Thoor Ballylee wishes Happy Birthday to William Butler Yeats!
Thoor Ballylee celebrates W.B. Yeats’s one hundred and fifty second birthday this weekend with the performance of Joe Hassett’s Two Stars, a play for voices featuring WB and James Joyce in conversation, directed by Ian Walsh and starring Fionnuala Flanagan as Molly Bloom and students from NUI Galway.
Two Stars
An Imaginary Conversation between WB Yeats and James Joyce
by Joe Hassett
2pm Saturday 12 June 2017
Music and refreshments
Admission Free
TWO STARS
An Imaginary Conversation between WB Yeats and James Joyce
Joyce Cathal Ryan
Yeats. Shane McCormick
Narrator Fiona Buckley
Nora/Molly. Fionnula Flanagan
Directed by Ian Walsh
Musical accompaniment and performance Úna Ní Fhlannagáin
The Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society welcomes this collaboration with NUI Galway’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance.
From the Playwright Joe Hassett:
The 20 year- old Joyce famously told the 37 year-old Yeats: “you are too old for me to help you.” Despite the younger man’s arrogance, Yeats recognized that Joyce had a contribution to make to Irish literature and generously helped him to do so. In one of fate’s twists, the relationship resulted in Joyce’s helping his elder. As Yeats defended the candor of Joyce’s writing on sexual matters, his own poetry took on a more erotic tone. The differing views of Yeats and Joyce on the proper subject of literature, particularly the role of the sordid in the creation of the beautiful, are as vibrant today as they were when these two stars in the Irish constellation struggled to launch their pioneering work.
The idea of presenting the two stars in conversation arose from Ambassador Anne Anderson’s idea of recognizing Yeats’s 150th birthday on June 13, 2015 as part of the Washington Embassy’s June 16th Bloomsday celebration. I put the play for voices together, and cultural officer Claire Fitzgibbon oversaw the production.
I’m delighted that the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society is bringing the conversation home to the place where Yeats first read and admired the ground-breaking prose of Ulysses and commented that, “I am making a setting for my old age, a place to influence lawless youth with its severity and antiquity. If I had had this tower of mine when Joyce began to write I daresay I might have been of use to him, and got him to meet those who might have helped him.”
Thoor Ballylee 
I was there with a dear friend in 2015, and would love to return. Good luck with the restoration work.
Andrew McDonald
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Am stuck in New York City when would love to be on Sligo to see Noe Hassett’s play in situ. As a member of the Board of the WB Yeats Society of NYC, I have shared your announcement and suggested that perhaps we can sponsor a performance or dramatic reading here at National Arts Club or next door at The Players Club both on Gramercy Park South. I am always impressed by Mr Hassett and his work. — Alison Armstrong
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Edits to my comments above:
For Sligo read Co. Galway/Yeats’s Tower. For Noe read Joe.
Sincerely
Alison Armstrong
School of Visual Art, NYC
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