Listen to my extended radio report from Harlem on US presidential election night, and after. Includes an interview with the Rev Al Sharpton on the challenges ahead for the Obama administration and for the civil rights movement.
“Everybody here that voted for John McCain, raise your hand!” said Michael Hardy into the microphone. Nobody raised their hand.
On 145th Street in Upper Harlem, the crowd in the meeting room of the House of Justice (motto: “No Justice, No Peace”) was feeling good. Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published in the Irish Times. Posted here again now due to Valentino Achak’s Deng’s visit to Dublin.
One night in the summer of 2001, I stood in a field, in thick mud, holding a clipboard and a torch. The torch showed up a row of primitive huts, and I moved from hut to hut, shining my torch inside, sometimes finding wide-eyed faces, mostly of children. “Where are your parents?” I asked. “Fetching wood”, they answered, though it was 4am, and I made marks on a sheet on my clipboard. Many huts were empty. As I walked, adult shadows flitted past, and there were sounds of running and shouting. Torch beams perforated the night, as colleagues walked down other, parallel lines of huts.
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Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008
There are two moments in ‘No Man’s Land’ that are great theatre. Late in the first act, Michael Gambon, playing Hirst, a writer of apparent high class and distinction, lapses into a drunken, maudlin reminiscence. He is haunted by the dream from which he has just woken, of a drowning. “There’s a gap in me”, he cries, “I can’t fill it… They’re blotting me out. Who is doing it? I’m suffocating.” His words, as befits somebody still mired in half-sleep, and drink sodden, are barely coherent. But the fear is very real, and it shoots through his character and the play: it is, it seems, the age-old fear of abandonment – of being a fraud and, worse, being a solitary fraud. Read the rest of this entry »
Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 10, 2008
It’s not difficult to imagine Brian Friel and his Field Day buddies sketching out the framework for ‘Translations’, in Derry in 1980. They start with the premise of setting it during the 1830s Ordnance Survey, an exercise that involved “standardising” Irish place names in brutish English: a scenario that provides for an encounter between coloniser and colonised but that doesn’t carry the baggage of nationalist mythologising. Brilliant. Read the rest of this entry »
Published in the Irish Independent, Saturday August 9, 2008
If you want to attend a show at the Belarus Free Theatre, first of all you have to find the mobile phone number of their manager. It’s not on the web. It’s not in the phone book. Just ask around until you get it.
Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 3, 2008
A long time ago (the days before cheap flights), in a city far, far away (by road, at least), a young, earnest Irishman found a job paying £2.50 an hour, for a ten-to-twelve hour day, in a theatre. Actually, it wasn’t a theatre, but was an old, rambling building, that was pretending to be a theatre “complex”.
Anyway, he was happy. He swept the floors, and tore tickets, and helped clean up the bar when the last punters had gone home at four am. Sometimes, he got to slip into the theatres and see shows for free! He was very happy. Even though most of them were awful.
Published in the Irish Independent, March 2007
The US is kicking a dead horse in Iraq, the outcome of a misconceived adventure that was supposed to be about taming the wild. Their only hope for retaining some dignity is to bury the bodies and get out as quickly as possible. This could be what the renowned American playwright, Sam Shepard, is talking about in his enigmatic new play, written for the Abbey, ‘Kicking A Dead Horse’.
Published in the Sunday Tribune, July 27, 2008
Megan O'Riordan, pro gambler
Earlier this week, I got an email from a writer friend, Simon Doyle. He was writing a new play, he said. It was about the kidnapping of a South Korean film director and his ex-wife actress by North Korean spies in 1978, and their being “forced by dictator Kim Jong-il to make a socialist interpretation of ‘Godzilla’”. It was called ‘¡ZAP!’ He invited me to a staging of some scenes on Saturday, as part of something called Project Brand New.
