Sneem DramSoc is an amateur dramatic society based in Sneem, County Kerry, Ireland.
Click on a production title to see the programme, or HERE to see earlier productions.
2016 - Faith Healer
(Main production and Storytelling Festival)
FAITH HEALER is a play primarily about faith although, like other Friel plays, it also deals with the relativity of truth. Faith here may be religious or secular, a faith in the power of human love transcending human weakness, or the ebbing and flowing faith of the artist in his creative powers. A talking play, its minimalist plot tells of the travels of an itinerant Irish faith healer, Frank Hardy, throughout Wales, Scotland, and, ultimately and tragically, Ireland, together with his mistress/wife/muse, Grace, and his showbiz Cockney manager, Teddy. The play consists of 4 monologues or parts spoken by the 3 protagonists, each giving a highly subjective, self-serving, contradictory account of their journeying, peddling miracle cures to despairing, mainly Celtic peoples. There are frequent biblical allusions and unmistakeable references to Celtic and Greek mythology (viz. the fate of the sons of Usna) in the tragicomic tale of the death foretold of the peripatetic hero.
2015 - Two Chekhovs
(Storytelling Festival)
We presented adapted versions of THE DANGERS OF TOBACCO and A RELUCTANT TRAGIC HEROINE. In the first of these, Mr. Sniffy, a henpecked husband, is compelled by his wife to give a public lecture on the harmful effects of tobacco but he continually interrupts this to reveal the extent of his unhappy married life. At the end, he is saved from nervous breakdown by the return of his wife. In the second short play, Maria, a Dublin civil servant, holidaying with her family at the seaside, is driven to the brink of distraction by various demands to run errands in the city and bring back lots of odd items to her holiday home.
2015 - Tartuffe
TARTUFFE, a fraud and pious impostor, has inveigled his way into the home of wealthy Cork magnate A.J. O'Reilly. He succeeds magnificently in winning the respect and devotion of the head of the house and his mother and then tries to marry his daughter, seduce his wife, and scrounge the deed to the property. He nearly gets away with it, but a clever Garda arrives in the nick of time to recover the property, free O'Reilly, and arrest Tartuffe. In the original, first staged before Louis XIV in 1664, Moliere poked fun at religious hypocrisy of the age. In the hundreds of years since then, the play has been creatively adapted to take account of particular local circumstances and identifiable local targets. The villain is irretrievably rotten and most of the people in the household are either sickeningly noble or stupid or both. The play is essentially a farce of morals, mercilessly examining the wickedness which men can commit in the guise of religious fervour, and the dangers for those who would believe only what they choose to believe despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.