A big win for 'Girls and Dolls'

ArtScape: There haven't been many women honoured by the Stewart Parker Trust over the years, but all three winners of the trust's awards this week were female: two Northern Ireland writers and an 80-year-old poet.

Lisa McGee won the trust's new playwright bursary, which has the largest prize fund, of about €10,000, for her play Girls and Dolls, produced by Tinderbox Theatre Company, which toured in the North late last year. McGee was born in Derry and studied drama at Queen's. She was a writer with Tinderbox, and took up a residency with the Royal National Theatre Company in September. Girls and Dolls, about two estranged, damaged women whose lives are bound after a past tragedy, was also nominated for best new play in The Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards.

The BBC Northern Ireland radio drama award went to Belfast's Rosemary Jenkinson for The Bonefire, produced by Rough Magic at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival. An ex-civil servant from Belfast who studied medieval literature at Durham University, she has also written poetry and short stories. Both Northern writers have Rough Magic connections, as McGee is a member of the company's Seeds 3 initiative for emerging theatre practitioners.

The BBC Northern Ireland Irish language drama award went to Máire Mhac an tSaoi, best known as an academic and poet, but obviously making a dramatic impact. The award was for her half-hour monologue, Fearg (Anger), part of the Seven Deadly Sins strand on the Tuesday Play on RTÉ Radio 1, produced by Cathal Póirtéir.

All three writers were at the awards ceremony at the Abbey on Wednesday, including Mhac an tSaoi and her husband Conor Cruise O'Brien. Frank McGuinness - a trustee of the Stewart Parker Trust - spoke about Parker's writing as being "full of astonishing courage" and "both fearless and funny". The trustees were not all in agreement on the winners, he said, and wished they had "more money to reward more people, but we don't and that's it". He congratulated all the new playwrights for having "the gumption and stamina to write a play and get it on stage". He and co-trustee Jennifer Johnston praised John Fairleigh for his unstinting work with the trust in promoting Irish writing. As well as the annual awards for emerging Irish playwrights, presented in Belfast and Dublin on alternate years, the trust organises a writing workshop in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, with Graham Whybrow from the Royal Court; publishes and translates plays (Fairleigh's particular interest has seen Irish plays translated into Romanian); and a visit by the winner to the Sibu theatre festival in August.

A row broke out in the audience after last year's reading in Romania of Monged by the Stewart Parker bursary winner, Gary Duggan. A mystified Duggan looked on. Apparently, according to Fairleigh, the row was between younger and older Romanian critics and translators about the content of the play, and whether Duggan's "honest representation of the language and activities of young people in Dublin" could or should be represented properly in Romanian.

Meanwhile, on the Irish-language drama front, the Irish Theatre Institute has begun research on an Irish-language "playography" in collaboration with Foras na Gaeilge, with Anna Bale and Pádraig Ó Siadhail working on the project. This will be the first online searchable catalogue of all Irish language plays, including original adaptations and translations written and produced in the Irish language, from the start of the 20th century to the present.

Cork goes Murphy mad

The new Cork City Archive Centre is to be named the Seamus Murphy Building after the sculptor and stone-carver as part of the city's six-month-long celebration of the centenary of Murphy's birth, writes Mary Leland.

Organised by a commemorative committee led by Cllr Mairin Quill, the events will include a residency competition administered by the National Sculpture Factory, while the Crawford Gallery is to announce an award for lettering and stone-carving in September.

The new adaptation by Johnny Hanrahan of Murphy's book Stone Mad, which opens at the Everyman Palace Theatre on April 11th signals the start of a programme that includes events at the city's libraries and museum, a sculpture trail for schools, an exhibition at the Crawford Gallery of various aspects of Murphy's work, and the publication, to coincide with his birthday on July 15th, of a book of essays on his art and influence. These will include contributions from Ann Wilson; Gearóid Ó Crualaoich; Murphy's daughter, the novelist Orla Murphy; and Peter Murray, curator of the Crawford Gallery.

Last December, Murphy's widow Maighread (daughter of the sculptor Joseph Higgins) presented all 134 of his original plaster portrait busts to the gallery. The sculptor Ken Thompson - to whom Murphy, who died suddenly in 1975, had bequeathed his tools - is to carve the inscription on the archive centre, close to where Murphy had his studio at 60 Watercourse Road in Blackpool, and a symposium on lettering, stone-carving and sculpture is also planned.

RTÉ is to screen the documentary on Seamus Murphy directed by Sean O'Mordha, and it is expected that Peadar Ó Riada will take part in the Mass on July 8th at the Church of the Annunciation in Blackpool, which Murphy was commissioned to design. The commemoration is supported by €100,000 from Cork City Council, with an additional €50,000 provided by the O'Flynn Group of developers. Quill says the extensive programme is a measure of the esteem in which Seamus Murphy, "a multi-dimensional man", was, and is, held.

Playboy goes to eastern world

What will they make of Pegeen Mike in the land of the rising sun? DruidSynge's production of Playboy of the Western World opens in the Tokyo International Arts Festival on Wednesday as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Ireland and Japan. Garry Hynes's production features Aaron Monaghan, Cathy Belton and Marie Mullen.

The Druid shows will follow St Patrick's Day celebrations in Japan, which include an Emerald Ball and a GAA sports day today. Other Irish events during the year include a Chieftains tour, a schools poetry competition and Irish dancing workshops (see www.irelandinjapan.jp for Irish events in Japan).

Meanwhile, Japanese events in Ireland throughout the year will include a Japanese calligraphy exhibition in the Atrium of the Office of Public Works in Dublin from March 30th, and others such as 100 years of Tokyo in photography, and Scenes of Childhood: 60 years of Post-war Japan, as well as an essay contest for a Japanese study tour prize.

For information about more Japanese events in Ireland, visit www.ie.emb-japan.go.jp.

Euro-visionaries jazz up Dublin

Dublin hasn't had a jazz festival since 2003, but that will change when the Improvised Music Company launches one with a difference next month, writes Ray Comiskey. And, despite the tongue-in-cheek Eurovision echoes in the title - 12 Points!, the countries involved won't be supplying juries - just emerging young jazz musicians with great promise. The festival, which will run at Project from April 25th to 28th, is built on the growing belief that much of the music's current innovative tendencies can be found in the Old World, rather than the American home of jazz. European jazz musicians are rediscovering their diverse ethnic musical heritages and the result is a burst of creativity as astonishing as it is unanticipated. Groups from Budapest, Paris, London, Sofia, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Brussels, Oslo and Dublin will take part, and the idea is to encourage them to stay on for the duration of the festival to mingle and exchange ideas. See www.12points.ie.

Rooftops of Paris

The National Gallery of Ireland's newly acquired Vincent Van Gogh went on display this week. The gallery bought Rooftops of Paris last month from Sotheby's for €904,000.