The fabulous work of Spike Milligan and Robin Glendinning will be staged at The Market Place Theatre in Armagh over the coming weeks, in a delectable treat for drama audiences.

Holywood Players, one of Northern Ireland’s leading amateur theatre companies, return to The Market Place with Robin Glendinning’s ‘The Week Before’. This is the story of the crazy week that precipitated the Easter Rising of 1916 which changed history. Pearse and MacDonagh were poets and romantic idealists who secretly organised the armed insurrection. Fitzgerald and MacNeill, the president of the Volunteers, were strongly opposed to a rising on practical and moral grounds and were ignorant of the advanced plans of the others. Birell, a brilliant civil servant who did much good in Ireland and his subordinate Nathan, were the English government aka ‘The Castle’.

The play covers the debates and moral dilemmas which filled ‘The Week Before’. As a link to the audience, the Cynic stalks the many vivid characters and whirling events but he too is on a journey and at the end he is not quite sure what it all means. ‘The Week Before’ will be staged on Friday 22 April at 8pm. Tickets are priced £11 and £9 (concession).

Then it’s the return of Big Telly Theatre Company and their massively popular production of Spike Milligan’s ‘Puckoon’, which has had audiences all across Ireland screaming with laughter at its Goonish blend of theatrical anarchy, musical wit, and impossible plot.

Ireland 1922, and the Ulster Boundary Commission has drawn the new border straight through the small town of Puckoon. With the church separated from its own graveyard and drink now thirty percent cheaper in one corner of the pub, life in the newly divided village will never be the same again. Based on the book by Spike Milligan, this comic masterpiece is an irreverent and hilarious story which takes the mick, celebrates the absurd, and paints a picture of a simple life that borders on the ridiculous. ‘Puckoon’ will be staged on Thursday 5 May at 8pm. Tickets are priced £13 and £11 (concession).

Tickets for all performances can be booked through the Box Office on [028] 3752 1821, or online at www.marketplacearmagh.com

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