Shamtown gives new life to Saw Doctors’ songs

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

The irony of getting an Agility Grant from the Arts Council last Spring wasn’t lost on the Saw Doctors’  manager, Ollie Jennings. “I’m 70 years of age and with creaking hips,” he jokes,

Ollie who is as fit as a flea he was delighted to be awarded the grant as part of a scheme that was introduced to support artists during the various Covid-19 lockdowns.

Even before Covid had struck, he’d been busy working on Shamtown, a musical which “would give new life to the Saw Doctors’ songs”.

With that €5,000 grant from the Arts Council, plus equal funding from Galway City Council and the Town Hall Theatre’s Patron Fund, Ollie and theatre director Andrew Flynn workshopped Shamtown, and presented the work-in-progress to an invited audience at the city’s Druid Theatre in January.

That was its second public outing, Ollie explains. An earlier version was shown in January 2022, to people from Tuam who had been involved with the Saw Docs before the band had even formed. That was also supported by Galway Town Hall. Despite the cast having had just a few days of rehearsals, the reaction last January was so good that Ollie vowed to continue writing the piece.

He’d begun it in 2017 when the band seemed to have broken up. It wasn’t clear then if the lads would ever reunite and Ollie, as their manager, felt the songs deserved a new lease of life in a different context

“I believed in the songs and wanted to put them out there to show how good they were,” he says.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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