A Fool's Errand

Triskel Arts Centre and Unreal Cities present a major new work for narrator, three musicians and painter, featuring the recordings of 49 voices: family, friends and colleagues of writer Dermot Healy in a celebration of his seminal epic poem, A Fool's Errand. Commissioned from composer Nick Roth by Cairde Sligo Arts Festival in partnership with The Model, A Fool's Errand premiered in Sligo in July 2022.

‘In A Fool’s Errand, Dermot Healy’s masterful book-length poem, the sense that keens afterwards, and during, is the sense of hearing. Just thinking of the poem, not the words, just the sense of it, fills my inner ears with the geese’s uproar, with this rude, sonic turmoil in the sky‘ - Nick Roth 

A Fool’s Errand by Dermot Healy is reproduced by kind permission of the author’s Estate and The Gallery Press. This Spring '24 performance forms part of a National Tour, supported by the Arts Council Touring Work Award. 

Personnel are: 

Lalor Roddy - narrator 

Emer Mayock - flute, uilleann pipes 

Nick Roth - soprano saxophone, whistle 

Donal Siggins - bouzouki, live electronics 

Diarmuid Delargy - live painting 

Adrian Dunbar - director