Testing the post by email facility
Testing this indeed.
David Hare: putting the banks on trial, on stage
Do you believe Brian Lenihan or David McWilliams? IBEC or the Unions? Were the bankers gangsters, or simply suffering from hubris?
If conflict is at the heart of drama, then the collapse of the Irish economy should have proved a goldmine for dramatists. A society swept up by irrational exuberance; lone voices shouting stop; pantomime villains; and as many different interpretations of the crisis as there were characters: all the ingredients of good drama were there.
We’ll see the social effects of the downturn on the Irish stage soon, no doubt: Irish theatre has always been good at documenting the intimate minutiae of Irish lives and communities. But it has rarely risen to the challenge of responding rapidly to great political and cultural events. (more…)
The late Irish actor, Donal Donnelly, remembered
The actor Donal Donnelly, who died on Monday in Chicago, aged 78, was best known to the public for his cinematic roles in The Godfather: Part III and The Dead, but is remembered by his friends primarily as man of the theatre.
“He was the real thing, a fabulous stage actor,” said Noel Pearson.
Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1931, to Irish parents, James, a doctor from Tyrone, and Nora (nee O’Connor), a teacher from Kerry, the family soon moved to Dublin, and Donnelly attended Synge St CBS, where he acted in school plays alongside Milo O’Shea and Eamonn Andrews.
After an apprenticeship at Callaghan’s outfitters on Dame Street, he left the trade to join the Gate Theatre, and subsequently joined Godfrey Quigley’s Globe Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. He later moved to London, where he met his wife, Patsy, a dancer, on the stage.
His break came in 1964, when he was cast as Gar Private (more…)
Silver Stars and the future of Irish theatre
On a night in October I sat in a tiny theatre in Temple Bar and watched and listened as ten ordinary men sang a cycle of songs about their lives and Ireland.
When it finished, too soon, the woman beside me said, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to have liked that,” and she was right.
They were love songs, mostly: about lovers, and love of family, and of country. Untrained and unabashed, this curious choir sang them with an honesty and starkness that would have been confrontational, were they not so gentle. (more…)
Theatre in the Noughties: the decade’s top ten
Ten years ago, the British theatre impresario Michael Kustow issued an impassioned plea for the theatre, in a book with the now quaint title, ‘Theatre@Risk’. Faced with the overwhelming forces of both the internet and global capital, Kustow wondered, would theatre survive?
It seemed for a while during this decade that Irish theatre makers were responding to this challenge by including bits of video in their plays and calling them “multimedia”.
The response may have been glib, but the challenge was real. New media offer genuinely new means of entertainment and social interaction, and the expectations they create – of accessibility, interaction, and real-time response – are poorly met by the cumbersome form of traditional theatre. (more…)
Manufacturing consent: moving the Abbey to the GPO
On a wall in the lobby of the Abbey, near the cloakroom, sits a discrete plaque, unveiled by Sean Lemass in 1966. It commemorates the seven company members who downed tools to take up arms in the 1916 Rising.
One of them, an actor named Sean Connolly, was the first Irish casualty of the Rising, shot by a sniper as he attempted to take City Hall with a small Citizen Army force. Also amongst them was Peadar Kearney, the author of The Soldier’s Song. Three of the seven were women, including the Abbey’s first leading lady, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh.
Nearly a century on from their decision to replace (or augment) cultural activism with revolutionary action, it seems that the Abbey might come – ostensibly – full circle, and move to a new home at the GPO on O’Connell Street. In vivid echo of the contribution of these seven, the Abbey would become a living memorial for the Rising (more…)
Aminatou Haidar returns to Western Sahara
The Western Saharan activist ended her hunger strike on Thursday last, following Morocco’s agreement to allow her return to Laayoune, as I reported for the Sunday Tribune. See also earlier reports on Haidar’s hunger strike here and on the situation in Western Sahara, including an interview with Haidar, here.
Short drama-documentary in the IFI
Sanctuary is a series of 26 ultra-short stories of asylum and refuge in Ireland, being shown in rotation before features in the IFI this month. The stories are all based on interviews I’ve done with people seeking asylum, and were performed by a collection of well known and emerging actors and writers. (more…)
Online audio archive for FLAC
Some more online radio: this is an online audio archive I developed for FLAC (the Free Legal Advice Centres).
It features an introductory podcast and clips from interviews with a series of legal luminaries involved in FLAC’s first 40 years.
Radio documentary on immigrant election candidates
Online now: my short radio documentary on this year’s local elections, for The Curious Ear on Radio One. The blurb:
In May 2009, Colin Murphy hit the roads of Ireland on the campaign trail with some of the 40 immigrants who ran in the local elections. In Dublin, Limerick, Monaghan and Donegal, he talked to candidates and the people they were canvassing about the issues and the practicalities of local politics in Ireland. From Patrick Maphoso’s activist independent politics on Dublin’s northside to Anna Rooney’s staunch support for the Government in Clones, this project charts the diversity of experience and opinion amongst an emerging group of politicians. Ultimately, the experience was a sobering one for many of those. “It will take a long time for people to get used to immigrants participating in the elections,” said Maphoso, “but the first generation have to pave the way.” In Letterkenny, Michael Abiola Phillips is also philosophical: “I won’t be disappointed even if I don’t get in this time around,” he said. “It means I have to work harder.”
For more, see FOMACS.
On tour with Terminus
‘Terminus’ is back at the Peacock in Dublin. This article was first published in the Sunday Tribune on January 13, 2008.
It is six hours before Mark O’Rowe’s play, ‘Terminus’, opens in New York. The cast are doing the technical rehearsal. They’ve never been in the theatre before.
Eileen Walsh is standing in a dim crossbeam, shrouded in mist, talking out to the audience. Mark O’Rowe is coughing. A technician is talking loudly. A couple of others are looking at dimly-lit laptops, or moving quietly through the gloom, fixing things. The two other actors, Andrea Irvine and Aidan Kelly, are sprawled on the stage, each straddling a large shard of (mock) glass, looking bored.
“The drill for several years has been bed alone, then tears.” Eileen Walsh plays against the rhythm of O’Rowe’s verse. She lets the rhyme announce itself, as if her character were unaware that there were anything distinctive about her speech. (more…)
Sam Shepard at the Abbey: glamorous import?
In Sam Shepard’s ‘Ages of the Moon’, not a lot happens. Two men drink, sitting on a porch. Nobody else comes along. One of them leaves, briefly. Most of what they talk about is objectively meaningless: rambling musings on life, alcohol, women; shared memories of past misadventures. A fan hums above them erratically, till one of them shoots it. They have a fight. One of them is hurt. It seems bad. They watch the moon.
The play is softly melancholic, with a streak of bleakness and despair, and a countervailing seam of hope and humanity. It is a gentle entertainment, in which the meandering earlier scenes, which are dominated by a sometimes-awkward burlesque comedy, lead to the payoff of a closing sequence of simple, stark beauty and emotional clarity.
The action, such as it is, takes place across a long day’s drinking (more…)
On Angola in Le Monde Diplomatique
I spent August in Angola, working on a documentary, and have written this piece on the town of Kuito for Le Monde Diplo. Here’s a one-minute intro to the documentary, which I hope to complete in the new year.
Michael Keegan Dolan’s rites of Spring
Michael Keegan Dolan has made some of the most provocative and inspiring work on the Irish stage in the last 10 years. But his next production is a ballet at, bizarrely, the English National Opera. So has Dolan abandoned the theatre? And has he abandoned Ireland?
Dolan is possibly the most significant innovator to have emerged in Irish theatre in the last decade or so. His company, Fabulous Beast, has produced some of the most striking shows in successive Dublin Theatre Festivals — and done so all from their Amish-like base on a farm in the midlands, near to Dolan’s home place in Co Westmeath.
Their work is “dance-theatre”, but the label is of use only to people who need to fill niches in festivals. Combining speech, live music, dance of all types, and ritual, Fabulous Beast have sought to interrogate on stage the historical roots and contemporary foibles of this quirky small country.
In Giselle, The Bull and James Son of James, Dolan created a trilogy as significant — or more so — for Irish theatre as Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy (more…)
Aziza Brahim sings of Western Sahara
Recently returned from the Western Saharan refugee camps in Algeria, where I was working with Donal Scannel on a documentary he’s making of the Sahrawi exile singer, Aziza Brahim. Here’s a glimpse of Aziza during some downtime on tour in Spain this summer.
Democracy & Dialogue
I’m currently working on a documentary on post-war Angola, and have cut this one-minute short for entry to the Democracy & Dialogue competition in this year’s Darklight.ie digital film festival in Dublin.
On Lisbon, for Prospect
I wrote this piece on the run-up to the Lisbon campaign for Prospect Magazine in London, on Cóir and Ireland’s new culture wars.
When critics curse each other
Caleb Crain is an American writer who keeps an elegant blog at www.steamthing.com. At the end of June, he wrote a review of a new book by the essayist Alain de Botton for the New York Times. The day after the review came out, a long comment was posted on Crain’s blog by a reader, calling himself, curiously, ‘Alain de Botton’. “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make,” it concluded.
De Botton is a philosopher who likes to write about happiness and love, and as the comment was not exactly suggestive of either of these traits, readers initially thought it must have been a hoax. But it was quickly established that ‘de Botton’ was, in fact, de Botton; the following day, he was back with a justification, of sorts. “There’s a point at which a review becomes so angry, cruel and mean-spirited that perspective just disappears,” he wrote. (more…)
The Fringe: finding new empty spaces
How would you describe the theatre to a child who had never been?
Would you start with the building? “It’s big and dark, and everybody’s quiet.” Or perhaps with the performers? “The actors wear make up and costumes, and do funny things on stage.”
You’d probably explain the rules (or the rituals): “Everybody’s quiet. We turn off our phones. There’s a break half way through, so we can go to the loo. At the end we clap until the actors have gone, and then we can go home.”
And to an extraordinary degree, you’d be right. Over 40 years ago, Peter Brook coined a term for the kind of theatre that can be easily defined by its physical parameters and tired conventions. He called it the “Deadly Theatre”, and he defined it best using the example of Shakespeare: (more…)
Alegre’s Story. A World Report from Kuito, Angola
I’ve just returned from Angola, where I was filming a documentary on recovery and reconstruction in the town of Kuito, since the end of the war. This is a short radio essay telling the story of one of the people I met there, Alegre. It was broadcast on World Report on RTE Radio One.
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