By Helen Shaw

If part of our work in Tóchar Stories is about mapping people’s changing relationship with the bogland then Luke Casserly’s theatre performance show Distillation  is an ideal partner. The show, a Luke Casserly, Abbey Theatre and Solas Nua production, is currently on a nationwide tour with dates across arts festivals from June to September and is described as ‘a multi-sensory performance that transports audiences to the Irish bog landscape through scent’. But perhaps it is more appropriate to say that Distillation taps into our memory and our imagination, our sense of place and belonging, through all our senses, from touch to smell, evoking curiosity and storytelling.

Luke has been a collaborative artist with Tóchar Stories across the last two years, working with us and communities in Carbury, Co Kildare and back in his home town of Lanesborough, Co. Longford.  From the beginning we hoped to partner with him to bring Distillation to communities who had direct experience of a culture of turf cutting, of in many ways came like Luke from a Bord na Móna family tradition and who knew well the impact of the cessation of the peat industry. For Luke, Distillation is a direct response, a conversation with that change, and a dialogue of hope for the shared future of our peatlands communities and our broken landscape. His show presents the bog as an imaginatory portal, allowing us to see it, hear it and even smell it anew.

On August 15th we partner with the Offaly Local Development Company (OLDC) and the Fiesta Hall in Kilcormac, Co Offaly to host Distillation and we’re offering local communities a gift seat at the table to experience Luke’s work in person.

The Fiesta Hall itself is a building of stories. It was once the hive of social life in the region when it was the local ‘ballroom of romance’ with big bands playing and with a Canadian maple wood floor that people from across Kilcormac’s neighbouring villages of Pollagh, Ferbane and Kinnity tell tales about. It later became a cinema and a bingo hall but more recently lay derelict until local visionaries involved in the Trench Trust, a philanthropic fund, and Green Offaly saw the potential for a new environmentally designed building offering a social, enterprise and cultural hub. The Fiesta Hall was bought by OLDC with support from the Just Transition Fund and the Trench Trust and a major renovation began. What is remarkable about the building refurbishment is how it has sought to reuse the materials from the old hall, like that maple floor and the old cinema seats, and to meet the exacting criteria of a green building in design and operation. For us, Luke’s work is a beautiful way to celebrate the newly reimagined Fiesta Hall, a building full of people’s memories and stories, once discarded, now repurposed for a new generation. Distillation is, in many ways, the essence of regeneration.

Would you like to be there on August 15th?

• There’s just 25 seats for each performance of Distillation so spaces are extremely limited but if you’d like to take one of the Tóchar Stories gift invite seats give us an email to tocharstories@gmail.com and put Distillation in the subject line and tells us why you want to be with us in the Fiesta Hall.
  

• First performance is at 12 noon, second at 2.30pm and a final performance at 5pm on the day. To find out more about Luke and Distillation go to https://www.lukecasserly.org/work#/distillation/ and you can find the touring date via the Abbey Theatre (Touring) https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats-on/distillation-2026/.
  

For connected stories read : Sharing our Past, Imagining our Future (September 2025)