St. Patrick's Drama Group - Two One Act Comedy Plays

St. Patrick's Drama Group

Present

Two One Act Comedy Plays -

The Tinker's Wedding

&

DADA

Wednesday 6th, Thursday 7th & Friday 8th May 2026

Curtain up: 8.00pm

(doors 7.30pm)

This May, St. Patrick's Drama Group Westport presents an evening of two one-act comedies that are separated by a century but connected by something altogether more mischievous — two priests who really should have known better than to accept the drink that was offered them.

The first play, J.M. Synge's classic comedy The Tinker's Wedding, appears here in a new one-act drama adaptation by Séamus McNally. Synge wrote the play in the early 1900s and it remains one of the sharpest, funniest and most irreverent works in the Irish dramatic canon. Sarah Casey wants to be married in a church. Her mother-in-law Mary Byrne wants a drink. The local priest wants a quiet night. Nobody gets quite what they want — but what unfolds at that roadside fire, under the stars of a Wicklow night, is as alive and as true today as the day Synge wrote it.

The second play, Dada, is a contemporary dark comedy written by Frank Houlihan and directed by Liz Browne. Two sisters, inseparable, finishing each other's sentences, gas entirely without knowing it, are waiting in a café for a priest they urgently need to see. The reasons for that urgency are best discovered in the theatre. Suffice to say the French coffee is the least of anyone's worries.

One priest is offered porter by the roadside. One is offered French coffee in a modern café with notions. Neither should have accepted.

Together the two drama plays make an evening that is funny, unsettling, and thoroughly Irish in the best possible sense — life and death taken seriously, and not seriously at all, sometimes in the same breath.