Ireland
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was born with the ability and the demon to write. I have been punished for it constantly.” Written and directed by Sinéad O’Shea, this fascinating documentary is a testimony to Edna O’Brien’s rebellious talent, her prolific output – a novel a year for a while – and her star-studded socialising. It includes archival footage, some of it against the backdrop of Irish politics, as well as final interviews in which she looks frail but still glamorous in a sequined indigo cardigan, recorded by O'Shea not long before O'Brien died last year, aged 93.The names of people she had affairs with, Read more ...
David Nice
A lot hung upon the delivery last night of Henning Kraggerud, whom I last witnessed leading performances of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and some of his own music at the head of a mine in Svalbard: he was announced at the beginning of the concert as the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s new artistic partner, following the likes of another instrumentalist-composer, Jörg Widmann, and fellow violinist Thomas Zehetmair. So did he triumph? Beyond wildest expectations.You could even have called this performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons a concert staging. Introducing each concerto with a charming mixture of Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
An Irish adaptation of Garcia Di Gregorio’s acclaimed 2008 film Mid-August Lunch, director Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is the story of Edward (James McArdle) and his 81-year-old mother Alma (the excellent Fionnula Flanagan), who has had a stroke and can only communicate through an iPad. The stairlift is in constant use, as is her bell. And there are jokes about pouffes.Set in suburban Dublin, it’s warm-hearted and charming in a lukewarm way, but although it’s based on Darren Thornton and his co-writer brother Colin’s experiences with their own mother, who had a degenerative disease, it’s Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted performance so vigorously and poetically argued, plumps for hedonistic delights.Despite a radiant quiet curtain praising the truer, purer heavenly love, it was Pleasure in the shape of mezzo-in-a-thousand Helen Charlston who held us captive, along with the rainbow hues Peter Whelan drew from his phenomenally responsive Irish Baroque Orchestra in this Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts.For its touring farce, Irish National Opera has dropped the "Die" from the title of Johann Strauss II's smash hit, allowing the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden directorial debut. Animal lovers will want to avert their eyes. The film is undeniably powerful, with fine performances, but the unremitting violence ends up feeling cartoonish and empty.Set in the west of Ireland, the mountainous landscape is magnificent. Its sheep-farming inhabitants, not so much. In the first scene, a flashback, Michael ( Read more ...
India Lewis
Anglo-Irish author Catherine Airey’s first novel, Confessions, is a puzzle, a game of family secrets played through the generations. Set partly in New York and partly in a small town in Donegal, the book moves back and forth through time and space becoming, in the process, a compulsive read: a fascinating Russian nesting doll of family trauma.There are obvious cliches in the familial "saga" genre, which at times can make the book feel a little artificial, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating, often heartbreaking tale. We open with the traumatic loss of the Cora’s father in the chaos of 9/11. Read more ...
David Nice
There’s nothing like an anodyne new(ish) work to give a masterpiece an even higher profile. Rachel Portman‘s Tipping Points, promising to address climate change issues, was so bland and featureless it could have been composed by AI. Any one bar of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, on the other hand, shows originality of throught within a tradition, and unlike the Portman near-vacuum it challenged the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland to the limits.That they pulled it off was obviously due in no small measure to the guidance of Jessica Cottis. I’d like to have seen more urging Read more ...
Sam Amidon
Walking in the morning from my Airbnb along the road in West Kerry, a seven-minute walk with ocean on one side and farmland on the other, down to the Teaċ Daṁsa workshop space. I would bring all possible clothes for the short walk because the weather could go through all possible phases in those seven minutes.Week one: free improv. We had almost all of our dancers, but only three musicians: myself, Mayah Kadish and Romain Bly. Very open feeling, 90 min or 2 hour improv sessions each day with the musicians and dancers together. It could go anywhere.Very early in the process we started Read more ...
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 ...