'The Great Hunger' on local tour

Bare Bodkin Theatre Company will be presenting a number of performances of 'The Great Hunger' by Patrick Kavanagh towards the end of January/early February.  The dates are Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda on Friday 24th January, The Venue Theatre, Ratoath on Friday 31st and  St Paul's Primary School, Abbeylands, Navan on Saturday 1st February.

'The Great Hunger' is a dramatised version of Patrick Kavanagh's epic poem which has toured the country over the past year to great critical and popular acclaim culminating in an invitation to perform it in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris last October where is was very warmly received. Performed by Peter Duffy, the poem is generally considered to be Patrick Kavanagh’s finest work. 'The Great Hunger' sharply delineates a life of economic and imaginative privation. A large part of the hunger the poem describes is sexual; its protagonist is bachelor farmer Patrick Maguire who has spent years at his mother’s beck and call. When she finally dies aged 91, he himself is 65 and has missed the boat in terms of finding a wife and having a family of his own, a source of acute sorrow and regret to him.

Peter Duffy himself grew up on a small Monaghan farm and so has a ready affinity for Kavanagh’s material which informs and shines through his absorbing interpretation of the work.

For the performance in Navan, the company will transform the hall in St Paul's Primary School into a 120 seat auditorium with tiered seating and comprehensive staging and lighting facilities.