Northern Ireland
Markie Robson-Scott
A woman walks out on her husband and their three kids – two teens, one five-year-old - after 19 years of marriage. She doesn’t want custody. What could be so wrong with the man that she’s driven to such drastic action? Eleven months later, Greg (Christopher Eccleston, anguished but plucky, with a shaky Northern Irish accent) doesn’t seem to have the answer.This doesn’t help matters on his sticky first go at internet dating, where his opening gambit is to enthuse about Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test and the conversation, before the question of the whereabouts of his wife comes up, Read more ...
Owen Richards
When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping. Not many would have predicted one of the funniest new shows of the year, but that’s what we got.In last night’s final episode, Erin seized control of the school’s magazine after the editor was struck down by illness. Abandoned by the team for her brazen opportunism (and basic lack of decency), she formed a ragtag editorship from the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Art fairs are vaguely promiscuous. So much art, so many galleries, so very many curators. They’re a glut for the eye yet curiously anodyne — the ranks of white cubicles could belong to a jobs fair, except there’s a Miró round the corner. And it’s impossible not to price-perv, that sly flick of the eye down to the label just happens.Not so at Art UK. They’re the London Art Fair’s museum partner this year, and this is their first ever exhibition. Nothing’s on sale because they hold none of the works themselves. Instead, all the pieces on display are publicly owned, if seldom seen. They’re on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There was much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary 66 Days (BBC Four) than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provided its immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest was broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In David Ireland's new hour-long two-hander – a co-production between Soho Theatre and west London's Orange Tree – two strangers, Janet and Dermot, meet for a casual hook-up arranged over the internet. The glitch, or at least surprise: she appears dressed as a mouse. That opening gambit won't surprise those who saw Ireland's earlier Royal Court entry Cyprus Avenue, in which protagonist Eric is so convinced his granddaughter is Gerry Adams that he scrawls a beard on her face to prove himself right. And in this considerably more modest entry, Ireland's penchant for Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions. But these documentaries, several supported or commissioned by the Arts Council, concentrate on the visual arts.The longest, Every Picture Tells a Story, is a 1983 biopic based on the early life of his northern Irish father, William Scott (1913-1989) who moved from Scotland to Enniskillen as a teenager, studied art in Belfast, then went on to London and a vastly successful career. The Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This new wartime drama launched on Remembrance Sunday is a curio. The setting of My Mother and Other Strangers is rural Northern Ireland in 1943, where it’s green and wet and a long way from the conflict. Into the midst of the fictional Moybeg on the shore of a lough a squadron of bombers from the USAF has been introduced. Their planes careen across the cloudy skies of a farming community where previously the loudest noises would have been the mooing of heifers in labour, while their pilots swarm into the pub and the fleapit. So they’re the strangers of the title.The mother is Mrs Rose Coyne Read more ...
David Nice
Do we see enough in the UK of continental European drama in translation? No. Is what we actually get the best? Probably not in the case of popular German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest. Still, it's rendered into pithy, convincing vernacular by no less a writer than Conor McPherson, well enough directed by Ian Rickson and plausibly characterised by two fine Irish actors.A greater play could take a fuller outline of its contents than can be given here without depriving the reader of more to chew on as spectator. Let's just say that Caolifhionn Dunn and Laurence Kinlan, who've just Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the reformed Undertones, with Paul McLoone replacing original singer Feargal Sharkey, have been a popular live draw since 1999, John Peel’s anointing of “Teenage Kicks” from their debut EP as his favourite recording suggests this is what they were about: a single, timeless song.Of course, it was not. The singles or lead EP tracks which followed – “Get Over You”, “Jimmy Jimmy”, “Here Comes Summer” and “You’ve Got My Number (Why Don’t You Use It)” – were as wonderful. So were their first two albums. The recent publication of the engaging Teenage Kicks: My Life as an Undertone, bassist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s much more to Brendan J Byrne’s engrossing, even-handed documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days than its title might at first suggest. The timeline that led up to the death on 5 May 1981 of the IRA prisoner provides the immediate context – an increasingly dramatic one as the countdown of Sands’s hunger strike nears its inexorable conclusion. But the film’s interest is broader, not least in examining his role as a symbolic figure, both in the immediate context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and across a much wider historical perspective.The drama of Sands’ life and death has already Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Barbican has built a steady reputation for almost unclassifiable large-scale art exhibitions, particularly in architecture, design and photography: they have been underestimated pioneers, often working in areas themselves under-scrutinised. Thus they often manage to surprise, and so it is here.This vast anthology is subtitled “Britain as Revealed by International Photographers”, and has been assembled under the aegis of Martin Parr, the highly successful photographer of the banalities of British life. It looks through the eyes of 23 foreigners, including five women, at the last eight Read more ...