Ireland
Veronica Lee
Mark O’Rowe is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights, and Terminus was first produced in 2007 by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It transferred to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008 and is now being revived by the Abbey in an international tour. His play charts another ordinary night in Dublin city, but as this captivating triptych unfolds the events his characters - simply named A, B and C - describe are anything but. A man and two women deliver a series of overlapping monologues about love, sex, loss, regret and acts of shocking violence, but also of angels transporting souls to the Read more ...
anne.billson
In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific circumstances. In mainstream cinema, this would lead to the earnest soul-searching and Oscar-bait performances of films like In the Bedroom, The Door in the Floor or Rabbit Hole. But Wake Wood is the latest film from the new-model Hammer Film Productions. Which of course means the soul-searching is followed by lots of running, and screaming, and blood.In Wake Wood, Aidan Gillen and Eva Birthistle play a married couple who lose their nine-year-old daughter in horrific Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, Read more ...
david.cheal
Bouncy: if there is one word that sums up this hot young Northern Irish band, that would be the one; there is a Tiggerish enthusiasm to their music that encourages bouncing, clapping, arm-waving and generally having a good time, which is exactly what happened at last night's gig: a festive atmosphere prevailed, Two Door Cinema Club played a short, sharp set that lasted for little more than an hour, and they sent the crowd out into the early spring night buzzing.A year ago Two Door Cinema Club were, as their choochy-faced singer Alex Trimble noted during this show, playing the Hoxton Bar and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ken Wardrop is a young Irish film-maker who has been winning awards since his days at the National Film School in Dublin. His & Hers, his feature debut, is no exception: it won the World Documentary Cinematography award at last year’s Sundance film festival. The title is deliberately misleading. We might expect a film with males and females in it, but instead this is a group of 70 girls and women talking to camera about the men - fathers, brothers, boyfriends, husbands and sons - in their lives.But, conversely, in asking them to talk about their lives in relation to men, their Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At the moment, most of the energy in British new writing seems to be coming from American and Irish playwrights. This is such a regular phenomenon, one that comes around every few years, that it seems idle to speculate on the reasons for it; surely, it’s enough to welcome another new talent from Ireland? As well as being the artistic director of Tall Tales theatre company, Deirdre Kinahan is a prolific playwright. Her UK debut, Moment, opened last night at the Bush Theatre in west London, and is an engrossing study of a dysfunctional family.Of all the ordeals of modern life, bringing home Read more ...
graeme.thomson
When it comes to the Seven Ages of popular music we are now well into the post-retro era. In 2011 every artist is a magpie and every song sails out beneath a pirate flag, greedily plundering where it pleases. When everything that has gone before is up for grabs, it’s now simply a question of how you want your yesterdays delivered: rare, medium or well done?Imelda May might reheat the past but at least she serves it up red hot. A performer since her early teens, her career has crept forward by increments. Now in her mid-thirties, May's third album Mayhem, released late last year, has provided Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Bob Geldof only shuts up in the end because a plane he should be on is imminently taking off for India, and he is still in his local South London pub, refusing to let a heavy cold stop him from talking like others drink - with unquenchable relish. He is in passing promoting his new album, How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell, a lesson Geldof could have given with conviction during his old band the Boomtown Rats’ pomp between 1977 and 1980, when their first nine singles hit the Top 20, climaxing with consecutive Number Ones “Rat Trap” and “I Don’t Like Mondays”. The way those Read more ...
hilary.whitney
No prizes for guessing what the future holds for the four Irishmen ensconced in the empty swimming pool in Enda Walsh’s latest play, Penelope, which opens at Hampstead Theatre next week. For these unfortunate creatures are the last of Penelope’s suitors from Homer’s Odyssey, the pariah who invade Odysseus’s home and make merry at his expense whilst shamelessly trying to win the hand of his faithful wife – and their time is up. Odysseus is homeward bound and they must face up to what is basically going to be an unavoidable bloodbath.“These four men”, says Walsh, “have been having conversations Read more ...
carole.woddis
Last year Brian Friel became an octogenarian. Yet the Irish playwright who has been greeted by the English like no other has so far failed to have that fact either celebrated or acknowledged with a retrospective festival by theatre’s major shakers and movers. It’s been left to The Curve in Leicester (that remarkable glass-fronted, inside-out, state-of-the art high-tech new theatre designed by Uruguyan, American-based architect Rafael Viñoly) to take the initiative.Building on a tradition of featuring other Irish writers, its visionary and persistent artistic director Paul Kerryson (the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
So, did they play all the singles? Well no, not all of them, given that they’ve released 26 of the buggers in the past year alone, frisbeeing one out every fortnight in the sort of kamikaze experiment contemplated by only the truly inspired or the slightly desperate. Ash, on the evidence of last night's gig, might just be a bit of both.In one respect this immensely likeable band provide a window into the future. Having kicked around since the mid-1990s with no little success, after being dropped by Warner Brothers in 2008 they decided to go it alone. Setting up their own label and website, Read more ...
sue.steward
The Celtic Tiger ran rampant through Ireland during the boom years of 1995-2007 when national institutions expanded their collections, galleries popped up and collectors, buyers and artists had a rare time. With literature, the new young Chick Lit writers made their mark, sometimes even outselling the serious contemporaries, and Seamus Heaney rightly got a Nobel Prize. With the crash, prices in Dublin’s major art auction houses fell by 50 per cent as the blinged-up property developers froze; if they did buy, they shifted from contemporary to reassuringly Irish "genre paintings" of peasants in Read more ...