of the wonderful people who we have had the pleasure of working with over 30 years.
Photographs by Leon Farrell, Photocall Ireland

"Little bit of speechifying for Fishamble at 30 years old" by Sebastian Barry

"Little bit of speechifying for Fishamble at 30 years old
Sebastian Barry
 
Belovéd Fishamble! Wholly singular theatre company, so bright, so true. My friend Jim and his stellar officers. You give them a mere play and they stretch every sinew and bust every gut to outplay the devil and give it the very best life, the very best illuminated moment in the theatre. Imperfections will be gently but surely clipped away, Jim with his devious smile and his courtesy that cannot be withstood, or would be withstood on pain of -- outcome unknown.
      My grandfather Papa Barry's back-garden wall divided his modest house from the monastery behind him in Donnybrook. Monks in camouflage brown hovered and muttered along the paths. But more importantly, the old stone wall, high and thick, had many a mortar-less gap, where imperial spiders lived, and draped their doors with their webs. These webs my grandfather would with utmost delicacy touch with a twig, and sure enough out would creep those time-blackened monsters, thinking in their laughable innocence that they had trapped a fly. It was only my grandfather there with his concentration and his joy, and me with my thumping heart.
      This is Jim enticing a play out of you. He taps your web and out you creep and are so surprised to see him there, that almost without noticing you write a few pages. Then you retreat again to your dark lair, somewhat shaken and humbled. Then the web is Jim-tapped again, and oh my heavens, out you pop again, all hope and hunger, ah, but it is just that bloody Jim again. I will have to write another few pages to make him go away. Then you discard the metaphor altogether and come out as a human being, because Jim has started something that can end well or ill, but is unstoppable now.
      True, he had to wait ten years for a second play from me, but was there ever a word of reproach? Not a one. Was there ever an episode of wheedling, whinging, hand-wringing, sue-threatening wailing and gnashing of teeth with mention made in maddened tones of wasted advances and personal insult? Not a murmur. Just all the usual devastating courtesy, kindness, respect, understanding. Fatal for the writer! What cunning and godlike plotting there is in that!
      Gentleman Jim, whom we all love.
      What is the theatre and how ancient is it? Who are actors and are they not something beyond human? Can we not hear the whispers of gods and catch the superhuman movement of myth in their performances? Like Liffeys and Corribs gone underground. A matter far far older than this culpable, straining, half-improving, half-disintegrating animal called homo sapiens sapiens, surely.
      Who are theatre people in general anyway, who labour gladly all their lives to try to give audiences not just a night out, but veritable reasons to live. Reasons to be grateful for life itself. Theatre companies. Mobilised. On a warlike footing without war. All a strange matter really beyond words.
      All the plays of Fishamble stretching back like the old lights of stars into a galaxy three decades wide.
      Consider for a moment all the effort, all the damn phonecalls, the nervy auditions, the mad risks, the relentless acts of faith required, the cups of dubious coffee, the tea gone cold in a thousand emergencies in the rehearsal room, the panic, the broken hearts, the affrighted souls -- and then the unexpected nights where the very souls of the actors, the director, the designer, the composer, are freed, manumitted into free space, easy space, happy space, dancing space, where every disappointment is suddenly redeemed. When the writer looks on the actors with a grateful love, when the director shakes the writer's hand with solemn delight, when suddenly, the whole world is righted on its keel, and we are well-nigh delirious to be shipmates and soulmates on a blessed ship on a conquered sea.
      And those other black, bleak nights when absolutely nothing is redeemed, but which forge the resolve to triumph next time, to do better next time. The two poles of theatre, between which all true theatre companies must be eternally ready and content to sail.
      Dear Jim, and Noble officers of Fishamble, how blessed I am to have worked with you, how blessed all the writers. And you have rich decades left to cry havoc, to run amok anew -- gently, courteously, courageously, unstoppably.
      Fishamble abú!"

Birthday Wishes from our friends

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A PLAY FOR IRELAND Shortlist Announcement

5/4/2018

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Today the 30 chosen projects to move to the next stage have been announced!
 
As part of our 30th year, we have recently set out to find one, big, ambitious play, that bursts with humanity and tackles a subject about which the playwright feels passionate - A PLAY FOR IRELAND that captures the zeitgeist of the country, that demands to be produced! 

We would firstly like to thank everyone who submitted for taking the time and effort to submitting their idea to Fishamble’s A PLAY FOR IRELAND.  We were delighted to receive 372 submissions. The quality of the proposals and the writing samples was extremely high, and we were sorry not to be able to include as many ideas as we would have liked.

The selection process involved the ideas and samples being read by a panel from Fishamble and each of the venues nominated by the playwrights.  This process was completed 'blind', so no one had access to the names or personal details of the applicants.

Then Fishamble and the venues all created a longlist, by choosing about a fifth of the submissions.  At this point, personal details of the writers were added to the longlisted submissions, to ensure balance in gender, geography, etc. Everyone created a shortlist from this selection, and then the task of comparing notes, ensuring all partners had a selection of their top choices in the final selection, and checking how this overlapped with the playwrights' venue preferences, began. We know that many great ideas, by super playwrights, were not included in the final list, and hope that these plays will find other routes to development and, hopefully, production. 
 
A PLAY FOR IRELAND chosen submissions contain stories on political change and tension, rural communities, gap years, tourism and heritage, relationships with history, facing adulthood, storm Ophelia, DNA testing, drunken walks home, the changing workplace and relationships within it, adoption and foster care, family crisis, alcoholic parents, health care reform, nursing homes, small business owners, humanity and community, Irish independence, republicanism and nationalism, the Irish language, rap music, donut chains, government departments, eviction, the concept of home, prophecy, broken hearts, and theatre.
 
This is a two-year process, which encourages the citizens of Ireland, and non-Irish citizens living on the island of Ireland, to write plays, engaging people aged 18+, from all communities, throughout the country. The initiative will mentor playwrights throughout the island of Ireland, and result in the production of a very special new play.
 
A PLAY FOR IRELAND is run in partnership with six venues across the country, in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Belfast; they : Belltable / Lime Tree, Draíocht, The Everyman, Lyric Theatre, Pavilion Theatre, Town Hall Theatre. 5 projects will be chosen to take part in the initiative in each venue, making a total of 30 plays, to mark Fishamble’s 30th birthday this year.
 
The writers of the 30 chosen plays (33 playwrights involved) are:
 
BELLTABLE – LIME TREE THEATRE, Limerick
Mike Finn
Joanne Ryan
Ann Blake
Michael Hilliard Mulcahy
Brendan Griffin

DRAÍOCHT, Blanchardstown
Ian Toner
Alice Murphy
Barry McStay
Jeda De Brí & Finbarr Doyle
Caitríona Daly
 
THE EVERYMAN, Cork
Noelle Brown & Karen Cogan
Bridgid Galvin
John Doran
Margaret McAuliffe
Lisa Carroll

LYRIC THEATRE, Belfast
Michael Patrick & Oisín Kearney
Shannon Yee
Vittoria Cafolla
Seamus Collins
Clare McMahon

PAVILION THEATRE, Dún Laoghaire
David Horan
Shay Linehan
Jody O'Neill
Lee Stafford
Ciara Elizabeth Smyth

TOWN HALL THEATRE, Galway
Marina Ní Dhubháin
Neasa O'Callaghan
Hugh Travers
Janet Moran
Fionn Foley

The playwrights will all gather for the first workshop in Dublin on Sat 28th April and then during 2018 they will take part in 4 workshops in their respective venues. At the end of the year they will each take part in one-on-one workshops for final notes on their draft script.  After that 6 projects will go through to Phase 2 in 2019.
 
We are also delighted to announce that the Transport Partner for A PLAY FOR IRELAND is Irish Rail.

​





#Fishamble30
#APlayforIreland

Read about the Playwrights
Read more about A PLAY FOR IRELAND
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  • Home
  • About
    • Board & Governance
    • Community Engagement
    • Meet the Team
    • Research
    • Encore
    • News
  • Productions
    • HEAVEN
    • In Two Minds
    • FIGHT NIGHT
    • The Black Wolfe Tone
    • Pat Kinevane Plays
      • KING
      • Before
      • Silent
      • Forgotten
      • Underneath
    • OUTRAGE
    • BREAKING
    • TAIGH/TŶ/TEACH
      • TAIGH/TŶ/TEACH Programme
    • Mustard
    • "Certain Individual Women"
    • 35 years of Fishamble
  • Artist Supports
    • Cruising the Boards Workshop
    • Transatlantic Commissions Residency
    • Big Ambitions
    • Playwriting Courses
    • New Play Clinic
    • Send Us Your Writing
    • Fishamble New Writing Award
    • Mentoring & Workshops
  • Tiny Plays
    • Tiny Plays for a Brighter Future
    • Tiny Plays for a Brighter Future Challenge
    • Tiny Plays 24/7
    • #TinyPlayChallenge
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland and America
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland 2
    • Tiny Plays for Ireland
  • Support Fishamble
    • Become a Friend
    • Donate
    • Corporate Membership
    • Sponsorship
    • Thank you
  • Calendar
  • Education
  • Contact
  • Shop