Festival organiser in RTÉ tribute to amateur drama
May 20, 2021
CLARE Drama Festival stalwart Tom Hanley is among 15 actors and organisers chosen by RTÉ to feature in a special short film to celebrate Ireland’s vibrant amateur drama circuit. While May is, ordinarily, the month when the RTÉ All Ireland Drama Festival takes place in Athlone, the Dean Crowe Theatre will lie empty for a second year in a row due to pandemic restrictions. In existence since the early 1950s, the festival has been deferred to 2022. However, actors from a range of the regional festival locations, including Clare, have come together to mark what should have been the 69th RTÉ All Ireland Drama Festival.
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The Inaugural Clare Drama Radio Play Festival will begin on Scariff Bay Community Radio (SBCR) this Saturday 27th February with a special festival programme hosted by Eoin O’Hagan at 8pm.
The event will continue on Saturdays, and Sundays, presented by Festival PRO Tom Hanley, until the final night on Easter Sunday April 4th. SBCR has joined forces with CDF who are one of Ireland’s longest running amateur drama festivals having started in 1946.
The Clare Drama Radio Play Festival is a perfect addition to the schedule of SBCR and an antidote to the continuing lockdown for both the listeners to the local station as well as the devotees of amateur drama throughout Ireland. This brand new drama festival is going to be a feast of drama for those starved of it because of Covid 19.
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’.