On Friday, February 21, Galway-based We Banjo 3 visit Friars’ Gate as part of a Music Network Tour.

Featuring 3 tenor banjos, fiddle, mandolins, tenor guitars, guitars, banjolin and vocals, the group combine Irish music with Old-Time American, Ragtime and Bluegrass to produce an exciting, fun, invigorating sound guaranteed to thrill audiences. Winners of the Music Network Young Musicwide Award, the group play with swing and soul, effortlessly combining the best of Irish and Bluegrass banjo music.

Their début album, Roots of the Banjo Tree, was voted best trad album in The Irish Times in December 2012. Tickets €12/€10.

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Following it's sold out run in Dublin, The New Theatre, brings James Joyce's early masterpiece to Friars’ Gate on Sunday, March 2. Friars’ Gate is the only Limerick venue in the national tour.

In the name Stephen Dedalus, he adopted in this, Joyce signalled his need to escape the nets he claimed Ireland would trap him in – religion and nationality. He would seek to fly 'above these nets'. Unique among his contemporaries he laid claim for the artist’s freedom from such temporal concerns to 'forge the uncreated conscience of his race'. Thus began his lifelong task of sketching the universal human condition he had observed around him in Dublin in the real lives of ordinary people.

In the course of A Portrait, which covered the first decades of his life, we see him creating his own individual aesthetic, as opposed to the dictates of the Church. He is already aware of the beginnings of new European writers such as Ibsen and leaves Ireland to live mostly in poverty, but at liberty to seek nourishment from other cultures. The novel eventually published in 1916, contains some of the most dramatic scenes in modern literature. Cast: Charlie Hughes, Katie O'Kelly, Lauren Farrell, Marcus Lamb and Patrick O'Donnell.

Bookings on 063-98727 or www.friarsgate.ie.

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