About the Show

Synopsis

The Last Céilí is a new music theatre work for three women, drawing on historical accounts, archive voices, traditional songs and tunes to tell a story of famine, departure and survival. Set in rural Ireland during Black ’47, the piece begins on the night before emigration, as three young women gather for one final céilí, a last spree, an American Wake, before leaving home. From this simple theatrical frame, the work moves through three interwoven movements: the pressures of famine and the decision to leave, the sea voyage, and the first hard landing abroad. At its centre is the resilience of the women themselves and the force of a final communal gathering held in the face of rupture and loss.

Performed by Lisa Lambe who the Irish Times described as “the finest singer and actor of her generation”, plus a fiddle player and a concertina player, The Last Céilí draws on the céilí as one of Ireland’s oldest communal performance forms, where song, storytelling, music and dance meet. It takes its rhythm from that tradition: songs and stories of loss, longing and leaving break open into tunes, dances and moments of fierce, unruly joy. Spoken text, direct address, puppetry, scene work, live music and song are folded into a fluid theatrical structure. The performers move between character, narrator, witness and musician, allowing the work to hold both intimacy and scale. 

Playing in and around a 20 foot kitchen table, and using microphones and live looping to build layered sound, the production conjures the force, drive and lift of a much larger céilí band while retaining the raw immediacy of three women sharing story and music in real time. The céilí is well documented as a deeply rooted Irish and Gaelic social form bringing together music, song, storytelling and later dance. At approximately 70 minutes, with a strong musical spine and concise spoken text, the work is designed to be theatrically vivid, tourable and adaptable across a range of contexts. The Last Céilí is not conceived as heritage presentation, but as a contemporary live event in which music, testimony and performance illuminate a story of women’s endurance, migration and collective memory.

NightVisiting

The Last Céilí has grown out of several years of research, performance, and artistic enquiry through Lisa Lambe’s Nightvisiting project, originally commissioned by the National Famine Museum in Strokestown, County Roscommon. Since 2022, Nightvisiting has toured across Ireland, America, and the UK, bringing audiences into an intimate world of songs, tunes, folklore, emigration stories, and forgotten ballads. Drawing on Lisa’s work with the National Folklore Collection and her research in Irish folklore, that wider body of work created the foundation for a deeper enquiry into famine era departure, women’s experience, and the rituals of leave taking. From that foundation, The Last Céilí has been developed as a distinct new piece through archival research, music exploration, dramaturgical development, and live performance enquiry.

Why this story now

The Last Céilí is shaped by the 180th anniversary of Black ’47, the worst year of the Great Famine, when mass emigration redrew the lives of Irish families and reshaped communities across Canada, America, England, Scotland, and Australia. At its heart, the work is about what happens when home can no longer hold you. It places women’s experience at the centre of that story, and uses live music not as accompaniment but as the means by which memory, grief, energy, and endurance are carried forward. Rooted in a specific Irish history, it offers a contemporary act of remembrance about hunger, rupture, migration, and survival, and about the ties that hardship forged between Ireland and the wider world.