Ireland
Calm with Horses review - a stirring debutFriday, 13 March 2020
Nick Rowland marks his breakout from TV drama with this very competent feature, an adaptation of Colin Barrett’s short story. Set in a bleak, rural Ireland, Cosmo Jarvis plays Arm, an ex-boxer with an estranged girlfriend, a non-verbal,... Read more... |
On Blueberry Hill, Trafalgar Studios review - superb acting, specious plotThursday, 12 March 2020
Some wondrous acting is sacrificed on the altar of an increasingly wonky plot in On Blueberry Hill, the first play in 10 years from Sebastian Barry, the Irish playwright and novelist whose onetime Royal Court entry The Steward of Christendom... Read more... |
Album: The Boomtown Rats - Citizens of BoomtownSaturday, 07 March 2020
The new Boomtown Rats album – their first for 36 years! – is both preposterous and rather wonderful. This is as it should be. The Irish band surfed the so-called “New Wave” after punk rock to brief chart-topping stardom. They had some cracking... Read more... |
Imagining Ireland, Barbican review - raising women's voicesMonday, 24 February 2020
Recent politics surround the EU and nationhood, fantasies of Irish Sea bridges and trading borders more porous than limestone have revived the granular rub between Eire and Britain, and the Celtic Tiger cool of the Nineties is a history module these... Read more... |
Michael Keegan-Dolan, MÁM, Sadler's Wells review - folk goes radicalWednesday, 12 February 2020
The Dingle Peninsula is a thumb of land that protrudes into the Atlantic as if trying to hitch a ride from Ireland to America. The choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan recently moved there, and its crags and vales and unspoilt coast have sucked him... Read more... |
Collapsible, Bush Theatre review - a high-wire solo engagementTuesday, 11 February 2020
There’s such remarkable symbiosis between material and performance in Irish dramatist Margaret Perry’s Collapsible that you wonder how the hour-long monologue will fare in any future incarnation. I don’t know how much Perry had the performer... Read more... |
On McQuillan's Hill, Finborough Theatre review - timely glance at Northern Irish myths and tensionsMonday, 10 February 2020
The news that the Continuity IRA created a bomb destined for England on Brexit Day has added to the timeliness of this revival of Joseph Crilly’s gut-punching comedy. Set in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, it takes a merciless glance at... Read more... |
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... |
