With huge thanks to all our visitors and volunteers and artists for helping make the space this year such a vibrant and active one, Thoor Ballylee has closed for this season.
Until reopening in spring visitors can still of course come and visit the grounds and garden and wander up the stream to the mill, all to appreciate the unique setting that gave birth to such imagination and craft.
A full review follows here at the end of the year. For now, those with a cultural bent will be pleased to note some recent and ongoing events that perpetuate the spirit of this place and South Galway.
The most important of these must surely be Augusta Gregory’s Grania, in a new production at the Abbey Theatre Dublin. Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, Artistic Director of the Abbey, with spectacular staging, resonant music, and intimate acting, what is discovered by the company suggests that the play, rather deprecated by Yeats and not performed in its author’s lifetime, might in fact be Gregory’s masterpiece, as it plays out agonizing scenarios of love, sexuality, maturity and immaturity, feminine defiance, and masculine bonding.
Gregory herself has also been given a new life in a one-act chamber opera at the Wexford Opera Festival, with scenario and book by Colm Tóibín. Lady Gregory in America follows the controversial American tour by the Abbey Theatre during which audiences tried to silence Synge’s raucous, divisive play, The Playboy of the Western World. Briefly featuring Yeats in a walk-on part, the opera, also featuring John Quinn, Molly Allgood, Maire Nic Shuibhlaigh, and range of chorusing policemen, judges, and actors, manages to riff on serious themes of love and artistic freedom with a light touch – a comedic vein tapped by the Italianate musical language of Alberto Caruso (who also musically directs the performance), something Gregory, which such a love for the country and its culture, might just have appreciated.
For more on Yeats’s artistic endeavours, the Dublin launch of The Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts at the United Arts Club at 6.30pm Wednesday 6 November is a chance for all to gather to celebrate a uniquely protean artistic legacy. Launched by Professor Adrian Frazier, the volume, edited by Charles I. Armstrong, Adrian Paterson, and Tom Walker, features new essays on Yeats and music, dance, and the visual and material arts by an varied interdisplinary range of scholars and thinkers.
Further afield, the International Yeats Society holds its latest symposium this December in Brazil. Called ‘Conjuring Yeats’, and held 9-11 December in the old colonial cities of Ouro Preto and Mariana, it features a range of international speakers on this intriguing general theme. A second call for papers has just appeared, so if you are interested do submit or attend virtually or in person!
For now all at Thoor Ballylee wish you a happy, prosperous, and culturally rich end to 2024!
