Director: James Riordan

Producer: Jill Murray

Set Designer: Andrew Clancy

Costume Designer: Saileóg O’Halloran

Mask Designer: Orla Clogher

Lighting Designer: Sarah Jane Shiels

Sound Designer: Jennifer O’Malley

Composer & Musician: Ultan O’Brien

Production Manager: Mark Carry

Sound Engineer: Ellen Culloo

Stage Manager: Sorcha De Faoite

Assistant Stage Manager: Madison Carpenter

Cast: Raymond Keane

“An evocative heard-rending piece about yearning and forgotten lives that weaves a spell.”

If you never return to where you’ve come from,

is this place you are now home? 

Not A Word invites you to sit with a silent man on another unexceptional evening. A day’s labouring done, in a place that has never quite felt like home, he plays a beautiful old tune as memory dances amongst his dirty boots and cherished trinkets.

Brú Theatre returns to the Galway International Arts Festival with the premier of a new piece of physical theatre merging mask, music and movement in a celebration of those who took the boat - worked hard, faltered and slowly faded from memory. This excavation of a forgotten class of Irish navvies - those emigrants who helped build a country not their own, seeks the beauty in the banal, the poetry between the concrete cracks.

Performed by Raymond Keane, with live electronic and traditional music from Ultan O’Brien, Not A Word offers a moving portrait of one emigrant echoing many people’s stories today. This ode to a self exiled laborer, making his way in this small space between places, is directed by James Riordan with mask design by Orla Clogher.

Runtime: ~60 minutes.

Bank Of Ireland Theatre, Galway

17-22 July, 2023.