Ireland
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 ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a very talented comic indeed to warm the main room at the Leicester Square Theatre, a venue that is situated beneath a Catholic church and which, vampire-like, can suck the life out of even the most buoyant of audiences. Fortunately, Jason Byrne has enough energy to wake the dead or, in this case, a few hundred damp souls who have come in from a rainy London town outside.The Irish comic starts his show as he means to go on - with the gags coming apace and a delightfully surreal set-up that involves Davina McCall exercise steppers and skipping ropes. Byrne’s greatest skill is riffing Read more ...
Matt Wolf
When cultural talk drifts toward Mr Big, thoughts tend to turn to Sex and the City's Chris Noth, whose New York is world enough and time away from the doomed metropolis populated by the "big fellah" played by Finbar Lynch in Richard Bean's play of the same name. This big guy is, in fact, slight but menacing: the type of man not unacquainted with the very methods of violence which Harold Pinter, among others, dramatised so well. And when Lynch's Costello remarks, "Unlike you, I am not mentally ill," one sits up and takes notice. The issue here has less to do with what Costello is not and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A play could be written about, or for, Michael Gambon's fingers, and perhaps Beckett's 1958 Krapp's Last Tape is it. I've seen this solo piece many times, most recently in a studio theatre rendition from Harold Pinter that opened a window on to his own mortality and won't quickly be forgotten. But what Gambon brings to the table - well, desk - is the abiding sense of a man struggling for his share of the light amidst darkness at the very moment that his powers may be slipping away. Or are they? Only those fingers know for sure.Indeed, during the opening passages of Michael Colgan's production Read more ...
kate.bassett
At 6ft 4in, Dara Ó Briain is a massive bloke. With his bald, cannon-ball head and barrel-chested torso – togged out in a suit – he looks like a bulldog that's acquired a tailor. But it is not, of course, his physical build that has made this affable Irishman a huge name in the entertainment industry. What's key to his popular appeal is his "ordinary bloke" manner combined with his gift of the gab and his quick mind.As an observational stand-up, he surely won't be running any marathons around the stage. His list of satirical butts, after all, includes fitness trainers' quackery. Why on earth Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks to their credit, both the group and its members have grown up into professionals at the head of their field.Specialising in Renaissance polyphony at a time when such music was not only unfashionable but almost entirely Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker is our fourth guest to choose some favourite books for holiday reading. Born in 1956, she is known in part for her suspended sculptures that appear to capture the moment of explosion, as well as for her celebrated sleeping installation of actress Tilda Swinton (The Maybe) at the Serpentine in 1995.Her inquiring, deconstructing ideas that include wrapping Rodin’s The Kiss in a mile of string (Tate Britain, 2003) or dropping, crushing and variously destroying objects have brought Parker constant explosure in major galleries, from Tate Britain and Read more ...
carole.woddis
The Martin McDonagh phenomenon is a curious one. He burst upon the world in 1996, aged 26, born in Camberwell, the son of Irish parents. The quirk of fate that placed him in south east London may or may not have been the making of him. But by pure accident, and whether he actually knew the people involved or not, it aligned him with what was to become the abiding zeitgeist of the mid-Nineties: BritArt and Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. This may seem a red herring as an introduction to a review of the Young Vic’s revival of McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the play that set him on the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
There cannot be many famous rock songs that mention cricket. Roy Harper's poetic "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" springs immediately to mind. And 10cc's "Dreadlock Holiday". And then the trail goes fairly cold. Until 2009, when The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon and Tommy Walsh of Pugwash collaborated on their inspired Duckworth Lewis Method concept album.It may not have topped the charts, but it did land them an appearance on Test Match Special. And last night’s live rendition as part of the Meltdown season garnered them the kind of standing ovation usually reserved for double Read more ...