Culture highlights 2024: Endgames in Galway and a bride by Ebbw Vale Steelworks.

Margaret Hannigan-Popp

Endgames in Galway

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that” observes Nell, her head poking out of a dustbin, on the Town Hall theatre stage. A highlight of the Galway Arts International Festival in 2025 was a new staging of the play, Endgame.

Never one for a barrel of laughs, Beckett chomps down on the absurdity of the human condition with a mordant wit that kind of fries your brain.

Clov and Hamm engage in a relentless crossfire of badinage. Dog whistles and shifting stepladders mock the pretences of power. This is a grey and sunless world.

Marie Mullen, delicately portrays Nell and brutally accentuates the cosmic pessimism.
Nothing can be more disorienting than to emerge from this rathaus into the clamour and craic of Galway festival time. But that’s Beckett!

Valleys Exhibition in Amgueddfa Cymru

A gorgeous, heart-breaking and life affirming love letter to the people of the Valleys. Arguably long overdue, this exhibition embraced those who lived, worked and died in the former coalfields of Wales.
I was moved by the deep empathy for poverty of place and the celebratory joy in individual stories.

A photograph of a bride is mesmerising. The delicate wafts of her veil echo in the clouds of vapour sitting on the chimney stacks in the background. She is standing in a field overlooking the Ebbw Vale Steelworks.

It conjures up the wedding scenes in ‘The Deer Hunter’.

The international importance of the Valleys culture and history is equally significant. We need more of this in Cymru!

A hooley of poetry, song and moving image

Saturday night of Luanasa in Ballygar Carnival. It’s my job to put on a community culture show.

Mary Turley Mc Grath read her poetry that memorialises the skill and toil of the stonemason ‘who shaped stone for the twelve-foot orchard wall from blocks blasted from Tebarney quarry,’.

Michael Nolan, local broadcaster, reflected on the life of Tom Kettle and the contemporary resonances of his writing from the battle of the Somme.

‘Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret scripture of the poor.’

Peju Awoywemi Tolulase and her grandchildren brought a message of hope for our rural village with a song melded from Yoruba soundscapes and Irish storytelling traditions.

Cynefin and Constellations

‘What’s occurrin?’ ‘Beth sy’n digwydd?’ I spent a couple of weeks wandering round Townhill asking people to write something for me. Fantastic response.

Every single person that I spoke to was polite, charming and supportive. A few worries.

Handwriting. Spelling. Was it good enough? Don’t worry. Just write. Make your mark.

The result led to creating a digital art piece titled ‘Streaming Stories On The Hill .’ I showed it outside the Gwent Boxing Club projected onto the steel fence.

‘Lovely. We need more of this,’ was one comment.

Yes, we do. More community cultural actions. More of this for 2025. Please.

Margaret Hannigan Popp is a creative writer who lives in Llantrisant . She collaborates with other artists and with communities to promote cultural wealth. https://www.mhanniganpopp.com/