Stephen Rea on stage with Neil Martin in The Third Policeman.
IRISH stage and screen legend Stephen Rea is coming to this year’s Earagail Arts Festival to narrate Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman with original music by Colin Reid.
This very unique performance will be staged at Letterkenny’s An Grianán Theatre on Sunday, July 22 and will be one of the theatrical highlights of this year’s 24th festival.
The musical backbone is provided by Reid on piano and assembled strings, featuring Neil Martin (West Ocean String Quartet), Becky Joslin and Niamh Fitzpatrick.
The Third Policeman is a murder thriller and hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender brief unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle, and a chilling fable of unending guilt.
The hero of the story and narrator (Rea) is a nameless young man with a wooden leg, who assists in a money-motivated killing, and, after trying to retrieve the stashed goods some time later, passes into a strange otherness – a place that superficially resembles the Irish countryside, but which casually disobeys the normal laws of How Things Work.
He encounters a small building of impermanent and shifting geometry which turns out to be the local barracks – it is here that he meets the policemen.
Stephen Rea worked at Dublin’s renowned Abbey Theatre before co-founding the Field Day Theatre in 1980. Hollywood took notice of him after his incredible performance in The Crying Game, V for Vendetta and Interview with the Vampire. Despite his film schedule, he still performs on stage regularly.
Belfast born and resident Colin Reid is a critically acclaimed musician who has performed all over the world both in his own right and with Brit Award-winning singer Eddi Reader.