WEEK 1 and 2: THE DRAMA WORKSHOP

The Drama Workshop, for beginners and more experienced students of Yeats’s theatre, is held each day, Week 1 Monday through Friday Week 2 Monday to Thursday, 2.30pm-6.30pm, and is offered as a two-week option to the afternoon academic seminars at no extra cost. The workshop provides students with an experiential approach to Yeats’s drama: in addition to rehearsing one of the plays for public presentation, students receive training in verse speaking, choral speech, characterisation, masks and basic stage movement by skilled practitioners.

The 2008 Workshop will be conducted by Joan and Sam McCready, accomplished Irish actors, teachers and directors, who have built up a dedicated following at the Summer School in recent years.

The play for 2008 will be Yeats's The Dreaming of the Bones.

Play Synopsis

   On a bare mountainside in County Clare, a young IRA soldier , who has been fighting in Dublin in 1916, encounters the ghosts of Dermot and Dervorgilla, the Irish lovers who betrayed their country to the invading Normans. They ask the young soldier for forgiveness, but he refuses, condemning them to continue living through their purgatory.

 The play is one of Yeats's most  famous 'Plays for Dancers'. Modelled on the traditional Japanese Noh play, it provides the Workshop with rare opportunities for imaginative movement, choral work, and expressive speaking of verse                                                                                                        

                               The Dreaming of the Bones,  Drama Workshop production 2004            

      Joan and Sam McCready with Drama Workshop students 2006

Joan and Sam McCready are well-known theatre personalities who have devoted a lifetime to teaching both in Ireland and in the US, where they have lived for the past 20 years. They have also maintained a career in the professional theatre. They are founder members of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, playing major roles and directing many productions, among them Spring’s Awakening, Bent, The Tinkers’ Wedding, The School for Scandal, The Playboy of the Western World, Yeats in Limbo, The Shadow of the Glen, and Martin Lynch’s Dockers and The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty. They have directed or appeared in all the plays of W. B. Yeats. Sam taught the Lyric Drama School, the Lyric Youth Theatre and the Lyric Drama Studio, and was a Trustee of the Lyric. In the early 1980s, they were joint-Artistic Directors of the Lyric. In America, Sam was Professor of Theatre at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, while Joan was Head of the Theatre Department at the Park School, Baltimore. Since their retirement from full-time teaching two years ago, they have performed throughout the US and in Europe, most notably in the works of Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Their production of Coole Lady: The Extraordinary Story of Lady Gregory, which premiered at the summer school in 2003, played off-Broadway in April 2005. Sam is the author of A William Butler Yeats Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 1997 and of Baptism by Fire - my life with Mary O'Malley and the Lyric Players (2007).

The recommended text for the Drama Workshop is W. B. Yeats: Selected Plays, chosen by Richard A. Cave (Penguin, 1997).

All participants in the workshop should wear comfortable clothing, and bring a black shirt/blouse, black trousers/long skirt, and black shoes for the public presentation.