Little John Nee returns with Sparkplug

Little John Nee returns to The Town Hall with his award-winning show Sparkplug which will run for 12 nights in the venue’s Studio Theatre from June 16-22.

The show, which proved hugely popular on its last outing in Galway is the story of Sparkplug Callaghan, a travelling bluesman and vintage mechanic living in his dead uncle’s barn and struggling to make ends meet; Joe Duffy is on the radio and the banks are putting people on the side of the road, but across the meadow he sees a vision; his boat has come in.

This is an adventure into the heart of a surreal rural landscape that combines lyrical comic storytelling with original music and songs played on a variety of intriguing instruments creating the soundscape that won the Irish Times Best Sound Designer Award for Little John.

Sparkplug received rave reviews at the 2012 Dublin Fringe and RTÉ Radio Drama subsequently adapted it for radio: that version in turn won a prize at the prestigious Prix Italia 2013. Writer Michael Harding in a review in The Irish Times described it as “a mesmerising piece of theatre balanced somewhere between the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a zen meditation session. The evening made me feel as if I was a child again, enthralled by a magical story”.

Tuam resident, Little John Nee, is widely regarded as one of Ireland’s leading solo theatre performers, his songs have been praised by singer-songwriter John Prine and his theatre shows have received critical acclaim in the UK and in the US. Viewers of TG4 will know him as Postie in Fear an Phoist.

He is currently Theatre Artist in Residence at the Town Hall Theatre Galway. He has recently recorded a new album of his theatre songs with The Caledonia Highly Strung Orchestra to be released in late September.