Galway Arts Festival

The Revenant

World Premiere

By Patrick MacCabe

Directed by Joe O'Byrne

Music by Gavin Friday

with Perter Trant

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word as : a Person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

Life's but a walking shadow: if there is a world which defines him it is this one-of penumbra. Once he had a name: but its outline has blurred, belonging as it did to a world of sumptuous and saturated colour. He might have been a character bestriding John Hinde's sixties photographic heaven. But now he moves cautiously - as if pursued, hunted. As he probes his way across the hearts moorland landscape. Haunted by a monochrome vision of the past. Which, as Faulkner has written, being far from irrelevant, is not even past. In this supernova of darkness, The Revenant continues, nightly, to plead his case.

He might be lost in a Rembrandt etching. Only one thing remains constant: the grey colour of the tombstone they've erected over his name. And over those whose voices once lit up the little town. Which no longer exists. For the grey of this play is that which borders a memoriam card. Which this time, now read: the small town, the end of history