Ireland
Tim Cumming
“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.Queue it up for your listening pleasure, and you’re going to be submerged in a sonic netherworld raised up by the four-piece’s panoply of organic drones seemingly captured in an echo chamber of epic proportions, with funereal drum taps, singer Radie Peat’s voice at its most haunted and disembodied, and more reminiscent of Heathen Earth-era Throbbing Gristle than anything heard before Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.Upgraded this time round to the open expanse of the Olivier stage, the play occupies an Irish backwater from designer Robert Jones that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, the vista defined by a striated stage curtain (it looks beaded, but isn't) itself suggesting the porousness of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Eugene O’Hare’s The Dry House is the kind of spare but oddly lyrical three-hander that would have made a good Wednesday Play back in the day. For Conor McPherson fans, it will seem like familiar terrain, with all the ingredients for an unusual domestic drama. Think, one interior, probably a humble home or a pub, where a small cast sit and drink, talk, confess, drink some more. Some of them are dead. Here there are two earthbound characters, Chrissy (Mairead McKinley) and her sister Claire (Kathy Kiera Clarke of Derry Girls fame). Also popping in regularly is Chrissy’s late daughter Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year. During the euphemistically named The Troubles, a Belfast mother loses her son, having seen him follow in his father’s footsteps into the Provisional IRA. Her daughter, wanting to prove Read more ...
David Nice
Silver rose, golden voices. Richard Strauss calls for four of the best: two sopranos and a mezzo for the love-triangle that develops between a 17-year-old Count, his 32-year-old lover and the girl he falls for at first sight; a bass as one of opera’s strongest if queasiest comic creations, Baron Ochs, Viennese Falstaff, debaucher of maidservants and country girls. Irish National Opera can now bask in the triumph of having cast three native singers of world-class calibre, and a German who sings as generously as he acts making his debut in a role he can now take all over the world.Bruno Ravella Read more ...
David Nice
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the invention of a scary Irish dad who forces his sons to act it out with him every day in their seedy Walworth Road flat. Go with conventional expectations and you’ll be wrong-footed, or downright disappointed; Enda Walsh pushes boundaries, pulls the dirty rug from under our feet. Vividly acted, directed and designed, this revival of his 2006 two-acter suggests it’s a masterpiece.It helps not to know what lies in store, which heightens the thriller aspect of the play; I was a nervy virgin Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“They say there are only two stories,” explains director Treasa O’Brien. “A person goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.” O’Brien was born in Dublin to a naval family that had to up sticks and move every two or three years. Her first school was in Malta, where the other kids would neither speak to her nor play with her since she was an outsider.In Town of Strangers she invites people who likewise live far from home to recount their stories. Gort, a small town in the west of Ireland, is the perfect setting for her enquiries since, per capita, it has the most diverse population in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Lisa O’Neill is a part of the new wave of Irish contemporary folk artists, one that encompasses the likes of Lankum, Ye Vagabonds and John Francis Flynn, all of them putting their albums out on Rough Trade, which makes the venerable English Indie label something of a centre for what the present and future of Irish folk music sounds like. (Lankum’s Radie Peat and O’Neill have also sung together, on the excellent “Factory Girl”, part of the showcase This Ain’t No Disco.)All of This Is Chance is O’Neill’s first release through Rough Trade, and her fourth album since the self-released Has An Read more ...
David Nice
This multimedia horror revue gave me heart trouble, which is an odd kind of compliment. Not at first: the assault of abrasive music, the one singer having to leap all over the place vocally, competing with spoken word and information overload, can seem self-defeating. And that vile word “lobotomy” is enough in itself to trigger a panic attack. But ultimately the impact is powerful, unforgettable, in tune with great artistic statements about the human condition.Least Like the Other’s creative team have been selective about the supposedly limited details we now have concerning the tragic life Read more ...
Graham Fuller
This is not a rehash of my Skinty Fia review, but smoke from the same grate.Asbury Park, New Jersey, 5 October – we've driven down from NYC to see Fontaines DC play hopefully most of their blistering third album at the Stone Pony venue. Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny played here in the Seventies. It's legendary – and bad news for we arthritics. The stage is not at the end of the narrow hall opposite the entrance and the bar but runs along a side wall, so the audience is squashed and stretched in front of it. Naturally wanting to get as close as we could to the Irish quintet Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors: 1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)3= Compartment No. 6 (Juho Kuosmanen); and3= Happening (Audrey Diwan)5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel)6. Tori and Lokita (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)7= The Duke (Roger Michell); and7= Three Minutes: A Lengthening (Bianca Stigter)9. Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook)10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) Each critic’s first choice was Read more ...
David Nice
Only a group of top musicians stood, or mostly sat, between a full but necessarily small house and Dr Malatesta’s Plastic Surgery Clinic in the bijou surroundings of Dun Laoghaire’s 324-seater Pavilion Theatre. The scaled-down wing of Irish National Opera’s season, touring between a highly-acclaimed production of Guillaume Tell and next March’s Der Rosenkavalier, worked so well because the same high values that have marked the other company offerings I’ve seen so far are very much in evidence.Donizetti’s stock farce of an old man duped into thinking he’s got himself a demure bride may not Read more ...