On Tuesday Jan 19 (at 3pm EST) and repeats on Saturday Jan 23 (at 8PM EST) the New York Irish Center will virtually present the short film, TO THE WESTERN WORLD, a docudrama made in 1981 by BAFTA winning director Margy Kinmonth. Remastered to mark the film’s 40th anniversary, this online presentation, courtesy of Foxtrot Films, is the film’s American premiere.
The broadcast and panel discussion that follows is a special feature of the 2021 Origin 1st Irish Virtual Theatre Festival, the three-week celebration of contemporary Irish culture that runs from January 11 to January 31.
The film documents the tour that Ireland’s great playwright John Millington Synge and major Irish artist Jack B. Yeats made of Counties Galway and Mayo in 1905. The two men were commissioned by the Manchester Guardian to report on the “Congested Districts”, the mostly poverty-stricken and over populated part of Connemara in the West of Ireland.
On their tour of the poorest Irish-speaking parts of west Galway and Mayo, Yeats provided illustrations for John Millington Synge’s articles for the Manchester Guardian. Synge wrote twelve articles and Yeats provided fifteen illustrations; his watercolors, such as The Man from Aranmore, 1905, provided visual imagery for Synge’s writings. Yeats also illustrated Synge’s book The Aran Islands (1907) and was consulted by Synge about the costumes for his theatrical masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, first performed two years later at the Abbey Theatre on January 26, 1907.
The film, narrated by legendary film director John Huston, was shot entirely on location with local inhabitants of Connemara and notable cast of actors from the Abbey players, including Tom Hickey, Pat Laffan, Brendan Cauldwell and Niall Tóibín.
Following the online screening there is a talk-back panel hosted by Turlough McConnell with filmmaker Margy Kinmonth and guests Professor Christine Kinealy, founder of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University and Cormac O’Malley, an important collector of Irish art and historian, whose father, the Irish rebel leader Ernie O’Malley, was a close friend of Jack Yeats and who owns several of the Yeats’s sketchbooks from that remarkable tour.
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