Arts Week with Judy Murphy

When Ann-Marie O’Sullivan moved to Ireland from Greece in 2018, she didn’t expect that a few years later, she would be directing and appearing in a folk musical about Ireland’s Great Famine. But through a series of serendipitous circumstances, that’s what happened.

The musical, In the Midst of Plenty, written by US based Amy Day and presented by Roscommon’s Enchanted Croí Theatre Company will visit Galway’s Town Hall Theatre next month as part of a 14-venue national tour.

Anne-Marie, who was born in England to an English mother and Irish father with roots in Connemara and Kerry, has a long background in theatre.  When she decided to move from Athens to Ireland in 2018, she couldn’t afford to live in a city here.

“And I have two pets,” she adds.

So, for those reasons, rather than “having any grand seven-year plan”, she ended up living in Roscommon, in the former servants’ quarters on the grounds of Strokestown House,  once home to the Mahon family, and now Ireland’s National Famine Museum.

Anne-Marie set up her company, Enchanted Croí in September 2019, but it had barely got off the ground when Covid arrived. She kept working and, during lockdown, embarked on a project about Olive Pakenham Mahon of Strokestown House (d 1982), to mark the reopening of the Famine Museum. Then she was told about California-based writer/composer-lyricist Amy.

Amy, a lecturer in legal writing in California, had visited Strokestown in 2019, while on a day off from teaching a course on human rights at the University of Galway.  The Famine Museum had awoken something in the academic and folk musician.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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