Ireland
David Nice
"Elysian" is the best way to describe the dream gardens of Ireland's Lismore Castle in early June: lupins, alliums and peonies rampant in endless herbaceous borders, supernatural perspectives towards the main building on various levels. This year’s Blackwater Valley Opera Festival production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, not so much: easily adjustable circumstances worked too often against talented performers in the converted stables space pressed into service once a year.Let’s start with the placement of the Irish Baroque Orchestra, so phenomenal under conductor Peter Whelan playing for the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Quiet Girl is adapted faithfully from Claire Keegan’s wonderful short story, Foster, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and then expanded into a novella.Much of the dialogue in Colm Bairéad’s beautiful, mainly Irish-language film, which is in many ways about the power of silence, is reproduced unchanged from Keegan's book.Set in 1981, the first scenes present nine-year-old Cáit (the marvellous Catherine Clinch, a 12-year-old newcomer) as more obviously unfortunate than in the book, perhaps to build up back-story.She’s bullied and slow at school and wets the bed at home, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Incanting, declaiming, and growling, as if actual singing might prettify the Fontaines DC’s post-punk dirges, Grian Chatten has never sounded more aggrieved than he does on the Irish combo’s third album. Disarmingly, he also sounds younger on Skinty Fia than he did on the group’s brash debut, Dogrel (2019), and its startlingly seasoned follow-up, A Hero’s Death (2020). It’s as if the man can no longer shield the boy. There’s a logical reason for this, and it applies not just to the frontman but to the Fontaines as a collective and the places they find themselves in, musically Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Ealing Studios’ output encompassed much more than comedy, though a viewing of 1952’s The Gentle Gunman suggests that political drama wasn't one of their strengths.Based on a play by Alexander McKendrick’s cousin Roger MacDougall, and directed by Ealing stalwart Basil Dearden, The Gentle Gunman’s problems start with its casting. Dirk Bogarde and John Mills rarely convince as brothers serving in the IRA during the early years of World War II, both actors struggling to maintain convincing Irish accents for more than a few seconds.There’s a fascinating film to be made about Ireland’s shady Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The terrain Holding occupies is well travelled, but this new ITV four-part drama travels over it really well. The landmarks are familiar: a quiet rural community, a cop with an unhealthy lifestyle and a secret sorrow, a feud between rival lovers of the local lothario, a long-buried trauma that’s suddenly unearthed. We could be in any rural location in the primetime drama of the past half-century.But as soon as elderly Mrs Meany (Brenda Fricker, pictured below) comes into shot on her mobility scooter, riding into town like a lone gunslinger with a perm, it’s clear this drama will be having its Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Irish teenager Saoirse Murphy has a dirty mouth. And she’s not afraid to use it when talking to the nuns at her convent school. But it soon emerges that her feistiness is a cover for some very disturbing problems in Sarah Hanly’s energetic debut monologue, Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks, which was first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin last year and now visits London’s Royal Court for a short run. And although much of the material is familiar, it’s thrillingly performed by the playwright herself.Beginning with Saoirse explaining her discovery of the joys of masturbation to her best Read more ...
David Nice
One thing’s clear from Irish National Opera’s bold championship of Vivaldi: he’s his own man when it comes to the stage, not some baroque generic, even if Bajazet is a pasticcio incorporating other composers’ music. He doesn’t characterize through arias as keenly as Handel, but his string writing is unique, and what a revelation to have Peter Whelan’s inspirational guidance from the harpsichord of 10 other players in the Irish Baroque Orchestra.Visually, there's much to admire. Molly O'Cathain's tarnished gold-and-wood set helps the singers to project - it's perfect for touring - and works Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Malcolm Arnold: Complete Symphonies and Dances National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Queensland Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Penny (Naxos)Working through these nine symphonies in chronological order is a fascinating and disturbing experience, the giddy peaks and deep troughs of Sir Malcolm Arnold’s personal life mirrored in sound. If you’ve only ever encountered Arnold’s lighter output, you’re in for a surprise. There’s plenty of sardonic humour and a lengthy string of improbably memorable tunes, but the prevailing impression is one of deep seriousness. Arnold often wrote for large Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge for 20 years,” sighs Pato Dooley (Adam Best) prophetically; he has already started making his escape from that particular Galway village, doing lonely stints on London building sites. For 40-year-old unmarried Maureen Folan (Orla Fitzgerald), the woman Pato had dubbed "the beauty queen of Leenane" in her youth, departure is a national pastime: Ireland, in this 25th anniversary revival of Martin McDonagh's breakout play, means “always someone leaving”, she suggests. For her conniving mother Mag (Ingrid Craigie), Read more ...
Rachel O'Riordan
The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a vicious, sad and extraordinary play.On the surface, Martin McDonagh's play, first seen 25 years ago and revived now in a collaboration between Chichester Festival Theatre and my home base, the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, is about a toxic, dysfunctional relationship between a mother and daughter in a lonely rural setting [pictured below: director Rachel O'Riordan]. Painfully funny and savage in its treatment of family dynamics, it pillories small town Ireland, while moving with supreme skill from comedy to violence and back again. It is romantic, acerbic Read more ...
Tom Teodorczuk
When Brendan Coyle, playing a modestly magnetic widower and sales rep called John in this revival of Conor McPherson's 2004 play Shining City, first appears on stage, he looks thoroughly bewildered. His eyes dart back and forth as he initially struggles to find his bearings. He has arrived at the office of the therapist Ian (Rory Keenan) whom he has sought out in an attempt to understand why he keeps seeing the ghost of his dead wife.Such confusion seems apt. The intimate, understated Theatre Royal Stratford East, has served up some gems over the years – most recently its 2018 London Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Rose (Ann Skelly; The Nevers) is adopted. The name on her birth certificate is Julie and the possibility of a different identity – different clothes, different hair, different accent - beckons. If she could embrace this second life, she thinks, she could be the person she was meant to be. “I’d be the real me.”In their third feature, directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, both originally from Dublin, continue the themes of identity, role-playing and moments of transformation that they explored in the unsettling, meditative Helen (2008) and Mister John (2013). Rose Plays Julie is also an Read more ...