Ireland
carole.woddis
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delivered a devastating portrait of modern-day loss and revenge in a production from the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse. Yet, as directed by the actress Lia Williams and performed remarkably by Leanne Best, nothing is quite as it seems. On a crepuscular set that looks like an overhang from Martin McDonagh or J M Synge (well, the setting is the west coast of Ireland), this young woman, Sal, carries a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Uncensored” is the word that best describes Sinéad O’Connor onstage. Even when she’s singing a less-than-great number she remains fascinating. Where most perform, she just is, in the most naked and mesmeric fashion. There’s stage-craft involved, of course, but she really does seem to be in the moment, prancing and pixie-ing barefoot on a carpet that she always has for shows.I’ve seen a couple of different Sinéads since I first became a convert a couple of years back. One was a damaged-looking biker chick, on the release of her latest album How About I Be Me (And You Be You) early in 2012, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
No theme, no message, no set, no title. Northern Irish comedian Jimeoin is a beguilingly old-fashioned kind of standup. “Just jokes,” he told us at the beginning of his new show, and he was true to his word. His gift lies in mining the quirks of everyday life for points of universal recognition, whether it’s the devilish business of refilling the ice tray, changing bin bags, bringing in the shopping, or why you’ll never see a busy man eating an ice cream.This observational path took some nicely surreal turns, such as when he graphically demonstrated why cowboys struggle with revolving doors, Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Rite is dark, both visually and in emotion, and stems from the same concept as Nijinsky’s - pack mentality and what fate this can project onto the "chosen one". But Dolan’s look is visually different. The 10 dancers are Read more ...
David Benedict
People sneer at musicals for endless reasons: they hate Broadway brashness, non-naturalistic lurches in and out of song, the sentimentality. One of the least acknowledged reasons, however, is because their plots – predictability plus songs – have zero tension. And you know what? Placed in the witness box, many a musical emerges guilty as accused. But the quietly astonishing Once is innocent of all those charges. Deftly exploding just about every myth about musicals, it’s simply riveting.The tension maintained throughout John Tiffany’s bewitching production is all the more remarkable Read more ...
Heather Neill
Molly Sweeney has been blind since early childhood. Supported by her understanding father, she has grown into a confident, independent woman. Then her new husband Frank and an ambitious ophthalmologist, Mr Rice, suggest that it might be possible to restore Molly's sight and she undergoes two operations. Partially sighted, she has to learn how to find her way in a mysterious new world where nothing is as she has experienced it. Her sense of herself is undermined, she loses her equilibrium and becomes confused in a mixture of memory and reality, seeing and not seeing.Brian Friel had already Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The manner and the speed with which Sinéad O’Connor veers between impishly poking fun at herself and her material, and delivering it with scorching force, is bewildering. For instance, with the “The Healing Room”, a tender song about a spiritual quest for inner peace, she cracks jokes about Mr Blobby during the intro and then changes the opening line to “I have a universe inside me… and a cucumber.” What’s extraordinary is that despite often sending herself up in this way, she can immediately slip back into singing so fiercely and persuasively that everything flows. The comedy moments merely Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The director James Marsh has made his name as a documentarian who brilliantly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Both Man on Wire and Project Nim seamlessly wove together archive and reconstruction. Although Shadow Dancer, an IRA thriller set in the early Nineties, is in many ways very stylised, it is not as needlessly overwrought as Marsh’s TV drama Red Riding, but nevertheless characterised by a cool absence of cliff-hanging narrative tension that is typical of documentary.With a script by former ITN newsman Tom Bradby, Marsh tells the grim story of Colette (Andrea Riseborough) Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A dark night of the soul gets mined for maximum effect in Irish director Lenny Abrahamson's third film, a subdued yet infinitely disturbing portrait of a teenager, and by extension his community, undone by a sudden act of violence. Set among Dublin's comfortable Sandymount middle-class, the film couples an improvisatory vibe with a gathering sense of grief that brings Greek tragedy to mind. And when the movie's deliberately clamped-down feel cracks open, watch out: the howl it unleashes is terrifying to behold.Newcomer Jack Reynor (pictured below right with Roisin Murphy) gives a star-making Read more ...
emma.simmonds
“It’s always the quiet places where the mad shit happens,” observes Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) in Northern Irish director Jon Wright’s creature feature. And, credit where it’s due, the mirthfully monikered Grabbers presents us with some classically mad shit. Set on the fictional Erin Island - a fishing village off the coast of Ireland - Grabbers is Wright’s second feature after 2009’s Tormented.After a prologue involving the fatal molestation of fisherman by an unseen sea monster, we’re introduced to Garda Ciarán O’Shea (Richard Coyle). He’s rebounding off rock bottom, drunk and Read more ...
peter.quinn
On Sailing to Byzantium Christine Tobin's utterly singular music fuses with the amaranthine force of WB Yeats's poetry to create one of the most transporting jazz releases in aeons. From the iridescent colours of “The Wild Swans at Coole” and the statuesque tranquility of the title track, to the subtly ornamented melodic line of “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and the deeply poignant “Long-legged Fly”, the album's unique sound-world and intense depth of feeling completely seduce the senses.Tobin's incredibly empathetic band features Liam Noble (piano), Phil Robson (guitar), Gareth Lockrane ( Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sligo Live is Europe’s most westerly music festival, and its mix of indie and traditional is unique. For four nights and days, cracking traditional players fill the town’s many excellent pubs - Kennedy’s, Foley’s, the Snug, Mchugh’s and Hardagan’s - with the headliners: Wallace Bird, Lau, accordion queen Sharon Shannon, Joan Armatrading. But one name stood out on the marquee, that of Van Morrison, coming to Sligo with the promise of a very different kind of show – “Lyrics and Poetry: Emphasis on Words”, with readings of his own work and that of Yeats.As it was, any hopes the audience filing Read more ...