Opening next week at the Gate Theatre is the Galway International Arts Festival stage version of Paul Muldoon’s Incantata, starring Stanley Townsend and directed by Sam Yates. It’s a beautifully staged rendering of one of the great Irish poems of the last century – not a recitation but a fully theatricalised adaptation (as is evident from the image below).
Last summer when the show was on in Galway, I moderated a post-show discussion with Stanley and Sam. They discuss in detail how they put the show together, describing how it evolved through the initial ideas and into rehearsals. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about acting, directing, the process of adaptation, Muldoon’s poem itself, and the legacies of Mary Farl-Powers (the visual artist; also Muldoon’s former partner and the subject and dedicatee of the poem). You can listen back here: https://soundcloud.com/nuigalway/incantata-post-show-talk
Scenes from the Bigger Picture 