A week of drama at Theatre at the Mill

This month Theatre at the Mill in Newtownabbey will be hosting the Ulster Drama Festival.

The festival will get under way on Monday May 15 with Bangor Drama Club performing Lovers by Brian Friel.

This poignant and funny play consists of two stories. In the first a young couple, Joe and Mag, are preparing for their final school exams and, because of Mag’s pregnancy, their imminent wedding. In the second story the lovers are older, but their passion, at first, is no less real. Their courtship is soon thwarted by Hannah’s crafty. bed-bound mother.

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The Clarence Players perform The Mai by Marina Corr on Tuesday May 16. An accomplished beautiful 40 year old woman, The Mai, has always sought an exceptional life. Robert, her cellist husband, has always felt stifled by The Mai’s ideals of perfection. The Mai is an epic tale of love and loss, of elusive dreams shattered by vulgar but inescapable reality.

The Holywood Players perform Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones on Wednesday May 17. All is not well in the Humble Hive. 35 year old Felix Humble is a Cambridge astrophysicist in search of a unified field theory. Following the sudden death of his father, Felix returns to his middle-England home and his difficult and demanding mother, and soon realises that his search for unity must include his own chaotic home life.

Rosemary Drama Group perform Blue Stockings by Jessica Swayle on Thursday May 18. At the first college in Britain to admit women, the ladies study ferociously to match their male peers grade for grade. Yet while the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being “blue stocking” – an unnatural educated woman.

Theatre 3 Newtownabbey perform Heroes by Gerald Sibleyras translated by Tom Stoppard on Friday May 19. In this very funny play, three World War 1 veterans pass their monotony-filled days in a military hospital by engaging in verbal battles of long-forgotten military campaigns, grumbling about the staff and reflecting on their lives.

Wexford Drama Group will round off the festival by performing Portia Coughlan by Marina Carr on Saturday May 20.

Attend every evening of the drama festival for £60 and £50 (Conc).