Ireland
Adam Sweeting
The cliffhanger ending of series two – will serial killer Paul Spector survive his gunshot wounds? – has been quietly defused, since Spector (Jamie Dornan) now has series three stretching out ahead of him. What was less expected was that this opener would look like a homage to Sky One's appallingly graphic surgical drama, Critical.After a quick recap of the shooting incident which left our eminence noire teetering on the brink of oblivion and experiencing near-death visions of tunnels and car crashes, most of the action focused on the trauma team dealing with his injuries.There was a nifty Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself adrift in; the water that she had to cross between her home in Dublin and a new love in London as she pulled her third album together; and - yes, let’s go there - the water, murky and all-consuming, that typifies Aaron Dessner of The National’s production, and makes him Hannigan’s perfect foil.Like her previous work, the songs on At Swim perfectly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an attack that has yet to be made, rather than a free dialogue with a set of characters and a story.The joy of Caroline Byrne’s new production for the Globe is precisely its ease. She doesn’t so much wrestle with the text as surrender herself to its flow, whether that carries her to dark places or light. The result is a show that’s half comedy and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend. If you don’t see it on a date, you might just as easily watch it with children, grandparents, or your long-lost step-sister from Patagonia. Perhaps only the soundtrack, a slick dovetailing of originals and some of the 1980s’ more stylish tunes from Duran Duran Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Colm Tóibín’s work has always eluded the attention of filmmakers. It took Nick Hornby, a writer who knows his way along the obstacle-strewn pathway between page and screen, to effect a beautifully smooth transition of his 2009 novel Brooklyn. The DVD arrives on the back of a BAFTA for best British film. In truth, Hornby is the most British thing about it. Like Tóibín, director John Crowley and Saoirse Ronan are Irish, while the story is set in the author’s native Enniscorthy and the eponymous Brooklyn, the Ireland in exile to which his young protagonist Eilis travels in search of work in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first feature by writer-director Stephen Fingleton, and has earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. Set in Fingleton's native Northern Ireland, it's a pared-down tale of post-apocalyptic struggle, compensating for its lack of budget with rigorous economy and a watchful intelligence.Martin McCann plays the titular survivalist, a gaunt and unsmiling homesteader who guards his shack in the forest, around which he cultivates his own vegetables. Dialogue has been kept to a bare minimum, so McCann has to create his character largely through facial expressions (suspicious Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Say what you like about The Corrs, there was never any denying their talent – or the voice of raven-haired youngest sister Andrea, fronting the familial quartet with ferocity and grace. It’s why it’s so disappointing that White Light – the band’s first album in a decade – begins with egregious autotune and woeful EDM-by-numbers.As far back as “Runaway” (released in September 1995) the band always tried to pair the instruments and flourishes of traditional Irish folk music with whatever was happening in the charts – but given the extent to which contemporary pop is itself Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Like so much inspirational endeavour, it began in a garden shed. Enya (Eithne Ní Bhraonáin in her native Irish), dissatisfied with her role in Clannad, was experimenting with Nicky Ryan, the band’s manager, and Ryan’s wife Roma, a poet. Using multi-tracking, a shimmering electronic sound, and melodies that had a similar relationship with Irish folklore as an O’Neill’s pub, they created in the 1980s a style of soft-focus electro-folk so earwormingly catchy that “Orinoco Flow”, on her second, 1988 album Watermark, parked itself at number one for three weeks, and became the song Alan Partridge Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“No courtier or lady’s champion would dream of fighting a duel anywhere else…” The setting for duels, liaisons, champagne and love, Paris’s Pré aux Clercs gives its name to Ferdinand Herold’s almost-comic 1832 opera – a welcome mood-lightener in this season’s otherwise tragic fare at the Wexford Festival. But though the piece does end in marriages rather than deaths (at least, for those who matter), it’s not quite the uncomplicated piece of silliness we might expect, or hope, from such a staple of the Opéra Comique.The context – France’s 16th-century Wars of Religion – offers not only echoes Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle.Written in 1888, the play represented Strindberg’s attempt to bring a new degree of naturalism to theatre. Its style and psychological acuity lend itself well to cinema; though being a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For sheer, visceral performances we’ll be lucky if we get anything as strong this year as the central roles from Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in Gerald Barrett’s Glassland. Their mother-son relationship has such an almost unbearable intimacy to it that comparisons to the last chapter of the Terence Davies Trilogy aren’t out of order.In Davies’s film the son was confronting the impending death of his mother, and here Reynor (very different from the confidence of his What Richard Did character) as the long-suffering John is all too aware that’s what faces his mum Jean unless she can battle her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“A place of ravishing beauty that would completely stop you in your tracks.” So said Christine Bleakley as she introduced the first episode of this six-part series, during which she travels along the Wild Atlantic Way on Ireland's west coast, from County Donegal in the north to County Cork in the south, 15,000 miles of rugged coastline formed over millions of years by the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean.The presenter was speaking about Malin Head, Ireland's most northerly point, but she could have been talking about almost any part of the island of Ireland. It's a tiny country but boy does it Read more ...