On 22 October 1975, the Guildford Four were convicted of bombings carried out by the Provisional IRA. They were Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Carol Richardson and Paddy Armstrong. Their innocence was accepted by the British Courts after they had spent 15 years in prison. Gerry Conlon’s story was told in the Oscar-winning film In the…
It was a close call, but GLAS has decided to save Christmas and bring the mighty John Spillane to town for a magic night of music, songs and stories in the lovely confines of the Lutheran Church in the heart of Geneva’s old town. John’s latest album The Legend of the Lough was named Irish folk…
The last time GLAS hosted Pat Kinevane was his performance of Silent in 2014 and it went on to win a Laurence Olivier award for the Dublin-based Fishamble Theatre Company. We are bringing him back for his latest solo drama for one night only on Thursday, 6 November, in our old stomping ground at the…
“If Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living” – James Joyce. GLAS is delighted to bring Blooming Ulysses to the Geneva stage for the first time. Every year, fans of Ulysses celebrate Bloomsday on 16 June, which is the day in 1904 on which Leopold Bloom famously makes his way around Dublin in…
Waiting for Beckett? The Gare St. Lazare theatre company is described by the New York Times as “the unparalleled Beckett champions.” They have been touring and producing new and innovative performances of Samuel Beckett’s work for 30 years. As part of our 20th anniversary programme, we are delighted to bring back Conor Lovett’s performance of…
Help GLAS celebrate its 20th anniversary with a very special evening of theatre. We launched in the middle of a snow and ice storm in January 2005, with a show about James Joyce. If you were at that first event, get in touch and be our guest at the Aula, College Sismondi, on 29 January…
‘Pity the nation’ – Support Gaza this Christmas The GLAS Christmas concert in the old town of Geneva is always a musical treat. Last year it was headlined by The Emigrants, an amazingly talented, multi-national ensemble playing a lively brand of traditional Irish music. Due to popular demand, we are bringing them back this December.…
NOTE: Change of venue – see below! The wait will have been worth it. Mikel Murfi is returning to the Geneva stage following his spellbinding performance earlier this year in ‘The Man in the Woman’s Shoes.’ It won him a standing ovation and GLAS received many emails from audience members looking forward to the next…
“You’re entitled to go to the theatre and see something which is utterly uplifting and joyful.” So says the Irish writer and actor, Mikel Murfi, and GLAS is delighted to bring his acclaimed solo show ‘The Man in the Woman’s Shoes’ to Geneva. Murfi trained at the prestigious Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris and has had…
Many friends of GLAS will recall the electrifying performance of Rafeef Ziadeh, the Palestinian poet, who we hosted in June 2016. At her suggestion we started to support the Gaza School of Music, founded in 2012 as a branch of the Edward Said Conservatory of Music to offer the first ever long-term music education programme…
We are delighted to host this showcase of talent from the Emerald Isle featuring five of the country’s most talented singers and musicians. Pauline Scanlon comes from an Irish-speaking tradition on the Dingle Peninsula and her voice has a haunting beauty. Niamh Regan is a singer-songwriter from Galway who combines Irish tradiiton with flavours of Americana,…
For our spring concert this year, we’re inviting you to spend an evening in the company of locally based singer and songwriter Eoghan O’Sullivan. A troubadour at heart, Eoghan has performed throughout Europe and beyond. He left his native Ireland for Switzerland in 2004 and has lived here ever since (aside from a few years…
It has been too long since we had a live, in-person event. So, we have decided to get the GLAS ball rolling again with a Christmas concert featuring the remarkable acapella vocal trio, White Raven, on Friday, December 16 in the beautiful setting of Geneva’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the heart of the old town…
Mohamedou Ould Slahi was imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay for 14 years, an innocent man held in a living hell courtesy of the United States as it prosecuted the so-called War on Terror. His gripping memoir, published as Guantánamo Diary, has been reissued as The Mauritanian with previously censored material restored. It coincides with a major film…
Robert Jones Jr. has just published his stunning debut novel The Prophets to enormous critical acclaim. He was born and raised in New York City. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Feminist Wire, and The Grio. He is the creator of the social justice social media community…
Mukesh Kapila is one of the most influential voices on the world stage when it comes to humanitarian action. He is widely celebrated for raising his voice against the genocide in Darfur which led to his expulsion from Sudan, a rare fate for a UN country representative. His memoir about that experience Against a Tide…
It has been a while since we offered you a musical evening and it is even further back in the pre-COVID past since that magical evening we enjoyed in the company of John Spillane in the Lutheran Evangelical Church here in Geneva. Generous sponsorship has made it possible to invite all GLAS members to join…
If there is one lesson that Lord Mark Malloch-Brown has learned in his years as a globe-trotting humanitarian and development specialist, it is that “democracy does not flow easily from the barrel of a foreigner’s gun.” An understandable sentiment from the man who founded the International Crisis Group and whose classic memoir The Unfinished Global…
The librarians of Dublin, the city associated with so many great writers, celebrate one book every year – Dublin, One City, One Book. These have included James Joyce’s Dubliners, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Roddy’s Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy, and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. This year they have chosen a modern day classic, Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey,…
The renowned war correspondent Patrick Cockburn who forecast the rise of ISIS in 2014, will provide the GLAS Hour with a first taste of his new book War in the Age of Trump this Thursday evening at 20:00 CEST. The book is due out in July and promises to be a fascinating on-the-ground account of…
Could the US and China end up going to war? That is one of the questions we will put to the distinguished author, academic and former President of the UN Security Council, Kishore Mahbubani, when we talk to him about his fascinating new book Has China Won? during this week’s GLAS Hour, which comes to…
“If Roddy Doyle and Nick Cave could procreate, the result would be something like Kevin Barry,” according to one critic. The Limerick-born author exploded onto the international literary scene with his firecracker collection of short stories, There are Little Kingdoms, in 2007, and soon became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Kevin Barry is…
Colm Tóibín is an award-winning author. He is also a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, New York. He was born in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, the setting for several of his books. His novels include The Master, Nora Webster and The House of Names. The film adaptation of Brooklyn earned three Oscar nominations in…
“Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America. Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by…
Anyone cocooned, marooned or feeling like some diversion can tune in to a conversation with one of Fleet Street’s finest foot soldiers next Monday. John McEntee’s devout mother once spent EUR 1,000 on having masses said in Catholic churches throughout Ireland for his salvation and the Hollywood actor Richard Harris sued him for libel following…
We hope all our supporters, families and friends are staying healthy and well. Physical distancing should not mean social distancing, so we’ve decided to run an occasional series of online Meet the Author interviews over Zoom. Much depends though on the response to this first one and whether there is sufficient interest. It is intended…
Cillian Murphy and Colin Farrell shot to movie stardom after they featured in the cult hit, Intermission, written by Mark O’Rowe. O’Rowe’s masterpiece for the stage, Howie the Rookie, has been revived and is now on tour from Glass Mask Theatre in Dublin. It stars Stephen Jones and Rex Ryan, two of Ireland’s most outstanding…
For this year’s GLAS Christmas Concert, we are delighted to host Lisa Lambe, one of Ireland’s most sought-after performers. Lisa regularly works with Ireland’s national RTÉ Concert Orchestra. For several years she toured the world as one of the lead singers with “Celtic Woman”, playing such venues as Carnegie Hall and Radio City, New York.…
Many GLAS supporters will remember the tour-de-force that was Catalpa, performed by Donal O’Kelly, and so popular that we have staged it twice. Donal is coming back to Geneva next month with another celebrated work, The Cambria. The Cambria was a trans-Atlantic paddle-steamer. In August 1845 among the passengers on board out of Boston was…
“I used to worry a lot about songs, my career. I’ve stopped that now. I believe genuinely if I try to be true to myself and write my songs with a good heart, and sing them with a good heart, then I’ll be taken care of.” It is ten years since GLAS had the pleasure…