Award winner Joyce Greenaway brings Whiskey Wars to Derry and Limavady

Award-winning writer/performer Joyce Greenaway is delighted to bring her ‘blistering’ double five-star Edinburgh Fringe solo show to the Steinbeck Festival, Limavady, and the Playhouse Derry.

Dry Northern Irish humour, raw emotion, a dysfunctional family—and whiskey! What’s not to love? 

Especially as this script was placed in the top 10% of 4000+ scripts in the BBC Writersroom Open Call 2023!

June 2021, Joyce Greenaway took a risk to try out a solo show at The Edinburgh Fringe for the first time ever.

Three days sat on a London rooftop, and Tam Tully's story wrote itself.

Tam Tully fights tragedy and treachery to save her Ulster distillery from ruin by crafting the Holy Grail of whiskey, that perfect single malt.

What if the mighty Tam Tully not only has to fight tragedy and treachery to save her eight-generation Irish family distillery in Newcastle, County Down, by crafting the perfect single malt but also battle the men who abandoned her, the duty that’s trapped her, and the lies she’s spent a lifetime concealing? 

Lace it with ascerbic throwaways, cask it in feral emotion, flavour it with politics, sex, religion, and misogyny, injustice and wait for Tam to explode.

Six weeks later, Greenaway ran up to Edinburgh and performed five in-person shows to over 170 people and was blown away by the response: audiences of all ages laughed, wept, hugged her afterwards, and asked if the story was true. 

This still happens.

It’s since toured to Dublin, Brighton, and the Edinburgh Fringe (2021-2023); a sellout run at The Lyric, Belfast, sponsored by Titanic Distillers; and various London venues, as well as representing NI at Bozar, Brussels, and four NI Festivals in 2024. 

After being the first #whiskeytheatre show to perform at the first vertical distillery in Scotland, the new Port of Leith Distillery, and Titanic Distillers, Belfast, a standing ovation at both to boot, it’s coming to Limavady before heading to the Playhouse Derry for one night in each venue, and it’s a simple setup: a chair, a glass, and a bottle of whiskey. And a richly comic dysfunctional family saga.

An award-winning creative, Joyce Greenaway was one of the seven major NI artists supported at the Edinburgh Fringe 2023 by Theatre and Dance NI, Arts Council NI, British Council NI, and Belfast International Arts Festival. In 2024, she was chosen to perform at Bozar, the prestigious cultural centre in Brussels, by the NI Executive Office, Brussels, in collaboration with ACNI and the Brussels Platform.

The show will be at the Roe Valley Arts & Cultural Centre, Limavady, during the Steinbeck Festival on Valentine's Day, with tickets available here.

In Derry, the following two days, February 15 and 16, it will be on in the Playhouse with tickets available here.