FEATS 2016

ITG sweeps the board at the 2016FESTIVAL OF EUROPEAN ANGLOPHONE THEATRICAL SOCIETIES

The London Vertigo by Brian Friel  (after Charles Macklin) – directed by Adam Brown has made ITG history by winning for us the coveted Best Show Award for the first time ever!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In ITG’s 30-year history of competing in FEATS, we have won 5 Awards: on 8 May, we  added another 3 to the trophies cabinet!

 

Along with snatching up the prize for Best Show in 2016, the talented newcomer to ITG, Brian Foley, walked theatrically away with the Award for Best Actor.

And, our fantastic production team – headed by stage manager, Róisín Dore took the prize for Best Stage Presentation!

With  huge thanks to all involved for their creativity, commitment and hard work. We are so delighted to say that it has all paid off. Special thanks to Adam Brown, a first-time director for the ITG – but we’ve a sneaking suspicion he might be tempted to work with us again… first up, this coming October, when Brussels audiences will have the chance to see The London Vertigo once more, as part of a Brian Friel double bill. In the meantime, we are lapping up the praise and proud to have achieved this great feat at FEATS 2016! Thank you for all your support.

Cast:

Murrough O’Doherty – Tony Dempsey

Katty Farrel – Sinéad Meehan

Tom Hamilton – Brian Holland

Mrs Diggerty – Noreen Doyle

Count Mushroom – Brian Foley

Directed by Adam Brown

The London Vertigo tells the story of ‘Mrs Diggerty’, who is forced to reform her behaviour by dropping her newly acquired Anglophile habits and language use to transform into ‘The Irish Fine Lady’ that we are led to believe she once was.

She proclaims: ‘After London everything I set my eyes on here gives me the ennui and the contre cure‘ and bemoans the fact that ‘even the dogs when they bark, I swear they bark wit’ a brogue’.

Yet she is left with no choice but to drop her colonial mimicry and change back to ‘decent Dublin domesticity’ – a theme that unwittingly rewrites the original author’s own biography as comedy and farce.

The acclaimed actor known in 18th century London as Charles Macklin was as much a personal creation as that of the characters who inhabited his plays. Having left Culdaff in north County Donegal as Cathal MacLochlainn a poor Irish-speaking peasant, he found his way into genteel London society via the stage.

Brian Friel who lived for the last 30 years of his life in the nearby village of Greencastle picked up the three act comedy which Macklin had written and did us a favour. He cut it down to perfect size for FEATS while remaining faithful to the original, in what he saw as a “companionship with a neighbouring playwright.”

Like Cathal MacLochlainn, the play has also had several names, initially called The True-born Irishman, and then The Irish Fine Lady, Friel renamed it (1990) to The London Vertigo.