Lime Tree Theatre | Belltable 

Jilly Morgan’s Birthday Party

by Liam McCarthy | Directed by Joan Sheehy

Jilly Morgan’s Birthday Party by Liam McCarthy is a story of love, longing and obsession, centring on Jack, and his experience of a brief, passionate kiss in the downstairs toilet at a party in Limerick City in 1983. The incident becomes Jack’s lifelong fixation. He kissed Jilly Morgan, at her own birthday party, and life, for him, will never be the same again.  

Jilly Morgan’s Birthday Party takes place across four decades, this is an exciting, time-bending and darkly humorous piece of new writing about the rise and fall of a fantasy. It is a condensed social history and a portrait of a city.  

The play, though radically reimagined, is inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short story The Kiss.