Amateur drama festival takes to the airwaves to beat lockdown restrictions
February 25, 2021
SATURDAY will see the start of the very first Clare Drama Radio Play Festival, which takes to the airwaves on Scariff Bay Community Radio (SBCR).
The inaugural event brings the station together with the long-established Clare Drama Festival to ensure that actors and their audiences get to enjoy the finest local theatrical productions in their own homes.
Proceedings kick off on the East Clare community radio station with a special festival programme hosted by Eoin O’Hagan at 8pm on Saturday next. Thereafter, the drama will continue on Saturdays, and Sundays, presented by Festival PRO Tom Hanley, from March 7 until the final night on Easter Sunday, April 4.
IMAGINE a typical rural shopkeeper in the Ireland of yesteryear. “I picture him wearing a brown shop coat with ballpoint pens in his top pocket,” says actor and journalist, Jim O’Brien of Ogonnelloe. “He lives over the shop, and the shop is his life.”
Now imagine that his merchandise is of a very specialised variety. This shopkeeper’s trade is not in groceries or other domestic essentials. His customers come from far and wide to purchase accoutrements of every kind, from small nuclear weapons to solar-powered chainsaws. All of them are tailored to the client’s exact needs. The only thing that links them is the fact they are all ‘plot unblocking devices’.