Dates
Thu 16 - Sun 19 Jul
Thu 16 - Sun 19 Jul, 8pm
Matinées: Sat 18 Jul, 2.30pm & Sun 19 Jul, 4pm
Once Off Productions, Cork Midsummer Festival & Pavilion Theatre present
The Homecoming of Joseph Grace by Deirdre Kinahan
Directed by Louise Lowe | Performed by Michael Glenn Murphy
A man sits by a body of water. His once good suit hangs loosely now on his bones. It is dawn. The early boat he has travelled on has just docked and his fellow bleary-eyed passengers disembark, swarming towards the city. In this near empty place he sits, unwilling or unable to set proper foot on Irish Soil.
Acclaimed playwright Deirdre Kinahan (The Saviour, Spinning, Rathmines Road, These Halcyon Days) reunites with leading theatre director Louise Lowe to explore the city’s cultural history as a port and place of departure in creating an evocation of place, memory and mind.
Not just a play of what was, or what is, The Homecoming of Joseph Grace is a tender, disarming and unexpected new drama. Wrapped in longing and separation, this is a meticulous and devastatingly vivid portrayal of a life lived in extraordinary circumstance.
A dance at life, it is a one-man play that takes the audience on an odyssey through otherness in deep rural Ireland, battle and imprisonment during World War I, the great cabarets of Weimar Berlin and on through to a tentative homecoming after 50 years of exile. As we sit with Joseph in an Irish ferry terminal, we sit with every refugee and every citizen of the world who is forced to flee in search of peace, happiness, love, home.