The green carnation is a former secret symbol of same sex love with an association to the theatre.
The Theatre Festival board liked the idea of reclaiming this historic symbol and adopted it as the Festival emblem in 2004. Here is a brief ouline of the flower’s past:
According to the book, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, Parisian gays began to wear an artificially dyed green carnation in 1891 as a secret symbol of their sexual preferences.
At the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan in February 1892 Wilde arranged it that a number of men in the audience would wear a dyed green carnation to arouse public curiousity.
Wilde later went on to claim that it was he who invented the artificial carnation. In 1894 a supposed work of fiction was published called the green carnation. However, it was widely known that the book was more a ‘documentary’ on the life of Oscar Wilde and his partner Bosie. According to the same book –
‘The green carnation to which we have referred is a white carnation, dyed by plunging the stem in an aqueous solution of the aniline dye called malachite green. The dye ascends the petals by capillary attraction, and at the end of twelve hours they are well tinged. A longer immersion deepens the tint.’
The association between the green carnation, theatre and gay identity continued even after the trial and death of Oscar Wilde. For example consider the song ‘Green Carnation’ from the 1929 musical ‘Bitter Sweet’ by Noel Coward –
”Pretty boys, witty boys,
You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation…
And as we are the reason
For the “Nineties” being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.”—Noel Coward, 1929 , Bitter Sweet
During COVID-19 we had an abstract logo for an online Festival
During the COVID pandemic in 2020-21, we used a different logo for a different kind of theatre festival. With lock downs starting in mid-March of 2020, the Festival that year had to be cancelled. Even in 2021 we were unable to have live performances with audience members, but we offered an on-line festival of recorded stage performances. This logo is more abstract with the shapes representing audience seating and a proscenium for a festival that had neither.
We were back in the theatres for the 2022 Festival.
For the 2022 Festival we reverted to the green/white/black colour scheme, using a logo that incorporated the older silhouette of Oscar Wilde, the green carnation, and “LGBTQ+” in it. The old-fashioned ticket-shaped design signified that we were back to an in-person Festival. This logo had been used in the past, and versions of this logo appeared in rainbow colours as well as solid green or black.
Our logo and colour scheme were last updated in 2023.
In the summer of 2022 the Festival got a grant from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht. Sport and Media to, among other things, develop a publicity campaign to increase the visibility of the Festival. As part of this campaign, in 2023 we revealed the logo and colour scheme we use today.
