Ireland
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
David Ireland’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big name has been cast in by a leading English theatre director. Appropriately, it stars two actual Hollywood “big names”, Woody Harrelson and Andy Serkis, the latter seen here for once without motion-capture tags or prosthetics. Welcome back.The setting is a typical middle-class period house In London, gutted and expensively decorated, where Leigh (Serkis, pictured below left) is preparing for a meeting with the Oscar-winning star of his latest production, Jay Conway (Harrelson, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was something misleading about the opening of this concert. As Andrew John Hozier-Byrne and his band stepped onstage, the stage was lit up by a single spotlight, focused around the microphone that the singer stepped up to. Yet the following two hours were anything but a one-man band, with the collective of musicians assembled behind him given ample room to shine, to mostly positive but occasionally negative effect.That arrival was greeted rapturously by the Glasgow crowd, who had already responded warmly to support act the Last Dinner Party and then entertained themselves by singing Read more ...
peter.quinn
This UK premiere of the award-winning, Dublin-born vocalist and composer Christine Tobin’s latest project, Returning Weather, presented an otherworldly ode to finding home – casting multiple perspectives on our yearning for connection and human warmth.Commissioned by The Dock, a multidisciplinary arts centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, the song cycle sees Tobin working for the first time with both traditional Irish musicians and jazz improvisers. As Tobin noted, it was also possibly the first time ever that uilleann pipes have featured as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.The piper Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine a Glyndebourne season where all those promising young singers in the chorus get to be principals in a series of fringe operas. At Wexford, they already have their work cut out, though this year not so much in the three main rarities – hence the sheer joy of witnessing so many fine performances in Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, Donizetti’s La fille du régiment and Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri.To catch four operas and a recital in one day, as well as another comedy the following morning, is unique in my experience to date. And there were abundant pleasures and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Dance First takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s most famous work Waiting for Godot. “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” says the tramp Estragon of Pozzo’s slave Lucky, who then proceeds to do both in a typically absurd Beckettian way.The Irish writer’s bleak worldview often manifested itself in slapstick comedy and nonsense, but you wouldn’t know it from James Marsh’s tasteful film, another biopic following his The Theory of Everything (2014) about Stephen Hawking, and the less successful portrait of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst, The Mercy (2017 Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is 1864 and the lush green lawns of Knowl, the stately home in Ireland that Maud Ruthyn (Agnes O’Casey) will inherit when she reaches the age of 21, are beautifully kept. Everything is in its place. Maud expects deference, especially from the domestic staff.Maud is a steely character, so when the trustees of her late father’s estate advise her to go against the terms of his will and appoint them as trustees to her fortune, she instantly suspects them of being on the make. They are merely trying to warn her that her wily Uncle Silas (David Wilmot, pictured below), a suspected murderer Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had to condense the Catholic faith of my upbringing in one sentence, I would say that it essentially comes down to two things: we're all sinners, but we are all capable of redemption. (Theological experts may take a different view.) That boiled-down notion appears to be the takeaway of Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Miracle Club, set in 1967 working-class Ballygar, just outside Dublin – the kind of place whose residents live there their entire life.It concerns three women who go to Lourdes “for the cure”. Anyone not au fait with the Marian devotion central to Irish Catholicism in that period Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ruth Wilson possibly hasn’t had as much to get her teeth into on-screen since she vamped it up in Luther. Her performance as Lorna Brady in The Woman in the Wall is an object lesson in the way a performer in demand for her engaging looks and edgy sexiness can smartly step off that particular conveyor belt and go off in a totally new direction. In Joe Murtagh’s script, she has found the ideal channel for both her experience and talent (she is an executive producer of the series too) and an important cause to champion. It’s 2015 in a small town in western Ireland, where bedraggled Lorna, a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Here we are in rural Ireland and on the other side of bonkers. Apocalypse Clown is billed as an "end-of-the-world road movie with clowns". It’s hilarious, off the wall, beyond the cringe.The protagonists are three washed-up members of the circus clown profession. They make a combustible madcap combination as they travel together around, squished into that long-extinct symbol of hippydom, a bright yellow Renault 4L.The starting point is that some celestial event – possibly a solar flare, but it doesn’t actually matter – has suddenly caused every piece of equipment that needs computer Read more ...
David Kettle
Heaven, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★It’s a rare show that combines form and content to quite such devastatingly potent effect. The storyline of two-hander Heaven from Dublin-based Fishamble theatre company might seem simple: a middle-aged couple return to their former home town, where they encounter old (and new) flames, leading to a reassessment of their partnership, love and hopes.Despite the narrow focus of the material – examined in forensic detail in Eugene O’Brien’s penetrating script – there’s nonetheless a mythic quality to these two everypeople, buffeted by forces greater than Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sinead O’Connor, who has died aged 56, was, the world agrees, a brilliant, unstable, unique talent, a provocateur with an angelic voice. The Mirror’s front page yesterday was a moody black and white picture with the headline “Nothing Compares…”. Morrissey was not the only one to point out the lack of support for her art for the last 30 years from mainstream companies and media. Now that she has passed she can safely be made a saintly legend. “In the middle ages, I would have been burnt as a witch” she told Peter Culshaw in their 2013 interview, republished below. The cover of The Mirror Read more ...