New York-based Galway author Seamus Scanlon’s play “The McGowan Trilogy” was performed last Friday at Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo and for the first time ever, the playwright has been told, a prayer in the Irish language was heard from a Japanese stage.
Scanlon, center, is pictured with the translator Chizuru Urabe, left, and Takeshi Eguchi, the producer who found “The McGowan Trilogy” while browsing in a New York bookstore. Fifty copies of the English-language book were ordered by the production company and have already been sold out. As reported in the Echo, the two-week run was also sold out largely on the basis of its star, Tori Matsuzaka, a prominent Japanese model and actor.
Scanlon said: “They never heard of me or the play or Callow Lake or Tayto or Barry's Tea.”
