PERFORMER AND LITERARY SCHOLAR
PAUL O'HANRAHAN
PAUL O'HANRAHAN, PhD
Foxrock Samuel Beckett Walks, 2014, 2015, Brighton Road, Foxrock, part of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council Season of Heritage, July-Sept 2015
Heads Yeats, Tails Joyce at the Dublin Writers Museum, for Culture Night 2015, September 18 2015
RECENT EVENTS
Beckett and Company, Samuel Beckett's relationship with James Joyce, at The Gables, Foxrock, October 28 2015
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Throughout my performance and academic career I have explored how literature can animate space and vice versa. In the above photo, I am oustide McDaid's pub in Dublin in April 2014, reading about poet Patrick Kavanagh. The performance was part of a walk celebrating the poetry of Grafton Street for the Dublin: One City, One Book event..Behind me is balladeer pat excellence, Mark Wale, who acted in my first ever Joyce production, Circe, an adaptation of the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, at Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1982.
A PORTRAIT OF 1916: POETRY AND POWER
Coming up on New Year's Day I will be presenting a Special1916 Centenary Walking Tour of Stephen's Green, Dublin, from 2.30 pm - 4 pm, meet at the Arch, opposite the Grafton Street entrance. The walk will visit the many memorials and memory sites in the vicinity of the Green. Authors featured include James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Patrick Pearse and Tom Kettle and I will be considering how poetry and politics overlapped before, during and after the Rising of 1916.
I am a performer, writer and teacher who specialises in contemporary and Irish literature, and, in particular, the works of James Joyce. I have two Edinburgh Festival Fringe First awards for adaptations of Joyce: for 'Circe' from Ulysses in 1983 and for Finnegans Wake in 1990. As artistic director of Balloonatics Theatre Company, I have presented street theatre and readings based on Joyce in Dublin on Bloomsday every year since 1988.
I have a doctorate combining German and Contemporary Literature Studies from the University of Liverpool. In September I completed a second season of literary walks based on Samuel Beckett’s Foxrock for the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Summer of Heritage programme.
