No Worst There Is None

Presented by The Stomach Box Theatre Company,
Poetry Ireland and The Dublin Theatre Festival.
Funded by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

No Worst There Is None
Directed by Dylan Tighe
Composed by Seán Óg
Scenography Phil MacMahon

A site-specific promenade piece staged in the magnificent surrounds of Newman House conjuring the nightmare world of the seminal Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he moves towards death. Set in the very house where Hopkins died in the 1880’s, No Worst There is None is a ground-breaking fusion of contemporary choral music, poetry and performance. The audience is invited to follow a live boys’ choir and performers around the building within a series of tableaux, installations and performance sequences. Featuring a new choral score, multiple installations and live electronics this is a radical contemporary reinvestigation of this lost historical episode, revealing the psyche of Hopkins in Dublin, as the country moves towards violent upheaval at the end of the 19th century.

2009 saw the production of a new multi-disciplinary project ‘No Worst There is None’, inspired by the dark sonnets of Gerald Manley Hopkins. The Irish Times Theatre Awards have nominated the show for Best Production, while Dylan Tighe has been nominated for Best Director & Seán Óg nominated for Best Sound Designer.

"One of the strangest and most beautiful shows of the Dublin Theatre Festival"
- Colm Toibín, New York Review of Books Blog.

"Really stunning, fantastic"
- Lynne Parker on Arts News, Lyric FM

"Powerful... impressive"
- Irish Independent

"Impressively accomplished"
- Irish theatre magazine

"A combination of walking tour, performance art, literary archaeology and audio-visual installation, this was a smart, sensitive and impeccably crafted piece of site- specific theatre...brave and new, and very, very good."
- Irish Independent

"Absorbing, unsettling...fascinating"
- Irish Times

****
- The Examiner