Ireland
Eimear McBride: Strange Hotel review - keycards to the heart of a woman in flightSunday, 09 February 2020
Hotels in fiction can serve as places of desolation or discovery; as escape hatches, or else punishment blocks. In her third novel, Eimear McBride channels this ambivalence but annexes it to another sub-genre - the narrative of life on the road,... Read more... |
Asking For It, Birmingham Repertory Theatre review - victim-blaming and abuse in small town IrelandThursday, 06 February 2020
In a world where the contentious report of a young English woman gang raped by teenage boys in Cyprus last year continues to make headlines, Asking For It is more than relevant. Such scenarios are by no means new but are once again making news... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Royal Opera review - a blast for children of all agesWednesday, 05 February 2020
"About as much fun as you can have with your clothes on," promised a member of the two Royal Opera casts teamworking their way through multiple roles and costume changes for what in effect is Alice's Adventures Under Ground and Through the Looking... Read more... |
How They Built the Titanic, Channel 5 review - the great liner revisited again, but why now?Wednesday, 11 December 2019
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been... Read more... |
CD: The Script - Sunsets & Full MoonsFriday, 08 November 2019
Massively successful Irish trio The Script could, loosely speaking, be called a rock band. But they aren’t really, are they? Their sixth album is an indictment of the kind of music they play. It’s packed with over-produced post-Coldplay anthem-pop... Read more... |
Dublin Murders, Series Finale, BBC One review - eerie detective drama grips tightlyWednesday, 06 November 2019
You wouldn’t expect a drama called Dublin Murders (BBC One) to be a laugh a minute, but the cumulative anguish, menace and torment of this eight-parter made it almost unbearable, even if viewers were thrown a tiny scrap of hope in the final frames.... Read more... |
Two Door Cinema Club, O2 Academy, Glasgow - lively but risk averse party songs for the weekendMonday, 07 October 2019
The onstage arrival of Two Door Cinema Club was heralded by a tongue-in-cheek video countdown that reached zero and then flashed up an error message, before asking the crowd to “try again”. In truth, the band’s own performance was never likely to... Read more... |
Blood Wedding, Young Vic review - inventive, poetic if over-stretched revival of Lorca's rural tragedyThursday, 26 September 2019
Earthiness, lyricism, fatalism, the undeniable force of passion, of ecstatic attraction, known as "duende": these are the familiar ingredients of Lorca's plays set in rural Spain. Blood Wedding, written in 1932, was the first, followed by Yerma two... Read more... |
Spotlight on The Troubles: A Secret History, BBC Four review - Ulster's bitter sectarian war revisitedWednesday, 11 September 2019
“The Troubles” is a polite euphemism for the ferocious storm of sectarian violence and political chaos which convulsed Northern Ireland for 30 years, before being brought to a close by 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Irish journalist Darragh MacIntyre... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Isabelle Aboulker, Swan Hennessy, SchubertSaturday, 03 August 2019
Isabelle Aboulker: Mélodies/Songs en français and in English Julia Kogan (soprano), Isabelle Aboulker (piano) (First Hand Records)Never heard of Isabelle Aboulker? Now in her 80th year, she's worked as a choral director and a singing... Read more... |
The Virtues, Episode 4, Channel 4 review - a bitter redemptionWednesday, 05 June 2019
Shane Meadows has said that he always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk. It’s homage to the European cinema he loves, with its preference for atmosphere over action, ambiguity over resolution, but it is also a way to confront an... Read more... |
Showbands, BBC Four review - an Irish cultural phenomenon explainedSaturday, 16 March 2019
Ask most people what a showband is and they’ll give you a blank look. But ask any Irish person (or those born in the Irish diaspora) who is north of 50 and they will probably look misty-eyed. For between the late 1950s and 1980s showbands were a... Read more... |
