Ireland
The Secret Scripture review - Jim Sheridan's turgid homecomingTuesday, 16 May 2017
It's the church wot done it! That's the unexceptional takeaway proffered by Jim Sheridan's first Irish film in 20 years, which is to say ever since the director of My Left Foot and The Boxer hit the big time. But despite a starry and often glamorous... Read more... |
CD: Imelda May - Life. Love. Flesh. BloodWednesday, 05 April 2017
As Imelda May releases her fifth CD, it can’t but help that Bob Dylan has come out as a fan – it was, she wrote, "like being kissed by Apollo himself". No doubt his buddy T Bone Burnett passed him a copy of the album, for he produced it in Los... Read more... |
Crash and BurnThursday, 29 December 2016
Not all racing drivers are created equal. New world champion Nico Rosberg is the son of a former F1 champion, grew up in Monaco, speaks five languages and turned down an offer to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London.On the... Read more... |
Ireland with Ardal O'Hanlon, More4Thursday, 15 December 2016
There has been an abundance of celebrity travelogues of late and with each one comes a new USP. Speaking just of Ireland, train enthusiast Michael Portillo nabbed the Victorian Bradshaw's rail guides, while the adventurous Christine Bleakley... Read more... |
Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, Sadler’s WellsMonday, 28 November 2016
Booking a ticket for a show devised by Michael Keegan-Dolan has always required an act of faith, and this is no exception. ‘If I say this is a house, it’s a house,” says the evening’s laconic compere, Mikel Murfi, gesturing with his cigarette to... Read more... |
Jack Taylor, C5Friday, 18 November 2016
For those new to this Irish crime series, a brief catch-up. Jack Taylor (played by Iain Glen at his world-weary best) is a hard-drinking maverick loner ex-cop who left the Garda Siochána (Ireland's police force) after hitting a politician to... Read more... |
Maria de Rudenz, Wexford Festival OperaTuesday, 01 November 2016
Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew... Read more... |
The Fall, Series 3, BBC TwoFriday, 30 September 2016
The cliffhanger ending of series two – will serial killer Paul Spector survive his gunshot wounds? – has been quietly defused, since Spector (Jamie Dornan) now has series three stretching out ahead of him. What was less expected was that this opener... Read more... |
CD: Lisa Hannigan - At SwimMonday, 15 August 2016
Water has featured prominently in Lisa Hannigan’s work since striking out solo on 2008’s Mercury-nominated Sea Sew: water that caresses and relaxes; water that turns deadly and drowns. The water in At Swim is the water that the singer finds herself... Read more... |
The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's GlobeSaturday, 04 June 2016
There’s a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn’t the one of Shakespeare’s making. So legendary are the work’s difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new production can feel like a proffered solution, a defence of an... Read more... |
Sing StreetTuesday, 17 May 2016
He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market... Read more... |
DVD: BrooklynFriday, 19 February 2016
Colm Tóibín’s work has always eluded the attention of filmmakers. It took Nick Hornby, a writer who knows his way along the obstacle-strewn pathway between page and screen, to effect a beautifully smooth transition of his 2009 novel Brooklyn. The... Read more... |
