Seamus Heaney’s ‘Station Island’ Inspires Dynamic Performance

As part of the Home of St Patrick’s Festival programme, the Lyric Theatre in partnership with Newry, Mourne and Down District Council presents ‘Reflections on Station Island’ at Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick on Sunday 18 March 2018.

Published in 1984, ‘Station Island’, represents a literary pilgrimage for Heaney, as he explores his complex relationship to his homeland, his faith and his past. The title poem, ‘Station Island', steeped in ritual, memory and ghostly visions, is central to the poet’s autobiographical quest for personal and artistic integrity.

Set on Lough Derg, a place that has been a site of pilgrimage for over a thousand years, this key collection of twelve poems represents the twelve ‘stations’ pilgrims go through to obtain a sense of healing, renewal and peace. In the same way, Heaney imagines his ‘Station Island’ as a symbolic literary retreat to conduct a very personal ‘examination of conscience.’

Under the direction of the Lyric Theatre’s Executive Producer, Jimmy Fay, this dynamic performance melds the spoken word, film and sound to evoke the poet’s process of self-examination. Against the backdrop of visual vignettes filmed by Neil O’Driscoll at Lough Derg, composers and performers, Paul Stapleton and Steve Davis will provide a unique improvised musical interpretation of the text as rising star, Seamus O’Hara, delivers a dramatic reading of the poem.

Tickets are £10 and £8 for concessions with bar facilities open from 7pm.

To book tickets, contact Box Office, Down Arts Centre on Tel: 028 4461 0747