Sean Walsh

I’m asking myself how do I write to a man who is so gifted with words? Your book, Notes on the Past Imperfect, spoke right to my heart. I cried a lot reading it but also smiled at parts. The one thing that came across powerfully to me was your deep love for Jenny and her love for you –...

I climb the stairs to the attic into an empty room full of Might Have Been… Cross to the slanting ceiling, lever open the Velox window… look out across Joycean rooftops towards Dublin Bay and London… so far away.   Sean Walsh.  Summer ’19.      

When she took off I gave her a month, ‘month at the outside… She’ll be back, nothing surer. Head hanging, down at the mouth, sure – but glad to be home, for all that: safe, secure, sheltered. Oh yeah, London’ll cure her cough…   Oh, Jenny, Jenny!.. What are you at, a tall a tall, daughter mine?.. I didn’t give...

All 4: The MacMaster Piece. Wee Nudge. Pen Pal. New Leaf. COMMENTS: “I just watched “Pen Pal,” “New Leaf,” “Wee Nudge” and “The McMaster Piece,” and I really think they are amazing. Moving and engrossing. I could listen to you for hours tell stories. The filming, production, and delivery are first-class, really really impressive. “The McMaster Piece” is especially poignant...

Here is a play that while set in the context of the passion of Jesus belongs to any and every age. A group of men used to power work to ensure that they remain in power and that an individual who threatens their power is eliminated. They are so committed to their own version of the truth that they will stop...

CAIAPHAS Yes?.. What is it? JUDAS I, I come to return your bribe. I - I have sinned in betraying the blood of an innocent man... CAIAPHAS What is that to us? It concerns you only. JUDAS You will take back the money you paid me. CAIAPHAS No, we will not! JUDAS But you must... CAIAPHAS To what purpose? Alleviate...

A priest from the Redempt’rist came to give us the School Retreat at the beginning of Lent… Hell for all eternity – you could hear a pin drop – then  the mercy of God that knows no limits…   (Fran Muldoon hasn’t cursed since and Hughie Crosby broke it off with Rose White…)   And I went to him for...

 (The lay apostolate is a participation in the saving mission of the Church itself. Through their baptism and confirmation, all are commissioned to that apostolate by the Lord Himself. – Vatican II Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.)   One year on from his election Pope Francis has already changed the image of the papacy, and modelled an entirely...

Plays are highly recommended: Irish Catholic, 6/2/’14. Dear Editor, In the issue of January 16, Peter Costello reviewed At the Praetorium: Good Friday Revisited, a trilogy of one act plays by Sean Walsh, the former head of drama on radio at RTÉ. The review remarks “it is always difficult to see how plays might be in performance, but these are...

1966. A single typewritten page of A 4.  A lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, penned the following:  Department of English, Queen’s University, Belfast.   1966.   VEIL by Sean Walsh   The idea of approaching the significance of the Passion obliquely, through the experiences of those who might be regarded as enemies, is good theatre; and the actual denouement...

“Write With A Fire In Your Heart…” “First and foremost write the book you want to write, not the one you – or others – think will sell. You’re going to be working on this project for a LONG time, believe me, so you’d better love it. Write with a fire in your heart and you’ll create something special, something...

At the start of the 80’s the opportunity of producing  my play, VEIL,  for  RTE Radio One came my way. I seized on it with gusto!  (I was a Producer/Director in the radio Drama Department.) Adapting what was essentially a stage play for radio was quite a challenge, entailing edits and re-writes. The sound supervision team – Anton Timoney and...

ON THE NIGHT OF March 27, ’13, at All Hollows, Dublin 9, the curtain came down on the third and last performance of At the Praetorium. (Last but hopefully not final!) Later, Sean Walsh reluctantly agreed to a Press Interview. (He is quite shy, really, hates beating his own drum…) So there he was, on the rostrum, mineral water to...

As it happened that week there was a visiting friar from Down Under staying at Merchants’ Quay. I cannot remember his name but I do know that he was keen on Drama, had a Doctorate or Master’s degree in English Lit. At community recreation one night – after sitting through a performance of VEIL – he expressed his enthusiasm in...

circa 1966. I was one of the Merchants’ Quay community, Dublin 8, and editor of Assisi, the monthly magazine of the Irish Franciscans. Another member of the community, Fr. Hugh Daly, was in charge of the FMU – the Franciscan Missionary Union with responsibility for St Anthony’s Hall, adjacent to the church. For much of the year it was a...

(Work in Progress) My script. Herewith relevant scenes, snatches of dialogue, monologue… Insights… ***** Storyline: a young priest, member of a religious community, goes AWL… *****  In the cloister, behind closed doors, drawn curtains, priests and brothers meet to discuss, confer, conjecture, reckon… Shock absorbers. *****  A corridor. Community chanting in background… Mark, the Prior, and Brother Declan, the sacristan…...

A Drama in two acts set against the backdrop of the first Good Friday. Herewith a sample scene. Taste, savour… AZARIAS: He is not innocent. VERONICA: Then what is he guilty of? Doing good? Teaching love, justice, truth? Speaking words that never before came from the lips of man? Is he guilty of some transgression because he gave her dead...

Dear Sean, Hello again (even though you nearly didn’t recognise me last night – understandably – it’s been a long time…) Thanks to you ( and all involved) for transporting us all to the Roman Praetorium last night. It was a fascinating, thought provoking, experience! Just what I needed on Spy Wednesday. I guess we all have our favourites –...

PENNY FOR YOUR TRAVELS.  (Reviews.) Memories which evoked my own childhood and probably that of most men, be they from Louth or Lesotho. The author makes very good use of setting. Father, son and dog out for a winter walk “the countryside still frosted, crunching underfoot”. Constant chatter from the son tells us a lot about the father-son relationship. He...

Irish Times.  11/03/1986 The late Howard Kinlay looks back to an unusual play heard recently on RTE One: Emma (in “Far Side of the Moon”) has been married 20 years. Her husband stays out late most nights, drinking with the boys or chasing a bird, she presumes. And she sits at home, “me and the four walls,” smoking too much,...

AT THE PRAETORIUM A play in one act by Sean Walsh The Praetorium?.. The Roman fortress in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. Centre and symbol of Roman colonisation. As such, hated and despised by the local inhabitants. In the dungeons beneath three prisoners lie in chains, awaiting execution – among them, Barabbas… while above, in morning sunlight, at the Seat of...

The events of the first Good Friday from a Roman perspective. Not an angel or a saint in sight!.. A dramatisation of the facts as recorded in the Passion Narrative of Matthew. Enacted at the Praetorium, the fortress in Jerusalem that was the centre and symbol of Roman occupation. How will the Governor of Judaea react when a prisoner is...

Set in a grotty bedsitter in the London of the late 60’s, THE DREAMERS centres on two Irish immigrant labourers, Shay and Liam: the former a maturing tree, the latter a mere sapling… They have much in common, little in common… Both are dreamers of dreams: we come to realise that their foremost dream – of making it, returning solvent...

Evening. Dublin suburb. Emma alone in a semi-detached… Ever alone. Her marriage on a knife edge. Thin, thin ice. Trapped. No way out. Until the day she meets by chance the woman who is to offer her a new lease of life, restore her self confidence, open doors for her she did not even know existed. Lisa, the stranger who...

Evening. He gets home, checks his voice mail as is his wont… listens, bemused, to various recorded messages… tenses, frowns as he hears a far-away voice from a distant past: his estranged wife speaking to, pleading with, her daughter, Jenny, now well into her teens… And so begins a chain reaction…

Ireland in the early 80’s. No civil divorce. No exit. Cul-de-sac. No way out of a broken marriage… Shock. Aftershock. Wave after wave… As he comes to realise that his wife has gone, gone for good, he begins to talk – to himself, to his nine-years-old daughter, to a “local in his local,” to a parish sage, to a solicitor/lawyer,...

Dad in Dublin takes a call from daughter in London triggering in him a chain reaction: he recalls her childhood, adolescence, young womanhood… their relationship over the years. A love story, then, of a different kind. Dad Jenny. Any Dad, any daughter. Any where, any time… “But for all our rows and fallings-out, I love you, Dad. No matter what....

ON THE NIGHT OF March 27 at All Hollows, Dublin 9, the curtain came down on the third and last performance of At the Praetorium. (Last but hopefully not final!) Later, Sean Walsh reluctantly agreed to a Press Conference. (He is quite shy, really, hates beating his own drum…) So there he was, on the rostrum, mineral water to hand,...

Jerusalem. Beneath the Roman Praetorium, in the dungeons, three men lie in chains, awaiting execution: Dismas, a thief, perhaps the greatest thief in all history – who stole Paradise even as he suffered the death penalty. Gestas, a man who may die as he has lived. And Jesus bar Abbas, held for murder and sedition, of whom so little is...

Scenes from an Irish boyhood. Not so much Voyage round my Father as Travels with my Dad… A man looks back at his formative years, early adolescence… Snatches from the past… fragments from a world long forgotten… A kind of mosaic rather than a formal memoir… Centred around not one but two moments of poignant sundering…

Emma has begun treatment for her alcohol addiction at a Substance Abuse clinic – much to her husband’s relief. When it is put to him that he should visit, participate in one of the sessions, he hesitates, then agrees rather reluctantly… What lay ahead on the morrow – for her, for him?..

Dear Sean, I have been reading “Notes on the Past Imperfect.” Heart-wrenching to read, assuredly difficult to write, but you fashioned an extraordinary story from that imperfect past with great courage and honesty. An amazing achievement to forge a unity from the six stories and to do it while remaining true to the monologue/dialogue format with such consistency. Well done!...

The following review appeared in the Irish Independent on 30 march 2013. Good Friday is, for believers in the Christ-story, the most dramatic day in world history. Two thousands years on it is still written about, remembered, re-enacted. We know the story so well — or do we? In this new book of three short plays — At the Praetorium...