Prayers of Sherkin by Sebastian Barry

Prayers of Sherkin was Sebastian Barry’s second play at the Abbey Theatre. A love story, it tells the story of Fanny, a young Quaker girl living in a dying religious community on Sherkin Island, West Cork in the 1890s.

An innocent girl, she is caught between starting a new life on the mainland and leaving her doomed community. On a rare shopping trip to the mainland town of Baltimore, she meets and befriends Patrick Kirwan a modest man. He has left his harrowing career printing drawings of murder victims for the Cork newspaper The Examiner.

This photo features Sebastian Barry’s mother Joan O’Hara (second from right), Alison Deegan, (far right), Alan Barry (centre), Dorian Hepburn (second from left) and Phelim Drew (far left). 

A portrait of Sebastian by Mick O’Dea was recently unveiled and hangs in the Abbey Theatre Bar.