What’s on June/July and beyond

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What’s On at the Celtic Club Melbourne

The Celtic Club is an organization that celebrates and supports pride in Irish heritage and culture, as well as the broader Celtic community. We provide opportunities for our members and guests to benefit from, learn about, and enjoy Gaelic language, Irish music, art, culture, and more.

For further information please visit us here:https://www.celticclub.com.au/whats-on

Ceoltóirí Naarm

This group of very young and very talented musicians are worth supporting.

Heaven

On the weekend of a wedding in rural Ireland, Mal and Mairead’s marriage is quietly crumbling.

For Mal, a buried queer desire, once repressed in favour of a ‘normal’ life, suddenly resurfaces when a Christlike young man reignites his forbidden fantasies. For Mairead, a fiery, tough-as-nails woman who married Mal to escape her own reckless romantic past, the weekend throws her face-to-face with the one who got away—the man who still holds a piece of her heart.

As both grapple with the choices that led them here, O’Brien’s Heaven becomes a raw, sensual examination of what it means to truly live. For anyone who’s ever felt trapped in a role they never asked for, this play pulses with the intensity of repressed desire and unfulfilled dreams. Whether you’re questioning the road you’ve taken, or yearning to break free, Heaven is a fierce, funny, and heart-wrenching exploration of identity, regret, and the lives we secretly long for.

Winner of the 2023 Irish Times Award for Best New Play, this daring and critically acclaimed play is a must-see for anyone who’s ever questioned the path not taken. Love, lust and liberation collide on a night that will change everything.

Irish Films in Australian Cinemas

https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/four-letters-of-love-review-irish-eyes-aromancing-in-heartfelt-adaptation/5202276.article

‘Small Things Like These’ finally hits Australian cinemas

Cinema lovers around Australia have impatiently been waiting for Cillian Murphy’s new film ‘Small Things Like These’ to make it’s way into our cinemas. The great news is that it will hit cinemas April 10! Check out your local cinema for showtimes as many have advance screenings, some cinemas have already started their screenings. The film is based on the prize winning novella by Claire Keegan. The story follows Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, in the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1985. Furlong faces his busiest season and as he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.

Irish films at the Sydney Film Festival

There are some fantastic Irish films at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, now running from June 4 – 15, including BRING THEM DOWN with Barry Keoghan. Explore the program here.

MIX TAPE – an Irish Australian mashup

Highly anticipated romantic drama MIX TAPE has more than a few Irish connections. Premiering on Binge on 12 June 2025, this Australia / Ireland co-production won the prestigious TV award at SXSW earlier this year.

Sharp-eyed viewers may recognise locations in Dublin used as stand-ins for UK’s ‘grim-up-North’ Sheffield. Irish film nerds may also spot actors Mark O’Halloran and Siobhán O’Kelly in the cast. And the series’ art director is none other than Sydney-sider and Clonbur, County Mayo stalwart Loretta Cosgrove.

MIX TAPE follows Daniel (Jim Sturgess) and Alison (Teresa Palmer), now living on opposite sides of the world, and moves between their teenage romance in Sheffield, England in 1989 and the modern-day reality of their adult relationships, as they reconnect through a song from their shared past, and explore their burning curiosity to understand if this is the love – and life – they were meant to have.

Thanks to the Irish Film Festival, Enda Murray and team, for these notices.

National Celtic Festival, Portarlington – 6 -9 June

Tickets are now on sale for the National Celtic Festival, running from 6 – 9 June in Portarlington.

See their website for more details: https://www.nationalcelticfestival.com

BLOOMSDAY in MELBOURNE 2025, 11-22 June 2025

THREE EVENTS:

CIRCE’S CARNIVAL OF VICE, DIRECTED BY WAYNE PEARN at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane

This original adaptation for the stage of James Joyce’s infamous Circe episode of Ulysses will take you deep into Nighttown, the red-light district of Dublin. It’s a foray into the most down-at-heel and the most heavily surveiled quarter of Dublin, eradicated by the new Free State exactly 100 years ago this past March. Meet the Madames and the working girls, who were reputed to have done more damage to the British Army than the Rebels.

It is wild and surreal journey into the darker sexual energies of Bloom who is aware he has been cruelly cuckolded by his dominatrix wife, Molly, that very afternoon and is struggling to know how to behave towards her and her seducer Blazes Boylan. It’s a rambunctious roller-coaster for Bloom as his fears, neuroses and anxieties are displayed to a cast of thousands who love and revile him equally.

Joyce uses the episode to explore sexual censorship and the rise of the New Sexology and to interrogate the authority the medical authorities were asserting against the Church moralists. Does this writer know no limits? How does he turn pathologies into comic performances?

For more information about the play, and as well the annual Bloomsday Seminar and Lunch, this year being held on 14 June from 10.30 am – 2.15 pm, see the website:

Booking information for 3 events: http://www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au

CALLING CLAN O’SULLIVAN

L to R: The Crests of O’Sullivan -Beare and O’Sullivan Mór (reproduced from the Clan website with permission)

Jim O’Sullivan advises that all O’Sullivans are welcome to join a clan gathering.

This is a unique opportunity for Sullivans and O’Sullivans all over the world to visit their ancestral home in one celebration of the clan’s heritage. 
They are hosting a World Record event on the Beara peninsula, in the Cork/Kerry area, from 30th May to 2nd June 2026. 
The event will be hosted by the Chieftain of the O’Sullivan Clan, Kelly Sullivan, who was presented with the chain of office by the Cork and Kerry County Mayors on the steps of City Hall in Boston in 2023. 
This is a family event, and we hope you can fill in the Google form (see website below) so we can book you in for the event.

Email Jim at: clanossullivan1602@gmail.com

Website for more information: https://osullivanclan.org