I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls
Mon 29 Jul 2002 – Sat 17 Aug 2002
Writer – Ade Morris
Director – Ade Morris
Designer – Libby Watson
Lighting Designer – Lawrence T Doyle
Cast includes: Shaun Hennessy, Ann Marcuson, Matthew Morrison
The play was inspired by a recent broadcast of Bryan Gallgher’s beautiful original short story on Radio 4’s Home Truths programme. The story catches perfectly an atmosphere of patient enduring love on a starving Northern Irish hillside as an old woman sings passionately her song of youth and hope to an empty hearth.
I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls is a simple, innocent, haunting aria from the opera The Bohemian Girl. One of the few operas by a British composer in the 250 years between Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten to achieve any significant success, it was for about seventy years the most widely performed opera in English in the English- speaking world.