Ireland
Jasper Rees
The transfer this week to the West End of The Weir has reminded theatre-goers of Conor McPherson’s hypnotic powers as a dramatist. In the Donmar's revival of the play you can palpably feel the playwright’s storytelling magic casting its spell all over again as, on a windy evening in a rural Irish pub, character after character unburdens himself - and finally herself - of a supernatural tale.In a way, The Weir - written when he was only 26 - is itself a ghost haunting the playwright’s entire career. It was first performed by the Royal Court in 1997, and was soon being staged all over the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Musically, lyrically, dramatically, on every count this debut album from The Gloaming is exceptional. Four-fifths of the group - Clare fiddle player Martin Hayes, Chicago guitarist Dennis Cahill, the Cúil Aodha sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionaird and Dublin-born hardanger player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh - are all well-known figures within traditional Irish music. It's The Gloaming's fifth member, New York-based pianist (and album producer) Thomas Bartlett, whose harmonic, rhythmic and textural effects serve to paint this music on a wider, more expansive canvas.Bringing together a song and six Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Raw fear is horror’s ideal state. The vertiginous drop through a trapdoor into primordial, gasping helplessness usually only lasts for the split-second length of a cinema-seat jolt. Jeremy Lovering’s debut aims to scare us for much longer. Unusually, he wanted to scare his actors too, feeding them just enough script to get by as they filmed on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (standing in for rural Ireland) at night, and he threw shocks at them out of the dark. Fear is his theme and method.The set-up is brutally simple. Tom (Iain De Caestecker) surprises new girlfriend Lucy (Alice Englert) with a Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
At the Wexford Opera Festival this autumn you could see a bicentenary performance of Verdi’s La traviata. Likewise Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. But that’s not why Ireland’s operatic showpiece is one of the most famous, admired and respected events on the European opera calendar (to prove it, Opera Europe, the forum for all companies across the continent, held one of its annual conferences in Wexford this autumn).The reason is quite simple. It’s repertoire. Since Dr Tom Walsh founded Wexford in 1951, spurred on by the writer and polymath Sir Compton Mackenzie, and helped along by legendary Read more ...
Matt Wolf
In 1998, Judi Dench slayed audiences on the London stage in Filumena, playing a former prostitute who learns belatedly to cry. The tears come more quickly - both for Britain's best-loved acting Dame and her public - in the comparably titled Philomena, the Stephen Frears film that tells an otherwise entirely dissimilar story about a doughty Irishwoman determined to locate the son wrenched from her a half-century or more before.The working-class widow's accomplice in a quest that turned the real Philomena Lee into a publishing sensation is onetime BBC journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), Read more ...
kate.bassett
The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, four-storey housing block hulking upstage. The adaptation is by Roddy Doyle himself, based on his 1987 comic novel.As many will also remember from the 1991 big-screen version of The Commitments, Doyle’s young protagonists are scraping by in Ireland, with no scintillating job prospects. But then they get together, form a band, work hard at it and wow a guy who has a recording studio. Though looking set to go Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to it fresh, it’s hard to imagine Father Figure as the Radio 2 serial it apparently began life as. The first episode of the six-part series is driven by what some would call "visual gags" or "physical comedy", as if writer and star Jason Byrne was so excited by the new medium that he decided to throw everything he could at the camera to see what stuck.I say "some", because your mileage may vary on the comic potential of a small child, covered from head to toe in chocolate spread, running around the family home chanting “I’m a human poo!”. And I say "everything", because what gets Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ardal O'Hanlon is best known as Father Dougal in the much missed Father Ted (created by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan), but he started life as a stand-up and he clearly brought many of his own qualities – although not the dimwittedness – to the lovable Irish priest, as an hour of his latest show proves. He riffs on matters ranging from Catholic guilt and racial stereotyping to monogamy and paedophilia without once offending anyone.In fact, he tells us, his unwillingness to cause offence makes him singularly unsuited to the role of stand-up. Not for him the brazenness of comics such as Read more ...
David Nice
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it fairly dances over the pitfalls is due partly to a well-calibrated ensemble, but above all to the fact that the great Italian playwright made an exception to social commentary and searching examination of the human condition, coming up instead with a piece of fluff about babymaking village-style.Happy-go-lucky local stud Liolà (Rory Keenan) – the name translates as “here or there” – breeds too many Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A taciturn, bearded Irishman leaves Berlin to return to his homeland. He’s travelling there to record silence. Arriving in Donegal, he wanders the countryside with a microphone trying to capture an environment where sounds made by humans do not intrude. In the rain and on moors, he stands or crouches with his equipment. Occasionally, someone encounters him. He returns to the house of a raconteur for bread, cheese and ham (pictured below right), before he’s drawn to the remote, Atlantic-buffeted Tory Island where he grew up.And that pretty much encapsulates the 84 minutes of Silence (not to be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rubberbandits embody that modern entertainment industry phenomenon – a huge YouTube hit who have moved into the mainstream with ease. The prankster hip hop duo – Mr Chrome and Blindboy Boatclub (aka Bob McGlynn and Dave Chambers) – have notched up more than 25 million hits online and now routinely sell out their energetic live shows, which they perform as if music gigs.They started life as underground artists, ripping the piss out of Irish culture and politics, and perform with shopping bags over their heads – as if either delinquents keeping their identity secret from the social in their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can theatrical lightning strike twice? That certainly looks to be the case at the Donmar, which has followed Josie Rourke's expert revival of Conor McPherson's contemporary classic, The Weir, with the world premiere of McPherson's latest, directed with a deft finger on both the human and numinous pulse by the author himself. A play that extends the terrain of The Weir and can be seen to invert it as well, The Night Alive poses as many questions as it answers, though of the pleasurable kind that comes from the sort of investment in character that sets McPherson so richly and feelingly Read more ...