The Last Céilí is a new 90 minute music theatre event for three women, drawing on historical accounts, archive voices, traditional songs and tunes to tell a story of famine, departure and survival. It is led by singer, actor, writer and folklorist Lisa Lambe, with East Clare concertina player and singer Eva Carroll, and Dublin fiddle player and sean nós dancer Caoimhe Ní Mhaolagáin.
Set in rural Ireland during Black ’47, the piece begins on the night before emigration. Three young women gather around a long kitchen table for one last céilí. A last spree. An American Wake. By morning, they will leave the house, the fields, the neighbours, the graves of their family, and the life that made them.
From this simple theatrical frame, the work opens into three interwoven movements: the pressure to leave, the crossing, and the first hard choices of life abroad. These are carried through scene, song, testimony and direct address rather than literal reconstruction. At its centre is a simple but difficult act: the women choose to go together. They will not scatter. They will not leave one of their own behind.
The Last Céilí is carried primarily through music. Approximately 80 percent of the performance is made up of songs and tunes, with concise spoken text used to frame the history, turn the story and give the women their distinct voices. The performers move between character, narrator, witness and musician. At times they are the young women inside the story. At times they turn out to the audience and speak the hard facts on which the story sits.
The production draws on the céilí as a deeply rooted Irish and Gaelic social form where song, story, music and dance meet. This tradition is held in the performers’ own practice: Lisa’s work in folklore, song and theatre; Eva’s East Clare concertina style and traditional singing; and Caoimhe’s fiddle playing, sean nós dance and inherited Dublin music culture. Songs and stories of loss, longing and departure break open into tunes, dances and moments of fierce, unruly joy.
The production plays in and around a 20 foot kitchen table. Microphones and live looping allow three performers to build layered sound in real time, creating the drive and lift of a much larger céilí band while keeping the raw immediacy of three women sharing story and music in front of an audience.
In the final 20 minutes, the performance opens into a live céilí led by the three women. The audience is drawn into the social energy of the gathering as story, testimony and farewell become a shared act of music, movement and survival. The degree of participation will be shaped with each presenter according to the venue, audience and local context.
The Last Céilí is vivid, tourable and adaptable across a range of venues and contexts. It is not a heritage presentation. It is a contemporary live event in which music, testimony, theatre and communal dance illuminate a story of women’s endurance, migration and collective memory.
The Last Céilí has grown from 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 been presented across Ireland, the United States and the United Kingdom, bringing audiences into an intimate world of songs, tunes, folklore, emigration stories and forgotten ballads.
Lisa’s work with the National Folklore Collection and the Irish Traditional Music Archive created the foundation for a deeper enquiry into famine era departure, women’s experience and the rituals of leave taking.
The Last Céilí is a distinct new work. It extends the research and performance method of NightVisiting into a larger dramatic form for three performers.
The Great Irish Famine emptied houses. It did not empty Irish culture.
The people who left carried songs, tunes, stories, language, humour, faith, political memory and ways of gathering. Those traditions took root in Canada, the United States and elsewhere. They were sustained and transformed by the diaspora and, over generations, helped shape Ireland in return.
The Last Céilí begins at the moment that exchange starts: the final gathering before departure.
Rooted in a specific history, the work speaks to contemporary questions of migration, belonging, cultural inheritance and the ways communities survive profound disruption.