The Curing Line is the new production from firebrand music-theatre company Straymaker, rooted in the complex and evocative world of the Irish borderlands. The show centres around Cora: receptionist for a dealer of car-parts, foster-sister, weekend raver; endowed through unwanted circumstance with the ability to cure ailments of the breath. Amidst a dense fog of uncertainty about her own origin and caught within the clenched fist of 1990’s small-town Ireland, Cora’s ‘cure’ is the thread that connects her to genealogy, to community and to her own sense of identity. When a moment of crisis causes that thread to fray, she is faced with the prospect of being the point in history where a powerful form of healing is irrevocably lost - an unraveling with seismic personal and societal consequences.

The world of The Curing Line is one in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the carnal and the mystic intermingle and become confused. The show stretches and subverts operatic form, with a tight-knit core of singers and musicians playing a range of gnarled, mischievous characters that colour and misguide Cora’s odyssey. Drawn from archival and ethnographic research into the waning indigenous traditions of healing and the ‘making’ of cures, The Curing Line is a meditation on the death of culture, on the human being as an environmental force, and on what it truly means to be healed or to heal. 

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.