Mommo Plays

Brigit I'd like it to be perfect ...Beautiful ...The statue ...Unbeatable? ...I'd like it to be what I feel ...And I don't know what that is. Set in the 1950s, Brigit, a prequel to Murphy's critically-acclaimed Bailegangaire (1985), tells the story of Mommo and S amus, grandparents living on the breadline, who are raising three grandchildren: Mary, Dolly and Tom, when S amus is offered a job to carve a statue of St Brigit. Brigit premiered in September 2014, in a production by Druid Theatre Company, Galway, Ireland. Bailegangaire The countryside produced a few sensations in the last couple of years, but my grand plan: I'll show them what can happen at the dark of night in a field. I'll come to grips with my life. Mommo tells over and over again a story she never finishes. It relates how the town of Bocht n came to be known as Baileganagaire, the town without laughter. Mary, Mommo's granddaughter, in between ministering to her, wavers between staying and leaving her. Dolly, Mommo's other granddaughter, counts down the days before her husband, Stephen, returns from England and this time she's determined to be ready for him. Sisters though they might be, will Mary and Dolly even begin to understand each other? Is any sense to be made of what Mommo has to say? What will it take to release each of these women from their private hells? A Thief of a Christmas I heard that laugh a wintry day the likes of this, a few years back, across the market square in Ballindine. It will be a lean Christmas now that the villagers have failed to sell their wares at the market in the town. Glum, if not devastated, they gather in John Mahony's shop-cum-pub to sing songs, drink a little and worry for the season ahead. Among them is Costello, a gregarious man, full of laughter, who has seen the world perhaps a little more than the others and knows how to hold their attention. When a stranger and his wife, grounded by the bad weather from getting back to their homes, enter the pub, a peculiar but devastating challenge emerges: that he, the stranger, is a better laugher than Costello. Set in the same town of Bocht n, but many years before, A Thief of a Christmas was first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in December 1985.