Musical edge to drama with Border as backdrop

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Life and doomed love in the Border town of Dundalk are at the heart of The Iron Annie Cabaret, which will be performed in the city’s Town Hall Theatre next Monday night, November 8. Music meets theatre in this edgy show about Aoife, a big figure in Dundalk’s smalltime underworld, who embarks on a relationship with the beautiful but flighty Annie. When Aoife’s associate, ‘The Rat King’, asks her to dispose of 10 kilos of cocaine that he robbed from a rival, she brings Annie with her on a whirlwind trip to Britain to do just that.

The show which features actor Eleanor McLoughlin and two Dundalk bands, has been adapted from the novel, Iron Annie. It’s the debut of local man Luke Cassidy and was published by Bloomsbury in September to wide acclaim.

The bands are folk outfit, the Dandelion Few, and recently-formed rockers, False Slag, who between them, have written 10 original songs for the piece, explains Luke who adapted the book for stage.

Both are from Dundalk, which according to Luke, is a fantastic town for nurturing musical talent. And he should know, because although he’s spent most of the last decade abroad – between Japan, Slovenia and Paris – it’s his home and the place which provided the backdrop for his debut work of fiction.

“It was a book I started in 2018 and it represented a shift in how I’d been approaching the process of writing,” he says of Iron Annie.

Before this, he’d focused on planning out plots before beginning to write. But with Iron Annie he concentrated on the character of Aoife and her doomed love affair with Annie,

“The story is told in the first person by Aoife who is a wheeler-dealer from around the Border and it’s told in the vernacular of the region,” Luke explains.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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