A few weeks before his death, Seamus Heaney signed off on his translation of Book VI of Virgil’s epic twelve-volume poem. In the two-thousand-year-old verse, Aeneas journeys to the Underworld in search of the shade of his father and other ghosts from his life.

Published after his death, Heaney’s lifetime’s craft culminates in his masterful and tender translation.

In their intimate realisation of it, Stephen Rea reads the text and Neil Martin underscores on cello – mostly together, though at times we hear just the words, at others just the music. It was commissioned by Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2016 with subsequent performances in Dublin and New York.

Stephen Rea and Neil Martin have been collaborating for thirty years, first sharing a stage (with Seamus Heaney, inter alia) in 1988 on a Field Day Theatre Company event. Founded by Stephen Rea and Brian Friel, Field Day will mark its 40th anniversary in 2020.