Donal O'Kelly Donal O'Kelly is a writer and actor. His world-travelled solo plays include the award-winning Catalpa (Edinburgh Fringe First, Best Event Melbourne International Festival), Bat The Father Rabbit The Son (Best Writer and Best Actor nominations Irish Theatre Awards), and Jimmy Joyced! (Best Actor nomination Irish Theatre Awards). The Cambria, his play about anti-slavery leader Frederick Douglass' voyage to Ireland in 1845, performed with Sorcha Fox, has toured to high acclaim in Ireland, the UK and Los Angeles. Vive La, his Mummer-style 1798 spy thriller, is currently playing to full houses in Dublin's Project Theatre. And Running Beast, his music-theatre piece about Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, with music by Michael Holohan, has recently toured Europe. Other plays include The Dogs (Rough Magic), Hughie On The Wires, Trickledown Town, The Business Of Blood, Farawayan, (all Calypso) Asylum! Asylum! (Peacock, Traverse Edinburgh, Ottawa and Boston), Mamie Sighs, Judas Of The Gallarus (Peacock) and The Hand (Dublin Theatre Festival 2002). Operation Easter (Best Play nomination Irish Theatre Awards) ran in Kilmainham Gaol in 2006 to mark the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising in Dublin. He has twice been awarded an Irish Arts Council literature bursary, and in 1999 was awarded the Irish American Cultural Institute Butler Literary Award. He set up Donal O'Kelly Productions in 2000, and has toured extensively at home and abroad since then. As an actor, his movie roles include the lead role of Bimbo in Roddy Doyle's The Van, and roles in Irish movies Spin The Bottle, I Went Down and the bilingual Kings, for which he has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the IFTA Awards. On stage, he has played the Lincoln Centre New York with Beckett's Act Without Words I, Toronto Winter Garden as Lucky in Waiting For Godot, Joxer in the Abbey Theatre's Juno And The Paycock, Sean O'Casey in Colm Toibin's Beauty In A Broken Place at the Peacock, and he plays the role of Enda Hunter in RTE's soap drama Fair City. He was a founder and for ten years a director of Calypso Productions, and is an associate director of the peace and justice organisation Afri. In 2007 he was elected to Aosdana, the Irish Arts Academy. Privacy Policy