Ireland
David Nice
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the invention of a scary Irish dad who forces his sons to act it out with him every day in their seedy Walworth Road flat. Go with conventional expectations and you’ll be wrong-footed, or downright disappointed; Enda Walsh pushes boundaries, pulls the dirty rug from under our feet. Vividly acted, directed and designed, this revival of his 2006 two-acter suggests it’s a masterpiece.It helps not to know what lies in store, which heightens the thriller aspect of the play; I was a nervy virgin Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“They say there are only two stories,” explains director Treasa O’Brien. “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” O’Brien was born in Dublin to a naval family that had to up sticks and move every two or three years. Her first school was in Malta, where the other kids would neither speak to her nor play with her since she was an outsider.In Town of Strangers she invites people who likewise live far from home to recount their stories. Gort, a small town in the west of Ireland, is the perfect setting for her enquiries since, per capita, it has the most diverse population in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lisa O’Neill is a part of the new wave of Irish contemporary folk artists, one that encompasses the likes of Lankum, Ye Vagabonds and John Francis Flynn, all of them putting their albums out on Rough Trade, which makes the venerable English Indie label something of a centre for what the present and future of Irish folk music sounds like. (Lankum’s Radie Peat and O’Neill have also sung together, on the excellent “Factory Girl”, part of the showcase This Ain’t No Disco.)All of This Is Chance is O’Neill’s first release through Rough Trade, and her fourth album since the self-released Has An Read more ...
David Nice
This multimedia horror revue gave me heart trouble, which is an odd kind of compliment. Not at first: the assault of abrasive music, the one singer having to leap all over the place vocally, competing with spoken word and information overload, can seem self-defeating. And that vile word “lobotomy” is enough in itself to trigger a panic attack. But ultimately the impact is powerful, unforgettable, in tune with great artistic statements about the human condition.Least Like the Other’s creative team have been selective about the supposedly limited details we now have concerning the tragic life Read more ...
Graham Fuller
This is not a rehash of my Skinty Fia review, but smoke from the same grate.Asbury Park, New Jersey, 5 October – we've driven down from NYC to see Fontaines DC play hopefully most of their blistering third album at the Stone Pony venue. Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny played here in the Seventies. It's legendary – and bad news for we arthritics. The stage is not at the end of the narrow hall opposite the entrance and the bar but runs along a side wall, so the audience is squashed and stretched in front of it. Naturally wanting to get as close as we could to the Irish quintet Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
David Nice
Only a group of top musicians stood, or mostly sat, between a full but necessarily small house and Dr Malatesta’s Plastic Surgery Clinic in the bijou surroundings of Dun Laoghaire’s 324-seater Pavilion Theatre. The scaled-down wing of Irish National Opera’s season, touring between a highly-acclaimed production of Guillaume Tell and next March’s Der Rosenkavalier, worked so well because the same high values that have marked the other company offerings I’ve seen so far are very much in evidence.Donizetti’s stock farce of an old man duped into thinking he’s got himself a demure bride may not Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.For those who can’t see it from their seats, the playwright has usefully included a line about this being a “sawdust restaurant”. If you happen to notice that there are oyster shells scattered over it too, and nod in recognition, you will probably feel less adrift given that the oyster shells and sawdust reference comes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a song by Kevin Ayers called “The Lady Rachel”. It was on his 1969 debut solo LP Joy Of A Toy. Play it alongside “This Still Life”, the second track on the second album from Ireland’s Aoife Nessa Frances and the aesthetic kinship is clear. The differing genders of the singer-composers aside, one could swap with the other and snugly fit onto either release.It’s not that the Kerry-recorded Protector sounds like it seeks to recreate the past, but that Frances has a sensibility – whether innate and instinctive or intentional – tapping into a seam of archetypal yet idiosyncratic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.The little stub of plot around which McDonagh has built his narrative is bafflingly simple. It’s 1923. Colm and Pádraic live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland called Inisherin. They’re long-standing friends, and every evening they go to Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Gabriel Byrne is not a typical film star. From his breakthrough as the lustful and doomed Uther Pendragon in Excalibur, via his iconic Prohibition-era gangster in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and the wickedly twisty The Usual Suspects, the Irishman has evaded the usual, overexposed trappings of celebrity, remaining a familiar, respected, but largely private figure.All of which makes this one-man evocation of his childhood and early life, based on his 2020 memoir of the same name, something of a revelation: not for its scandal or behind-the- Read more ...
David Nice
Essay-writing can be a great art, at least when executed by Hubert Butler of Kilkenny, on a par - whether you know his writing or not, and you should – with Bacon, Swift and Orwell. The same goes for speechifying. That level I witnessed, at the start of my three days at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, from Masha Gessen delivering the Hubert Butler Annual Lecture, and at the end from Professor Roy Foster, Fiona Shaw and the winner of this year’s Huber Butler Essay Prize, Kevin Sullivan.Disclosure first: it was my partner who set up the Prize as part of HEART London, a potential home for European Read more ...