Glynis Casson & Cormac de Barra
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Glynis Casson
Glynis has played many leading roles in musicals over the years in the Gaiety Theatre Dublin. She has performed her one-woman show “Oscar and the Sphinx” in Festivals in Ireland, The Chelsea Festival, London, and Egypt. She played Lady Bracknell in Dublin and at the Enniskillen Oscar Wilde Festival. She has appeared in the Abbey Theatre in “The House of Bernarda Alba” and the Focus Theatre in “Very Heaven.” Glynis played the part of Kathleen in RTE's “Fair City” and Maurya in the film “Riders to the Sea” made in Hamburg. She played Mrs McNulty in “The Clinic” and Imelda in the film “32A” starring Aidan Quinn which was released in 2008. She was the hilarious Auntie Joyce in the series “Uncle Max” filmed in Galway last year for BBC Children's Television. She has just completed filming “Marú” a crime series for TG4.
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Cormac de Barra: Harpist
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Cormac comes from a family of traditional Irish musicians
and singers and first studied harp with his grandmother
Rósín Ní Sheaghedha in Dublin. He also studied concert
harp in the USA leading to performances and radio/TV appearances in Ireland, France and as far away as Japan
and Australia. He is tours frequently with Moya Brennan,
the voice of the world-famous group Clannad and with
singer and actress Hazel O'Connor. Well-known harpist
and composer Anne-Marie O'Farrell and Cormac have
been playing harp together for over a decade and are known
as Ireland's foremost harp duo.
http://cormac.debarra.net.
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Christopher Casson
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Born in 1912 of famous theatrical parents, Dame Sybil
Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, Christopher became an
actor
at the age
of three.
He came to Ireland to the Gate Theatre in Dublin with Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammóir in 1938. In the Gate,
there
was an opportunity to play all kinds of parts, Shakespeare,
O'Neill, and Tchekov. With the Abbey Theatre he played the English major in Louis Dalton's “This Other Eden” which was the longest run the Abbey had ever had.
He did a great deal of T.V. work- notably Canon Brown in “The Riordan's”, Liam in “The Irish R.M.”, “The Loves of
Cass Maguire” and “The Treaty”.
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Christopher took to painting
and sketching on the early Australian tour. He was always searching for abstraction in the theatre, and everywhere from Gertrude Stein to Picasso and Braque.
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Right: Chrsitopher's Illustration "Mystery and History" |
The Celtic Mystique helped him in this search with the Harp, and the Catholic Church, which he joined in 1941, the year before
his marriage to Kay O'Connell. The marriage lasted fifty years. Christopher used to describe
his drawings as “An expression of his neurosis”- they have religious and abstract themes but also have their own wry sense of humour. He died in July 1996, aged eighty-four years. |
