Mick Lally theatre, Galway; available online
Drawing on her early writings, Colm Tóibín captures the essence of the late Irish poet in this transformative livestreamed production
Eavan Boland, poet and writer, died a year ago last Tuesday, aged 75. In this complex, profound and transformative new drama for Druid Theatre, Colm Tóibín blends together excerpts from Boland’s essays and poems. The programme tells us that the selections have been “edited by” him, but there is more than editorial assemblage in his arrangements.
There is a dynamic unfolding of the ideas and perceptions of the poet at a point in her life when, a young mother living in a Dublin suburb, she was actively struggling with questions that were shaping her work: questions around the influences of her Paris-trained artist mother, working from home, and her piano-playing, Jesuitical, diplomat father, relocating the family from Dublin to New York and London; questions around her particular experiences as woman, wife, mother, against a hinterland of male-formed, Irish literary models; questions, too, around notions of authorship, of personal and collective identities, of memories and myths.
Continue reading...