Theatre

Conor McPherson's celebrated play The Seafarer will be staged at the Cork Opera House from Tuesday, June 17 until Saturday, June 21. Recently nominated for a number of awards, including a Tony for Best Play, The Seafarer, set in a house in a Dublin suburb where brothers Sharky and Richard, and a couple of old drinking buddies pass Christmas Eve getting drunk and playing cards, explores the demons in the lives of broken men.

The Irish premiere of internationally renowned Romanian playwright Paul Ioachim's End of the Line (Monday, June 16 - Saturday, June 21) at the Granary Theatre is sure to be welcomed with great interest. A bittersweet comedy that takes a quirky, absurd look at three people on the edge of society, the production is a collaboration between award-winning actor/director Dan Tudor from the National Theatre of Bucharest and Cork playwright Jody O'Neill (They Never Froze Walt Disney).

After the tremendous audience response to the incredible and moving Bath of Baghdad, presented by the Experimental Theatre of Syria at the 2007 Cork Midsummer Festival, it comes as no surprise to find another slice of contemporary Middle Eastern Theatre on this years programme. Make Me Stop Smoking, a multi-media lecture performance by Rabih Mroué which takes place at the Half Moon Theatre on Tuesday, July 1 and Wednesday, July 2, will see the actor reconstruct the landscape of his homeland Lebanon, destroyed by so many wars and crises, with the aid of dozens of anonymous personal documents, videos, photographs, newspaper clippings and eyewitness reports that he has collected over the years.

A site-specific production taking place in a secret location, the Dutch production Braakland (June 19 – June 21) tells in sobering, penetrating images, a tale of nine figures wandering about a forgotten land. Taking place in an immense wasteland, the experience of watching Braakland is said to be almost cinematic, a blur of poetic violence and threadbare landscapes.

Corcadorca

Synonymous with the Midsummer Festival, Cork's most elaborate and ambitious production company, the internationally renowned Corcadorca, have, more then most, helped to raise the profile of the festival in the city through its spectacular outdoor shows.

For the past four years, Corcadorca's shows for the Midsummer Festival have completely sold out, and have twice been nominated for Best Production in the Irish Times Theatre Awards, for Woyzeck at Ireland's Naval Base in Haulbowline last June, and their multi-location production of The Merchant of Venice in 2005.

This year Corcadorca will stage, for the first time in Ireland, Pulitzer prize winning playwright Eugene O'Neill's seminal The Hairy Ape. The play was a marked departure for O'Neill who ventured into more expressionistic waters with The Hairy Ape. A bitter and brutal play it questioned the manner in which America was changing from its agricultural roots to an industrial based nation and at what cost it came.