Ireland
Adam Sweeting
Veterans of the first series of Blood will be familiar with writer Sophie Petzal’s fondness for leading the viewer up the garden path and round the mulberry bush as the story develops. Get ready to go through it all again.The setting is the rural heart of Ireland, and this sequel resumes the year after the tragic events of its predecessor, as disgraced doctor Jim Hogan (Adrian Dunbar, pictured below) returns to pick up the pieces with his family. It was the death of Jim’s wife Mary that fuelled the drama of the first series, with the truth about Jim’s complicity or guilt kept hanging Read more ...
Normal People, BBC One review – adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel evokes the deep cut of first love
Joseph Walsh
Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, was a psychologically rich, emotive journey into the psyches of two Irish teenagers who fall in love. Only two years on from publication, it has been turned into a 12-part series from the BBC and Hulu. Rooney’s plot was simple. Working-class boy Connell, who’s popular at school, catches the eye of the socially awkward rich girl Marianne, and we follow their on-off relationship from upper-sixth to university. The novel had its detractors, but for most readers the way Rooney elegantly rendered the inner lives of Read more ...
Graham Fuller
When Sea Fever premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, no one could have guessed its story about an Irish fishing trawler attacked by a giant jellyfish would in one respect prove prophetic. Toward the end of writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s low-key horror movie, self-quarantining becomes a bone of contention for what’s left of the crew. The creature latches on to the boat with its ghostly white limbs, turning patches of the hull into mush with its slime and spreading a lethal parasitic infection that plays havoc with victims’ eyes.However, no blame Read more ...
Nick Hasted
St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But turn the rickety door-handle of a bohemian pub near Brighton station, and a poignant scene is unfolding. The Irish poet Brendan Cleary’s reading has been officially called off, and the boozy crowd whose raucousness he would have had to ride has evaporated. Instead, he continues unpaid for a scattered few. The sight of these last drinkers fondly listening under candlelight will warm me in the months to come. It’s not quite Weimar, because no human monster is approaching to destroy us. But the lights are going out.Cleary Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal, autistic five-year-old son and the kinds of friends who get him into trouble. Chief among them is Dympna (Barry Keoghan, in a wholly chilling performance), the heir apparent to the local drug-dealing Devers clan. Dympna exploits Arm’s pugilism to add muscle to his verbal threats. Violence is the Devers’ modus operandi and Calm with Horses veers Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Some wondrous acting is sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly wonky plot in On Blueberry Hill, the first play in 10 years from Sebastian Barry, the Irish playwright and novelist whose onetime Royal Court entry The Steward of Christendom showcased a treasured theatrical memory in the leading performance of the late and truly great Donal McCann.This latest work, a two-hander premiered in 2017 by Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company, isn’t remotely the equal of its 1995 forbear. And yet it, too, offers major acting opportunities for both David Ganly and Niall Buggy, the Irish actors here Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking songs (“Rat Trap” is a gem), but were reviled by the era’s Year Zero arbiters of taste. This was because they were clearly a Stones-ish R&B unit who’d jumped the bandwagon, the outrageous mugging of frontman Bob Geldof sealing the deal. That, however, is all ancient history and they return with a set that’s as goofy as it is contagious, clearly Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these days. Nevertheless the creative exchange between the two nations has a long and fruitful history – our folk traditions are conjoined twins, after all, and our contemporary musical cultures part of a continual flow back and forth.Imagining Ireland, first mounted to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising back in 2016, the year of the Brexit Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Dingle Peninsula is a thumb of land that protrudes into the Atlantic as if trying to hitch a ride from Ireland to America. The choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan recently moved there, and its crags and vales and unspoilt coast have sucked him into an older, slower way of life that – paradoxically, because his work was and remains radical – has given him a shot in the arm.The opening minutes of his latest confection of dance-theatre and live music feel like a sequel to his last, a savage take on Swan Lake that explored the effect on Irish communities of corruption in the Catholic church. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s such remarkable symbiosis between material and performance in Irish dramatist Margaret Perry’s Collapsible that you wonder how the hour-long monologue will fare in any future incarnation. I don’t know how much Perry had the performer specifically in mind when she wrote the piece, nor whether they developed it together in rehearsal, but the fusion feels total. It transfers to the studio space of the Bush Theatre from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where Holahan won The Stage’s Edinburgh Award for her performance.The space at the Bush gives it a poised but fraught intimacy, highlighted Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The news that the Continuity IRA created a bomb destined for England on Brexit Day has added to the timeliness of this revival of Joseph Crilly’s gut-punching comedy. Set in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, it takes a merciless glance at the myths and delusions surrounding small-town Northern Ireland, which are exposed in painful detail following the release of former IRA terrorist, Fra Maline, from prison.One of the most striking aspects of Irish drama is the way in which landscapes and buildings are so strongly steeped in the memories of the lives and conflicts that have played Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road, with all its detours and disorientations. Captured at intervals, from her thirties to her fifties, McBride‘s protagonist picks up the tangled threads of a woman’s life. In a sense, this work follows on from the stricken childhood conjured in her remarkable debut, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and the youthful passion and misery evoked in its Read more ...