For anyone who’s ever been young and dreamed of going to a festival and finding Nirvana…Lisdoon-Nirvana is a dramatic monologue with live music, written and performed by Frankie McCafferty.
Based on the last music festival at Lisdoonvarna in July 1983, the piece follows one young guy, Macker, and his friends making the Odyssean trip from Donegal to Clare. Travelling on the pillion of his friend’s two-stroke motorbike, they encounter 80s Ireland and young people from all over making the same pilgrimage. Laden with camping gear and cheap alcohol smuggled across the border, wearing a converted Garda riot control helmet stuffed with bin bags, and a pair of swimming goggles, our hero undergoes a rite of passage as he ventures out into the big bad beautiful world. Through his eyes we see the Folk and Rock glory of the Irish Glastonbury- and a country in transition, with a backdrop of recession, church oppression, emigration and Troubles. But right now Macker’s 17. There’s Smithwick’s in the rucksack. And rumour has it that the girls from the North are bringing hash and condoms. So that’s alright Mama…
FRANKIE MCCAFFERTY
Frankie McCafferty is from Donegal. He studied Arts at UCG and trained in performing arts at the Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique in Paris. His most recent role was back in Paris in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall at the Centre Culturel Irlandais as part of the Beckett Unbound festival 2024. He has been a theatre practitioner and a freelance actor in film, TV and radio for more than thirty years. He wrote and performed the one-man play Tintype at the Kilkenny Arts Festival to critical acclaim and was commissioned to write the history play Godscursed by An Grianan, Letterkenny. It received a public reading as part of Prime Cut Theatre’s Verge series of new writing for theatre. He has extensive experience of working with new writing, appearing in the premiere productions of Wild Harvest, The Song of the Yellow Bittern and At the Black Pig’s Dyke (Druid) (Belfast Telegraph Best Actor award), The Cripple of Inishmaan (National Theatre) and the Lyric Belfast’s recent productions of The Gap Year and Fire Below, Trad (Galway Arts Festival) (Edinburgh Fringe First), Second City Trilogy (Cork Opera House), and The Thing About December (Decadent Theatre). He wrote and directed a theatre adaptation of Padraig O’Conaire’s Paidin Mhaire (An Taibhdhearc, Galway), and wrote the audio play Iris as part of The MAC Belfast’s lockdown project On the Street Where We Live.
Theatre roles include The Lonesome West (Gaiety Theatre), The Plough and the Stars (Abbey Theatre) The Seafarer and The Weir (Decadent Theatre), Dealer’s Choice and Endgame (Prime Cut Productions), and John B. Keane’s Sharon’s Grave (Druid). Many roles at the Lyric Belfast include Conversations on a Homecoming, Molly Sweeney, Waiting for Godot, The Playboy of the Western World, Much Ado about Nothing, and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme for which he received an Irish Times Theatre award. He has appeared in many radio dramas for BBC and RTE, and as a filmmaker directed the films Brood (Arts Council/ RTE), Flush (IFB/RTE), Filleann an Feall (Bord Scannan/ TG4) and The Devil (NI Screen/ BBC).
Film and TV roles include Philomena, Angela’s Ashes, In the Name of the Father, Fifty DeadMen Walking, Far and Away, Vikings, Ripper Street, Resistance, Death and Nightingales, The Woman in White, Ballykissangel, Rasai na Gaillimhe, Twenty Twelve, Blue Lights, DerryGirls, and the Troubles drama Say Nothing due for release later this year.
