Fantastic entertainment at theatre festival in Birr

Many of us were privileged to experience a fantastic theatre festival in Birr over the weekend when the 9th annual Scripts festival came to town.
We enjoyed drama of the very highest standard, which started for me on Friday evening when I attended the one man show “Looking for America” performed by Federico Gonzalez. There was a lot of humour in this thoroughly entertaining piece, as well as a lot of pathos as Federico brought us through his very difficult upbringing in a number of deeply troubled countries in Southern and Central America. He told us that his father was arrested by a Military Junta in El Salvador, after which soldiers would enter and search their house several times every day. His family fled the madness of the Salvadoran Civil War when he was five, after which they spent time in Venezuela and Cuba. Cuba in the 1980s had plenty of social problems but it was an oasis of peace after the horror of El Salvador. Eventually Federico emigrated to Ireland in the mid 1990s and has lived here ever since.
On Saturday I attended the one woman show “Wake”. This was a tour de force by actress Irene Kelleher who poked a lot of affectionate fun at the typical behaviour of us Irish at a wake. Afterwards we got to ask the performer some questions about the play, which is an invaluable opportunity for audiences. Irene said she's from west Cork and the play was partly autobiographical.
The magnificent finale was on Sunday afternoon when we were treated to three brand new works of the very highest calibre. This was a competition and it was very hard to choose between the three plays but eventually the judges awarded the prize to “Marble Mushrooms” by the Dublin playwright Tony Doyle. Tony's play begins humorously, lightly as Karl and Tom are waiting in a departure lounge to be called for their flight. However, the tone suddenly switches, the intensity levels are dialled up, and the audience is hit with an emotional sledgehammer.
The other two contending plays, by playwrights Sarah McKenna Dunne, Jacqueline Corrigan and Robert Webster featured similar shifts from humour to darkness and intensity. In other words, something of an emotional rollercoaster!
Scripts is an invaluable addition to Birr's festival calendar and I think we should be extremely grateful to everyone who makes it happen, particularly Angela Ryan Whyte and Lisa Daly who have been the principal driving force behind the festival since its first inception in 2013. For these ladies theatre is more than just entertainment. It's also a sacred space. Their enthusiasm and love for theatre shines through the event. It's obvious that they have also built up quite a few contacts in the Irish theatrical world over the years, which has proven invaluable for Scripts.
A shout-out should also go to the other hardworking members of the festival team - Emma Nee Haslam, Eugene O'Brien, Gildas Le Pallec and Rebecca Kelly.