On the Town: Poets, playwrights and many admirers turned out at the Abbey Theatre this week to celebrate poet Seamus Heaney and his newest work, The Burial at Thebes.
Antigone, the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, which has been renamed in a new translation by the Nobel Prize winning poet, opened to a packed house.
"It is a lovely, lyrical lamentation," said poet Dennis O'Driscoll after the performance. "It's a timeless play re-presented for our own time."
"At last a contemporary translation that respects words," said poet Theo Dorgan.
"Powerful stuff - thought provoking - that says there are some fundamental values that no government should ever try to oppose," said barrister and poet John O'Donnell, who was there with his wife, Michelene O'Donnell.
"It has contemporary resonances about power and the price you pay for power," said playwright Bernard Farrell, who was there with his sister, Theresa Farrell.
Other poets at the opening included John F. Deane, Julie O'Callaghan, Peter Fallon and Matthew Hollis, whose book, Ground Water, is shortly being published by Bloodaxe. Also there was author Angela Bourke, of UCD's Modern Irish department, whose book about the sad fate of Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who worked at the New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s, is due out next month from Jonathan Cape publishers.
Others in attendance were playwright and Heaney's fellow Derryman Brian Friel, former artistic director of the Abbey Christopher Fitz-Simon and his wife, Anne Makower, film-maker and broadcaster Muiris Mac Conghail, actor Fiona O'Shaughnessy, The Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards judge Dolores Lyne, poet Liam Ó Muirthile, with his wife, Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín, and Gaby Smyth, chairman of Amnesty International in Ireland.