GOVERNANCE
Bewley’s Café Theatre Board Members
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Chairperson
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Members
Ronan Richardson
Bewley’s Café Theatre CLG is governed by a voluntary board of Directors. List of Directors above and Directors’ biographies below. Bewley’s Café Theatre is committed to good governance and has embarked upon the journey of compliance with the Governance Code.
Bewley’s Café Theatre keeps detailed books and records of accounts and maintains strict financial controls. The organisation is transparent in its audited financial statements, with most recent statements available here.
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Alison Lindsay
Alison Lindsay practiced as a Barrister on the Western and Cork Circuits. She served as judge of the Circuit Court for twenty years. During that time ,she chaired a Commission of Inquiry into the contamination of blood products for people with haemophilia .
She has helped people with intellectual disabilities to take their proper place in society through her work with L’Arche here in Ireland and internationally. She has completed two terms as chair of L’Arche International .
She has always had a keen interest in the arts, nurtured in UCD and encouraged by various festivals in Cork and Galway. She particularly loves theatre and is an avid attender at all theatre venues in Dublin.
She is married to Kevin Cross and has four adult children one grandson and a lovely black Labrador Cassie.
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Michael James Ford
Michael James Ford is an actor, director and writer who has been working in the Irish Theatre since 1981. His original plays include Bloody Phoenix (Bewley’s Walkabout) Happy Henrietta (Roundwood House), Macklin: Method and Madness (Co-written with Gary Jermyn: Macklin Festival, Viking Theatre), Hedy Lamarr and the Easter Rising (Bewley’s and Oran Mor, Glasgow) and For King and Kinnitty (Offaly Drama Project). Stage adaptations include Lost Hearts (Co-written with Stuart Roche: Roundwood House) A Christmas Carol (Viking Theatre), Poe Show (Bewley’s Café Theatre), Mister Vasek (RTE Radio), Dinner on Mulberry Street (Bewley’s and RTE) and The Diamond Lens (The New Theatre). He has also compiled several historical words and music pieces with The Delmaine String Quartet, including Magic in My Eyes, Love and War, The Waterloo Concert and Romantic Turmoil.
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As an actor he has appeared at the Abbey, the Gate, the Lyric, the Viking, the Mill and in numerous productions at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre. He was Artistic Director of Bewley’s Café Theatre from 1999 – 2005 and directed many shows for the company including Too Much of Nothing, So Long Sleeping Beauty, Oscar and the Sphinx and Roman Fever.
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Cól Campbell
Cól Campbell is Chair of Bewley’s. Bewley’s is an Irish family owned hot beverage company, located in Dublin and founded in 1840, which operates internationally. Its primary business operations are the production of tea, coffee and the operations of cafés. Bewley's has operations in Ireland, the UK and the United States; in the Boston area under the Rebecca's Cafe name and in California as Java City.
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Cól has over 30 years’ experience in the hospitality and foodservice sector. Throughout his career, Cól has held numerous positions within the Bewley’s Group, has worked with Four Seasons Hotels in the USA, and has started and run two business in food and hospitality.
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Cól holds a primary qualification in Catering, Hospitality Administration and Management from the Technological University Dublin and an MBA from the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. He has also completed executive education programmes with INSEAD and IMD, holds a Diploma in Company Direction from the Institute or Directors. As well as serving on the board of Bewley’s Café Theatre, he is Chairman of Dublin’s business improvement district, DublinTown and was a founding director the Family Business Network Ireland.
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Cól lives with his family on the banks of the river Liffey. He enjoys watching rugby and theatre, hillwalking, running with his dogs, and planting trees.
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​Dagogo Hart
Dagogo Hart is a Dublin based poet, writer, and spoken word artist whose words have wowed audiences from bar basements to electric picnic stages. He started performing in Dublin in 2016 in open mics and poetry slams, which saw him win the Slam Sunday grand slam and become an All Ireland poetry slam finalist. Since then he has performed for festivals like Electric Picnic, St. Patricks, Dublin Fringe, Drogheda literary festival, Cuirt International Poetry Festival, and First fortnight. He is one-third of the collective WeAreGriot; A poetry collective that curates art events around poetry. His personal works include; The Home Project (a series of poetry films), RedBeard Paddy (a poetry short film), Mmanwu (a play in the 2023 Dublin Fringe Festival), See True (a spoken word variety show) and Boy Child (a spoken-word play), the last two co-written with FeliSpeaks, Talkatives; a hip-hop and poetry slam as part of WeAreGriot. His poetry is inspired by his hometown in Lagos, Nigeria, and his experience since moving to Ireland.
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Cauvery Madhavan
Award winning writer Cauvery Madhavan was born in India and moved to Ireland thirty four years ago. Her first two books Paddy Indian and The Uncoupling (both with Penguin India and BlackAmber, UK) were published to wide critical acclaim.
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Her latest novel, The Tainted, (HopeRoad, UK and Speaking Tiger, India) was chosen by Laureate Sebastian Barry for his Laureate Picks 2020. In the same year it was also one of An Post Book Awards’ Top Summer Reads. The book was awarded the runner-up prize in SAHR Prize for Military Fiction and chosen by The Times, UK, for their list of top 40 Historical Fiction novels.
Cauvery is a proud ambassador for the Play It Forward Fellowship and served as a judge for the Irish Novel Fair 2022.
She lives with her husband and three children in County Kildare and is working on her fourth novel.
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Madeleine Nesbitt
Madeleine has long been a keen supporter of Bewley's Café theatre. A passionate supporter of the Arts, she was introduced to theatre from early childhood with visits to musicals, pantomime and then drama productions. Her role on Bewley's Board, is to represent the audience. She takes minutes of the board meetings.
Madeleine has an Honours degree in English Literature and Italian from Trinity College Dublin. After graduating she worked for UCD Libraries and the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade. She did not pursue a career after she had children, choosing instead the path of full-time mother. She has worked for many charities and was chair of the Friends of the Rotunda for many years. She is a former board member of Cois Ceim Dance Theatre and has been very involved with the Trinity Women Graduates (TWG), the European Women of Europe (UWE) and with Graduate Women International (GWI). She is on the Council for the Friends of the theatre festival.
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In her free time, she continues her love of Spanish, with conversation classes and enjoys walking, cycling, swimming, Pilates and is a member of two book clubs.
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Ellen O' Malley
Ellen O' Malley has a passion for drama and the performance arts, taking drama, dance and singing lessons from the age of 6. She is currently involved in amateur dramatics with Clontarf Players and has performed on stages both at home and abroad.
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Ellen graduated from DIT's Film & Broadcasting studies in 2011, in her final year her short documentary ‘Sit, Stay, Love’ was selected to be screened in the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin and at a number of international festivals. Since then, she has worked in the digital story-telling space as a video producer and project manager for Together Digital, an award-winning digital agency in Dublin. Here she is also involved in website and social media marketing.
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Ellen lives in Dublin with her partner and their dog, Jeff. She is Chair of Darkness into Light Clontarf, managing the organisation of the annual 5km sunrise walk in aid of Pieta.
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Daniel Reardon
Daniel Reardon has been working as Actor, Playwright and Director in Irish Theatre, Radio, Film and Television for 50 years. He travels worldwide with the Irish Experimental Theatre Companies, Pan Pan, Dead Centre and Brokentalkers from Korea to New Zealand, New York to San Francisco, and throughout Ireland, Great Britain, and the Continent. His most recent appearance on stage was at the Sarajevo National Theatre with Dead Centre’s Production of Chekhov’s First Play (November 2021). He was last seen on The Abbey Stage as Puck in the controversial production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in the Geriatric ward of a Psychiatric Hospital.
He performed his stage adaptation of his book of poems Fond Pageant during 2019 and early 2020 at Smock Alley Theatre, The New Theatre, at the Skibbereen Arts Festival and at the O’Donoghue Theatre N.U.I. Galway. As Playwright his stage plays include Spenser’s Laye (Dublin, Cork, and Edinburgh) The O.K. Thing To Do (Abbey/Peacock) and All Around My Head Bewley’s Café Theatre. He won The Bewley’s Café Theatre Award for Fun with Bamboo and his play Bleeding Poets was nominated Best New Play by the Irish Times Theatre Awards. He has written many plays for radio including the Daily Serial riverrun.