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Nomad’s outstanding debut production of “Conversations on a Homecoming” (2007) is now followed by a newly commissioned adaptation of Pat Mc Cabe’s (The Butcher Boy) novel “The Dead School”.
Raphael Bell is an old style national school teacher whose life is haunted by images and memories from his past and who has devoted his life to upholding his school’s rigorous core curriculum.
At close of day, his charges now silent, with the last blood-red rays slanting obliquely in slabs through the stained-glass window, amid the smells of ink and varnish, and the fragile, scarcely-remembered voices of a vanished choir, Raphael Bell is experiencing a measure of alarm - two things have been irrevocably destroyed: ‘first, my life’s work and now, regrettably, my mind’.
The Dead School is an explosion - a titanic clash between two Irish world-views: it is modernism and traditionalism in a fight to the death, It is the Ireland of the seventies crashing headlong into that of the thirties, in the process shining a light onto how we got here - to a world of Big Brother and Nip N’ Tuck, with ‘Peig Sayers’, in her shawl, standing bewildered on the motorway.
This production by NOMAD is a special commission, with the writer working in collaboration with director Padraic McIntyre. The cast includes Eammon Owens (The Butcher Boy), Carrie Crowley and Peter Daly (Conversations on a Homecoming).
Contact Details:
Roscommon Arts Centre Box Office
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