Ireland
David Nice
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. You might be harder pressed to come up with three more, but Wexford Festival Opera has done just that, theming this year’s triptych of rarities in the shape of never less than interesting, if often dramatically flawed, comedies by Donizetti, Mascagni and Stanford as “Theatre Within Theatre”.Nothing sinks to the dud level of Halévy’s La tempesta in 2022 or Erlanger's L’aube rouge last year. And nothing in the state-of-the-art Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...
Heather Neill
"Captain" Jack Boyle is a fantasist, a mythmaker, a storyteller. He relishes an audience – usually his sidekick, Joxer. There is a theatricality in his part as written by O'Casey, but in Matthew Warchus's hands this is made an explicit element of the whole production, culminating in the unexpected finale. When the first scene opens, swags of red stage curtains rise and remain looped in place throughout, framing the action.The play, the second in Seán O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, is set in the city in 1922. Citizens ground down by poverty suffer further as society is ripped apart by civil war Read more ...
David Nice
Nobodaddy, taking its title from Blake’s violent dark-god “Father of Jealousy”, is much more than a dance piece, and Michael Keegan-Dolan, whose company was formerly known as Fabulous Beast, is more than just a choreographer, with unique takes on the total work of art already to his credit.This is no exception, and may mark a new zenith. There's material enough for more than one happening. Typically, Keegan-Dolan weaves around an individual loss more Blake poems, the Irish rebellion of 1798, folk-based songs of exile in collaboration with the wonderful Sam Amidon, and reflections on the Miami Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini elevated the operatic tearjerker to tragic status in three masterpieces: La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica, rivalling the other two in intensity despite its brevity. Its special atmosphere works best as the central part of a trilogy (Il Trittico) between a dark melodrama and a pacy comedy. The jury’s still out on whether it works on its own, so disappointingly undernourished is Annilese Miskimmon’s production.For a start, Puccini’s delicate evocation of a cloister towards sunset in springtime, with crepuscular birdsong, doesn’t tally with the grim picture of pregnant girls Read more ...
Justine Elias
Orla Barry laughed when she was advised to take up sheep farming, and not just because she had no experience. “Orla with the sheep eyes,” she calls herself and, indeed, in a stylized self-portrait, she does seem to have the placid, watchful gaze of a ewe.After 16 years as a working artist in Brussels, Barry inherited her father’s Wexford farm and grew her flock. Today she tends 29 white Lleyn sheep, whose black-lined eyelashes make them look like hung-over nightclubgoers who fell asleep in their makeup.In Cara Holmes’s lyrical documentary, Barry – and the sheep and the Border Collie watching Read more ...
David Kettle
In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a version of the 15th-century French song "La pernette se lève." It tells the story of Jeannette, whose parents want her to marry into the gentry or royalty. She, however, is in love with Pierre. He is in prison. She vows to be hanged at the same time he is. In France, “Ne pleure pas, Jeannette” is a nursery rhyme. Versions have been recorded by Les Compagnons De La Chanson and French children’s TV favourite Dorothée.“Aux marches du palais” is also French and has been sung by (again) Les Compagnons De La Chanson, Marie Laforêt, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benjamin Brewer’s post-apocalyptic, Nic Cage-starring creature feature finds a sombre interest in fatherhood and growing up in screenwriter Michael Nilon’s bleak scenario, after Paul (Cage) gathers up two abandoned babies with black smoke blooming, and a city falling into catastrophe.Fifteen years later, adopted siblings Joseph (It’s lead kid Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) live in a farmhouse under Paul’s sternly loving tutelage, foraging by day, and cowering when night brings monsters scratching at their door, much like A Quiet Place or a vampire flick. Arcadian was filmed Read more ...
David Nice
Recreating Handel’s Egypt with a first-rate cast on the summer opera scene could have been the exclusive domain of Glyndebourne, bringing back its revival of David McVicar’s celebrated Giulio Cesare in July. Yet over the Irish sea, in the grounds of a castle with exquisite gardens above the lushly wooded valley of the river Blackwater, they’ve pulled it off. This is a singular triumph of which Caesar would be proud.Modest budgeting means a spare but effective and unfussy production from Tom Creed which brings out the best in everyone, and the Irish Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, no Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Faye is okay. Or, at least she says she’s okay. But is she really? And, if she really is, like really okay, why is she seeking help for her insomnia?As Irish playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth brings her ward-winning Fringe Festival play, Lie Low, to the Royal Court as part of a nationwide tour, audiences will have a chance to see for themselves what the matter with Faye is. And something definitely is. In an early scene of this intense 70-minute psychological thriller, the thirtysomething woman is asking a doctor for help: she can’t sleep and we soon discover why.About a year ago, Faye came Read more ...
David Nice
Peerless among the constellation of Irish singers making waves around the world, mezzo Paula Murrihy first dazzled London as Ascanio in Terry Gilliam’s English National Opera production of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Since then she’s become a major star on the continent, not least as a superb Octavian in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, less so in the UK, though that should have changed with her Proms appearance last year as Didon in Les Troyens.The Wigmore Hall hardcore don’t seem to have got the message – last night’s concert, far from being the sellout it should have been, was relatively Read more ...