Ireland
Tom Baily
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an experience that lay dormant within his own life for too long. That is the trauma of the sexual abuse survivor, who is locked in silence and trapped by what cannot be said. If there were periods in The Virtues (Channel 4) that ambled along too slowly, or were simply too unbearable to watch, Meadows has achieved a redeeming climax in this final episode Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a huge Irish cultural phenomenon, and Ardal O’Hanlon was our amiable guide through this brief but illuminating history of them.Taking a break from his Caribbean sojourn in Death in Paradise, in Showbands: How Ireland Learned to Party O'Hanlon explained that Ireland in the 1960s was very different to the young, outward-looking country it is now – poor, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mothers’ fears for and of their children are primal horror material: The Babadook and Under the Shadow set recent standards for exploring its emotional terror. Lee Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, has similarly profound subtexts in mind, and more fine actors as his mother and boy. The razor’s edge of ambiguity in The Babadook in particular, the nervous uncertainty of what is happening and who should be feared, is, though, less sharp.When Sarah (Seána Kerslake) brings her 8-year-old son Chris (James Quinn Markey) to a big, badly lit house on the edge of an Irish forest borrowed from the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s. The wholly avoidable tragedy (Ireland exported huge amounts of grain, butter and livestock during the famine) resides still in the modern Irish psyche; it is no coincidence that of all the nations that contributed to Live Aid in 1985, Ireland’s contribution, per capita, was the greatest.Lance Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Chekhovian is a rather over-used word when it comes to describing some of the late Brian Friel's best work, but you can see why it might apply to Aristocrats, his 1979 play which premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin before becoming a contemporary classic. You can count off the elements that remind you of the Russia master: decaying estates, feckless toffs, wistful longings and missed opportunities. Aristocrats is now revived by Lyndsey Turner, whose previous Friel re-stagings at the Donmar - Faith Healer and Philadelphia, Here I Come! - have all been very successful. And she has already Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In the autumn of 1892 Émile Bernard wrote home to his mother that, following the summer decampment to Pont-Aven of artists visiting from Paris and further afield, there remained "some artists here, two of them talented and copying each other. One mainly copies the other." Most likely he was writing about Irish painter Roderic O’Conor and the younger Swiss artist Cuno Amiet who stayed on in the Breton village long after the summer’s artistic cavalcade had left.There are indeed striking similarities and borrowings between O’Conor’s and Amiet’s canvases, but what the National Gallery of Ireland’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Brian Friel, who died in 2015 at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interviews, keeping his powder dry for the work and shrouding his personal life in mystique. Not that he never opened his mouth at all. When Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) was winning Tony Awards in New York, he got into trouble for saying that a good stage manager is preferable to a director who disobeys the script. One or two American directors may have smirked when in 1993 Wonderful Tennessee closed on Broadway after nine performances. A year later Molly Sweeney won more awards in New York - a pleasing affirmation for Read more ...
David Kettle
Writer and director David Nicholas Wilkinson felt moved to make his reflective, rather melancholy documentary on the 48% who voted to remain in the EU, he says, because nobody else was making one. When it came to funding the project, not a single Brit would invest (though he has German and Irish backers) – potential supporters were apparently too nervous of their names getting out.Have the values of Remain already become so ignored and so – well, unacceptable? Possibly. Which, of course, makes it all the more crucial that Wilkinson has provided Remainers with this platform to present their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Aidan Turner may not reveal those famously bronzed pecs that have made TV's Poldark box office catnip in his West End debut. But what Michael Grandage's funny and fiery revival of The Lieutenant of Inishmore reveals in spades is the irresistible charisma and stage savvy of an actor fully at home in what can only be called Martin McDonagh-land. Bring Turner's full-on brio together with an ensemble who mine every mountingly absurdist moment of the play's deathly landscape and you've got a star vehicle that turns out to be far more than that, as well: a bruising tonic for our troubled times Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What sort of physical upgrade can a play withstand? That question will have occurred to devotees of Brian Friel's Translations, a play that has thrived in smaller venues (London's Hampstead and Donmar, over time) and had trouble in larger spaces: a 1995 Broadway revival, starring Brian Dennehy, did a quick fade. Particular credit, then, to Ian Rickson and his remarkably empathic team for steering Friel's complex weave of characters on to the National's largest, most exposing stage – the Olivier – and ensuring that it lands. After all, writing this gorgeous ought to be seen by as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian Rickson’s route into theatre was not conventional. Growing up in south London, he discovered plays largely through reading them as a student at Essex University. During those years he stood on a picketline in the miners’ strike, and proudly hurled the contents of an eggbox at Cecil Parkinson. He is a lifelong supporter of Charlton Athletic. When he was appointed to succeed Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court in 1998, having been associate director for three years, he was portrayed in the media as a nowhere man. He could have been forgiven for wondering whether his surname had been changed Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An Irishman who spent more than half a century in London and then Devon, and a prolific writer – nearly 20 novels and novellas, some 20 collections of short stories in varying combinations – William Trevor (1928-2016) is often eulogised as a modern Chekhov. He is invariably characterised as the master of the short story in post-Joycean times, rightly revered, esteemed, admired, awarded. Several of these last 10 stories were published in The New Yorker, where much of his finest work in this form has appeared, while several iterations of his Collected Stories published previously have run to Read more ...