Arambe, Beckett, Bisi Adigun, Brokentalkers, Dermot Bolger, Druid, Eileen Walsh, Enda Walsh, Harold Pinter, Jimmy Murphy, JM Synge, Michael Keegan Dolan, RSC, Shakespeare, The Gate, Tom Murphy
In Culture, Ireland, Theatre on January 5, 2010 at 11:27 am
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Africa, Arambe, Bisi Adigun, Gianina Carbunaria, Immigration & asylum, John Millington Synge, Parnell Street, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry, The Playboy of the Western World, Theatre, Village
In Immigration & asylum, Theatre on July 7, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Originally published in Village, Sunday, 30 December 2007
“In dem days was before the Africans came to Parnell Street.” Them days was before the Africans came to our stages, too.
This was the year when immigrants got themselves a mayor, a minister, and a voice on the Irish stage. As in politics, so too in the theatre: most of the talking for immigrants is being done by the Irish – but not all.
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