Produced by Galway International Arts Festival and Jen Coppinger in association with Poetry Ireland. The production, a stage adaptation by Stanley Townsend and Sam Yates from the poem by Paul Muldoon, has played Galway International Arts Festival (2018), The Gate Theatre, Dublin (2019) and the Irish Rep Theatre (2020). 

 
Incantata was written by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon about the great artist, and his former partner, Mary Farl Powers, who died at the very young age of 43. This world premiere stage production imagines a whole life that is based on Paul Muldoon’s writing and it goes beyond that too. It’s a story full of love, full of heartache, full of sadness, and with bitingly funny humour too.

The production features a haunting soundtrack by composer Teho Teardo, who is well known to audiences in Ireland for his music with Enda Walsh including Ballyturk, Arlington and most recently Grief is the Thing with Feathers; set design by Rosanna Vize; lighting design by the multi-award winning designer Paul Keogan; cutting-edge video design by Jack Phelan and sound design by Sinéad Diskin.

Press

THE NEW YORK TIMES (Critics’ Choice) | Maya Phillips “Spellbinding… lyrical… “Incantata” is unique and beautiful… its life onstage has a peculiar charm, a touch of magic.”

THEATRE REVIEWS LIMITED | David Roberts “One of the most powerful theatrical experiences of the current off-Broadway season.”

FRONT ROW CENTRE | Holli Harms “This is theatricality when it is smart. This is a deconstruction of words and reconstruction of life. This is an ingenious production… It is sublime.”

THE THEATRE SCENE | Eugene Paul “A bravura performance by outstanding Stanley Townsend exhaustively aided by the constant fluidity of director Sam Yates’s hard pressed ingenuity.”

DC METRO | Deb Miller “an emotion-packed elegy to the enchantment of love, life, and art by Irish poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon…Townsend’s intense tour-de-force delivery.”

ONE MAGAZINE | Lisa Del Rosso “Written by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon, directed with sensitivity and spirit by Sam Yates, and performed by the astonishing Stanley Townsend, it is a tour-de-force, a challenging work of language and love attempting to bridge the divide between life and death.”

TALKIN’ BROADWAY | David Hurst “An emotionally gripping performance by Townsend, a commanding actor with a riveting presence. He and Yates have transformed the poem into a multi-sensory experience, with cryptic music by Teho Teardo, an eclectic set and costuming by Rosanna Vize, evocative lighting by Paul Keogan, edgy video design by Jack Phelan, and haunting sound design by Sinéad Diskin.”

4**** THE GUARDIAN | Helen Meany “Stanley Townsend brings the poet’s searing love poetry to life in a visually stunning show boasting some Beckettian touches.”

4**** THE IRISH TIMES | Peter Crawley “Here, then, in all its display and transformations, is grief as an artform.”

4**** IRISH EXAMINER | Padraic Killeen “What makes this a remarkable piece of theatre, however, is director Sam Yates’s frenzied use of sound and vision to complement, and foil, Muldoon’s raw and riveting lament. It all makes for a brilliantly unstable experience, the play teetering between order and disorder, as Townsend’s wild cacophony of memory fragments struggles to extract from life some sense of a redemptive unity.”

THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT | Emer O’Kelly “The performance is a monumental collaboration so perfect (glowingly directed by Sam Yates, designed by Rosanna Vize with Teho Teardo’s music, Jack Phelan’s video and lit by Paul Keogan with Sinead Diskin’s sound), that the poem’s kaleidoscopic images do more than freeze themselves individually into the mind… Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF) seems to have a genius in its choice of co-production. In this case, it’s Jen Coppinger and Poetry Ireland. And, of course, the electrifying Stanley Townsend.”

RTÉ ARENA on Incantata “Amazing performance. Amazing visuals. Beautiful. Highly recommended.”

GALWAY CITY TRIBUNE on Incantata “A dizzying journey through grief and loss…the dream production team.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES | Scott Heller ‘That festival, and the Galway theater scene in general, has been a major launching pad for such playwrights as Martin McDonagh (“The Beauty Queen of Leenane”) and Enda Walsh (“Misterman,” “Once”)… Another festival highlight: a video-ornamented stage adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning poet Paul Muldoon’s “Incantata.” It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ll hear more about all three plays, as Irish work has been regularly presented on the London and New York stages, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Irish Arts Center.”

THE IRISH TIMES | Deirdre Falvey Festival roundup “One of the prides of this year’s festival…a glorious burst of poetic intensity in Stanley Townsend’s magnificent grief- and rage-laden performance in Paul Muldoon’s Incantata produced with Jen Coppinger.”