Cross Border Directions Theatre
Cross Border Directions Theatre is set up to create cross border opportunities for touring theatre ranging from classical to modern plays and from contemporary and new to experimental productions
Dummy by Brian McAvera
Dealing with Northern Ireland’s recent history, Dummy touches on wider conflicts past and present. It’s multi-media approach focuses on the victims of violence, employing video and still archive images evocative pop music from the 1970s and beyond, a newly commissioned electronic score, choreography, anarchic staging gives an urgent biting provocative passionate topicality.
Audience response to its stage reading – really strong; without any of the clichéd troubles plays’’, ‘’absolutely amazing…moving moments’’, gorgeous’’ and ‘’ the vision of the peace works, it sings’’.
Dummy is a play about the past. present and future of Northern Ireland and too many places elsewhere when conflict creates innocent victims’’.
Inspired by Jack Pakenham icon series of troubles paintings featuring aventriquest dummy and F.E William’s visceral Women of Belfast sculptures. It address the cost and legacy of conflict with unflinching honesty.
Dummy was developed with Arts Council of N.Ireland.
The Reckoning: Lorenzo Lotto.
Rehearsed Reading.
Friday 2nd October 2026.
Gt Gallery, Queen Street Belfast. Free.
Lotto: Ruairi Conaghan
The Reckoner: Mary McGurk
Director: Joe Devlin
Consultant: Michael Quinn
Financed by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
At the age of eighteen, Lorenzo Lotto upped and left Venice and decamped to Treviso, which was about thirty miles away. It's a half hour journey by train today but then it was rather more arduous. However, Lotto prospered. Within a few years he was being called a 'major painter', and he was producing both portraits, and religious works.
The Reckoning examines the conscience of an artist and what inspired him. It is a play about human suffering and emotional denial, his possible loves and losses and what historically drives a person to create in the first place.
