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 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 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 out into a live céilí dance led by the three women. The audience is drawn into the gathering. What begins as story, testimony and farewell becomes a shared act of music, movement and survival.
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 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.
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.