4 CORNERS FESTIVAL 2025 - MUSIC, LITERATURE & THEATRE

How excited am I that we have launched the 4 Corners Festival 2025 and that I can now tell the world what will be happening for a jam packed week in February. Our theme is HOME?. Set the week aside - January 31st through February 9th and grab tickets quickly (info below).

This blog is just just about the music and theatre and literature. There is so much more.

Iain Archer, Nuala McKeever, Glenn Patterson, Anthony Toner and Andrea Montgomery all on the same bill. Oh my! 

Nuala’s play Truth, Love Or Promise is a one woman play that is worth seeing for the first, second or third time. It’s full of humour, grief and our Troubles. The turns and twists of home.

Glenn has been writing novels for decades most of which has opened up his home, the city of Belfast. I am a particular fan of The Mill Grinding The Old People Young about the development of the city and Gull about that DeLorean car factory that I passed every Friday heading home on the train from University.

Iain is maybe one of Northern Ireland’s best ever songwriters. Though not as famous as Van or Gary. Iain has won two Ivor Novello Awards for Snow Patrol’s Final Straw and James Bay’s Hold Back The River. The latter even had a Grammy nomination. He has also written with Liam Gallagher, Shania Twain, Jake Bugg and Noah Kahan among others. 30 years ago as young man starting his journey he sold out The Lyric Theatre… and so this year we welcome him home to the very same theatre.

This year’s In Conversation event that has featured Deacon Blue’s Ricky Ross, Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody and very memorably Dana Masters, will give me an opportunity time to talk to Anthony Toner and Andrea Montgomery about home.

Anthony is one of our wee country’s most crafted songwriters. He has written about his own home with Elvis on the bedroom wall, the Harpur’s Hill estate that that house was in and the Coleraine that that the estate was in. Widening his home to East Belfast he has an entire album about that side of our city called Six Inches Of Water. 

We are delighted to have alongside Anthony his partner Andrea Montgomery. Andrea is a writer, theatre director and even cartoonist. She is Canadian but was been born in India, raised in Switzerland & Indonesia and has worked in China, Greenland and Iran so talking to her about home will be fascinating. I cannot wait!

These are just some of the names. Scattered across other events you’ll find guest appearances by Brian Houston, Dana Masters and Clare Sands among others. 

The 4 Corners Festival 2025 written programme is out there. On Monday December 2nd it will go live on our website https://www.4cornersfestival.com. Everything is FREE. Thank you to our funders and Friends Of The Festival. 

Comments

[Ivor McFetridge]

Anthony grew up in Harpur’s HIll. Not Harpers’