Rough Magic is a multi-award-winning national theatre company. Since 1984 the company boasts 140 productions, with an ethos that is inherently collaborative and artist-led.
As part of Rough Magic’s 40th anniversary celebrations, Trinity’s School of English, the Drama Department, and the Samuel Beckett Centre will host a special series of discussions at the Trinity Long Room Hub this week.
The event is supported by the Trinity Foundation and Trust and will see the seven founding members of Rough Magic discuss their beginnings in Trinity’s Front Square.
The Rough Magic Theatre Company archive was donated to the Library of Trinity College Dublin in 2017 and an exhibition in 2019 (‘Rough Magic – a Living Archive’) traced the evolution of the company and the people at its centre.
Writing at the time of the exhibition launch, Professor Nicholas Grene, Trinity School of English, remembered these early beginnings:
“In the summer of 1984, I ran into Lynne Parker and Declan Hughes in Front Square; they had just graduated. ‘What are you up to?’ I asked. ‘We’re setting up a theatre company’. Hardly a surprise there: they had been mainstays of D.U. Players for the four years of their time as students of English. ‘What are you calling it?’ ‘Rough Magic’. I was immediately struck. It was simply the most brilliant name for a theatre company — at once ‘rough’ as in experimental, challenging, and at the same time magical, transformative, as all theatre should be. But it also showed their time in English had not been wasted: they had picked out Prospero’s line from The Tempest, ‘this rough magic / I here abjure’. The old magus might be abjuring rough magic, but the young Turks were about to create it.” (read more here).
In 2019, the Trinity Long Room Hub also appointed Rough Magic Theatre as its creative artists in residence in partnership with Trinity's Creative Arts research theme, Neurohumanities and the Global Brain Health Initiative. Their project ‘Choirs, Wellbeing and the Neurohumanities’ culminated in a performance by the Mornington Singers as part of the Trinity Long Room Hub 10th anniversary celebrations available to view here.
Further information:
Register here to attend ‘From Front Square to Centre Stage’ taking place at the Trinity Long Room Hub from the 5-6 April
Check out roughmagic40.netlify.app