The Last Céilí
A live céilíplay for three women, set on the last night before they depart from famine Ireland.
Céilí: ( Kay-lee ) A night visit; social gathering of music, storytelling, conversation, remembrance and celebration.
Around a kitchen table, through song, tune and spoken word, they carry us from the wild energy of a final night together into the famine roads, the coffin ships, and the first hard landing abroad.
The Last Céilí is a live music theatre work about leaving, survival, and the fierce will to begin again.
Part céilí and part play it draws on historical accounts, archive voices, traditional songs and tunes, and is the lastest in Lisa's Nightvisitng series of shows, first commisioned and perfromed at Ireland's National Famine Museum in 2022 .
Set in rural Ireland during Black ’47, the work follows the forces that drive people from home and out towards the sea, and the fight to survive beyond it. Performed by an actor/ singer, a fiddle player and a concertina player, it is shaped by the pulse of the céilí: songs and stories of loss and leaving break open into tunes, dances and moments of fierce, unruly joy.
The Last Céilí is in development for touring presentation, partnership and co production conversations.
For presenters and partners
For Canadian presenters and partners
The Last Céilí is being developed with a view to presentation in Canada in 2027, in the context of the 180th anniversary of Black ’47 and the famine migration that reshaped lives and communities across the Atlantic. Rooted in a specific Irish history, the work is designed to connect clearly with contemporary audiences through live music, story, ritual and performance. We welcome conversations with Canadian theatres, festivals, universities, museums, heritage sites and Irish cultural organisations interested in presentation, residency, audience engagement and community partnership.
Why it may resonate in CanadaThe Last Céilí speaks to a history that profoundly shaped Ireland and Canada alike. It approaches famine and emigration not as distant memorial, but as lived experience carried in song, story, ritual and family memory. The work offers Canadian presenters a vivid contemporary Irish performance that connects the history of Black ’47 to enduring questions of migration, belonging, resilience and cultural inheritance.
For American presenters and partners
The Last Céilí is being developed for international presentation from 2027 onwards. Shaped by the history of Black ’47 and the departures that carried Irish lives across the Atlantic, the work combines live music, story, ritual and performance in a form designed to speak directly to contemporary audiences. We welcome conversations with American theatres, festivals, universities, museums and Irish cultural organisations interested in presentation, residency, audience engagement and partnership.
Why it may resonate in the United StatesThe Last Céilí opens a direct line to the histories of famine, departure and reinvention that shaped Irish American life across generations. Through song, story and live performance, it approaches that history not as memorial alone, but as something still carried in family memory, cultural identity and the shared experience of migration. It offers American presenters a contemporary Irish work with emotional clarity, musical force and strong audience connection.
About the Show
Synopsis
The Last Céilí is a new music theatre work for three women, drawing on historical accounts, archive voices, traditional songs and tunes to tell a story of famine, departure and survival. Set in rural Ireland during Black ’47, the piece begins on the night before emigration, as three young women gather for one final céilí, a last spree, an American Wake, before leaving home.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 the resilience of the women themselves and the force of a final communal gathering held in the face of rupture and loss.
Performed by Lisa lambe who the Irish Times described as “the finest singer and actor of her generation.”, plus a fiddle player and a concertina player, The Last Céilí draws on the céilí as one of Ireland’s oldest communal performance forms, where song, storytelling, music and dance meet. It takes its rhythm from that tradition: songs and stories of loss, longing and leaving break open into tunes, dances and moments of fierce, unruly joy. Spoken text, direct address, puppetry, scene work, live music and song are folded into a fluid theatrical structure. The performers move between character, narrator, witness and musician, allowing the work to hold both intimacy and scale.
Playing in and around a kitchen table, and using microphones and live looping to build layered sound, the production conjures the force, drive and lift of a much larger céilí band while retaining the raw immediacy of three women sharing story and music in real time. The céilí is well documented as a deeply rooted Irish and Gaelic social form bringing together music, song, storytelling and later dance. At approximately 70 minutes, with a strong musical spine and concise spoken text, the work is designed to be theatrically vivid, tourable and adaptable across a range of contexts. The Last Céilí is not conceived as heritage presentation, but as a contemporary live event in which music, testimony and performance illuminate a story of women’s endurance, migration and collective memory.
NightVisiting
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.
Why this story now
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.
A small selection of songs
Music is the dramatic engine of The Last Céilí. Traditional songs and tunes do not sit beside the story. They drive it. The show is built through the relationship between voice, fiddle, concertina and rhythm, moving from the energy of a final communal gathering into lament, crossing and survival. Live looping allows three performers to create layered sound and a wider musical world while keeping the event immediate and human.
The voices behind the work
The Last Céilí draws on eyewitness accounts, songs, folklore and historical testimony from the famine years. These are not presented as background alone, but as source voices that help shape the emotional and dramatic world of the piece.
"A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag out the corpse of her child, a girl about twelve, perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones. In another house, within 500 yards of the cavalry station at Skibbereen, the dispensary doctor found seven wretches lying, unable to move under the same cloak, one had been dead for many hours, but the others were unable to move themselves or the corpse."
“A poor forlorn girl, hearing that her mother was seized with cholera, hastened to the rescue, alas! too late, but with a deep religious and filial devotion, desiring at least a decent interment for her dear departed parent, was driven to the shocking necessity of carrying the corpse upon her own back for three long miles to this very union, so that she might make her wants known, and simply obtain a coffin from the relieving officer."
Design concept and visual references
The Last Céilí is staged in and around a kitchen table, with the performers, their instruments and microphones fully visible. The setting evokes rural Ireland in the mid 19th century, while the use of looping and live sound keeps the event contemporary in its theatrical language. The visual world is spare, flexible and tourable, allowing the performers and the music to remain at the centre.
Presentation details
Running time
Approximately 70 minutes
Company
3 performers, 1 technician, 1 company manager
Form
Live music theatre with spoken text, song, puppetry and direct address
Music
Performed live by singer, fiddle player and concertina player
Staging
Designed for flexibility, playing in and around a kitchen table with microphones and live looping. The work is suited to proscenium and studio theatres as well as non traditional playing spaces.
Technical approach
We anticipate touring with our own sound and lighting system, designed to support small to medium scale venues. In larger venues, this would be supplemented as needed by the presenting venue’s in house equipment and infrastructure.
Venue types
Theatres, festivals, university settings, museums, heritage sites and civic spaces
Scale
Intimate in means, with the energy and sound of a larger céilí band
Audience engagement
Workshops, conversations, story gathering and partner events can be shaped with presenters and host organisations
Development pathway
2023 to 2025
The Last Céilí has grown out of several years of research, performance and artistic enquiry through Lisa Lambe’s Nightvisiting project. That earlier work, shaped through archive material, song, folklore and lived testimony, created the foundation for a deeper exploration of famine, departure, women’s voices and the rituals of leave taking.
2025 to 2026
The new work is now in active development through archival research, music exploration, text development and dramaturgical shaping. Core musical, textual and staging material is taking form, with touring practicality and technical simplicity being considered from the outset.
Autumn 2026
A creation residency in Ireland will bring the work fully into the room, focusing on the final running order, musical structure and staging language. Small audience sharings will help test pacing, clarity, intimacy and technical footprint.
From 2027
Presentation and touring conversations are continuing in parallel with development, with the work being shaped for flexible presentation across theatres, festivals, university settings, museums and heritage contexts.
A possible presentation window
Late May would offer a particularly resonant presentation window for The Last Céilí in Canada. On 31 May 1847, forty ships lay off Grosse Île carrying around 12,500 famine emigrants, one of the starkest moments in the history of Irish arrival in Canada. A late May presentation would place the work close to that shared historical moment, while also aligning with the wider season of famine remembrance.
Audience engagement and partnership
Alongside performance, The Last Céilí can support a range of presenter and partner activity, shaped to local context. This may include artist talks, workshops in song, story and performance, conversations around migration and memory, small stakeholder or donor events, and local story gathering with community partners, archives or heritage organisations. The aim is not to add activity for its own sake, but to create meaningful local connection around the work.
Interactive Workshops
To support the main performances, we can offer practical workshops in traditional Irish singing, music, and storytelling. These sessions can be tailored for community choirs, student groups, local musicians, or mixed public participants. Depending on the presenter’s needs, workshops can focus on song interpretation and vocal style, ornamentation and phrasing, narrative craft, or the relationship between story and melody. Sessions can be delivered as a single 90 minute workshop, a short series across a residency week, or an open masterclass format with audience observation. Where helpful, we can link the workshop content directly to themes and source material in The show, so participation deepens the experience of the performance rather than sitting beside it.
Special Event Hosting
To support the main performances, we can also offer private performances of selected music from the show in a venue of your choice. These can be informal and close range, designed for small groups such as donors, board members, partners, or key community stakeholders. The format can be music only, or music with a short conversation about the project, the source material, and the local participation strands. These moments can take place off site, in a private home, a cultural space, a university setting, or a civic venue, depending on what best suits your relationships.
Family Letters and Stories
In each host city we will reach out to Irish diaspora networks, working with the Irish Embassy and Consulates and with local Irish cultural organisations. We will invite people to share family stories, letters, photographs, and small details of emigration and arrival. With permission, these stories can be used as part of the lead up to the performance, helping the local audience see their own city and its Irish history inside the work. The longer term aim is to build a digital online resource that reflects the audience stories of the many people who have experienced the show.
Local Conversation Podcast
Ahead of each city visit we will record a short 30 minute podcast with a local historian or a representative of the Irish diaspora community. Each episode will explore the wake tradition, and how it shaped community life in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the context of emigration. Where relevant, we will widen the lens to include other communities and cultures with comparable leave taking rituals, so the project speaks beyond Irish experience while staying rooted in it.
Team
The Last Céilí is led by singer, writer and performer Lisa Lambe and theatre director, writer and designer Graham McLaren, in collaboration with a small team of musicians and makers. Together they bring extensive experience across music, theatre, new writing, touring production and live performance.
Lisa Lambe
Irish singer, actor and folklorist. The Irish Times called her “the finest singer and actor of her generation.” A leading presence at the Abbey and the Gate. International concerts at Radio City New York, Red Rocks and Glastonbury. Central to the global success of Celtic Woman with Grammy and Emmy nominations and six Billboard World Artist of the Year awards. Creator of the Nightvisiting series, a work shaped by her recent MA in Irish Folklore and inspired by her work with the ITMA and National Folklore Collection, UCD. First commissioned by the National Famine Museum, Strokestown Park in 2022, Nightvisiting has since been presented at Triskel Arts Centre, Liverpool Irish Festival, TradFest at The Séamus Ennis Arts Centre, West Cork Music and the Irish Cultural Centre, London
Graham McLaren
Graham McLaren has three decades of work across Europe, North America and Australia. He served as Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre, from 2016 to 2021, and earlier as Associate Director at the National Theatre of Scotland. He founded Theatre Babel in 1994 and led the renewal of Perth Theatre from 2004 to 2008. His productions have been seen at International Festivals, and National Theatres across the globe. He has created more than 70 productions across four continents.
Michael Mushalla
Michael Mushalla is an internationally recognised creative producer, artist manager and agent based in the United States Virgin Islands. In a classic mail room to board room trajectory, he began at Columbia Artists Management Inc. in 1981, later serving as Vice President and as a member of the Board of Directors for more than a decade. In 1998 he founded Double M Arts & Events, LLC, which he continues to lead today. Across a long international career, he has represented and produced work with major artists and organisations including the Mark Morris Dance Group, the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Scotland, Scott Silven, Vox Motus. From scale as broad as one man performances by Al Pacino, to The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Michael is an active member of the International Society for the Performing Arts, North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents, and the Western Arts Alliance.