sat 15/02/2025

Ireland

Brit has her first feature selected for Cannes

Alicia Duffy's feature debut, All Good Children

Cheering news for Brits in Cannes (always assuming anyone is actually able to travel there this year). Originally rumoured to be in line for the Critics' Week, a young British filmmaker, Alicia Duffy, has now secured an even better berth: her first...

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Little Gem, Bush Theatre

A gobby play that has real heart: Sarah Greene, Anita Reeves and Amelia Crowley deliver bright and enjoyable monologues

Monologue is a boring word, but in the hands of an Irish pensmith it can create some pretty exciting theatre. From a writer such as Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe the monologue can set the night alight with its storytelling brio. Word-drunk on these...

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Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters, Serpentine Gallery

Richard Hamilton, the true father of Pop art and spiritual descendant of Duchamp, is not a particularly prolific artist. Rather, he sticks to an idea and works on it over several editions and in different media, so that we get a large body of work...

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DVDs Round-Up 5

Two films with a East European flavour, Katalin Varga and Tales from the Golden Age, are among our March selection, which also includes the lovely, bittersweet Irish drama Kisses. Our US release (available worldwide, of course, by mail-order) is Wim...

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London Assurance, National Theatre

For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant...

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Horses come to Storyville

Thoroughbred documentary Race Horses comes to BBC Four

Horses, Liz Mermin's "intensely strange" but bewitching documentary about a year in the life of a trio of Irish "horse athletes", has already been seen at the Sheffield Doc/Fest and at the ICA in London. Now, recut and retitled Race Horses, it comes...

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Dara O Briain, touring

What a joy to welcome Dara O Briain back into the stand-up fold. The Irishman has been away from live performance for five years because he has been busy hosting the panel show Mock the Week and mucking about in boats on various Three Men... series...

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Ondine

Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than...

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The Bible: A History, Channel 4

For six years from 1988, when Sinn Fein was banned from direct broadcasting, Gerry Adams could be seen on television, but not heard. Instead, actors would read his words while his lips soundlessly moved. What would the architects of that ban have...

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The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a murdered 14-year-old who hovers in metaphysical limbo over her grieving family, was once to have been filmed by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. On the evidence of Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and...

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Tom Paulin on Translating Medea

I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured...

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Photographic Gallery: Niall O'Brien, Art Work Space

'Xavier', from Niall O'Brien's 'Good Rats' exhibition

Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the...

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