Reviews

DruidMurphy by Tom Murphy

Reviewed by Fintan Walsh on 27 June 2012 23 June - 20 Oct, 2012 (on tour) in Hampstead Theatre

Although Tom Murphy did not expressly write Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), A Whistle in the Dark (1961) and Famine (1968) as a trilogy, Druid’s curation of the three plays invites us to see the dramas as being intimately connected. In the incredibly ambitious DruidMurphy production, the...

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Shortcut to Hallelujah by Mick Donnellan

Reviewed by Matthew Harrison on 27 June 2012 25 June - 1 July, 2012 in Town Hall Theatre

Writer and director Mick Donnellan knows his audience and they seem to know him. This symbiotic relationship ensures that Shortcut to Hallelujah, Donnellan’s cacophonous paean to pub politics, county football and life in Ballinrobe, strikes a chord with Truman Theatre Company’s large and...

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Appendage by Derek Murphy

Reviewed by Terence Blain on 26 June 2012 15 - 30 June, 2012 (on tour) in the MAC, Belfast

How do we mourn? Why do we mourn? What do we mourn about? These questions lurk lugubriously in Derek Murphy’s Appendage, a two-hander set in a simply featured apartment, somewhere in New York City. Both protagonists, it turns out, are mourning the same woman. For Peter, it’s his wife Jill,...

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Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi

Reviewed by Wolfgang Marx on 23 June 2012 9 - 30 June, 2012 in Samuel Beckett Theatre

Several of the first operas written around 1600 in Italy are dedicated to the myth of Orpheus. Developed by a group of Florentine aristocrats who wanted to revive ancient Greek tragedy as they understood it, opera was created as new type of drama in which music was not just occasionally inserted –...

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The Love-Hungry Farmer by John B. Keane, adapted for stage by Des Keogh

Reviewed by Rosalind Fanning on 16 June 2012 on tour in Birr Theatre & Arts Centre

In Des Keogh’s adaptation of the John B. Keane book, Letters of a Love-Hungry Farmer, the solo actor plays John Bosco McLaine, the bachelor farmer, and other vignettes. The production is directed by Charlotte Moore, one of the two founders of The Irish Repertory Theatre in lower Manhattan, where...

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Griswold by Arnold Thomas Fanning

Reviewed by Jesse Weaver on 14 June 2012 13 - 23 June, 2012 in the Civic Theatre

It’s always encouraging to see new writing on the Irish stage, and it's always slightly disheartening when a new script hasn’t received careful consideration in terms of its development. Arnold Thomas Fanning’s Griswold could have been a cracker of play that pointedly tackled issues...

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The House by Tom Murphy

Reviewed by Sara Keating on 14 June 2012 13 June - 14 July, 2012 in the Abbey Theatre

There is a disturbing moment in the middle of Tom Murphy’s late play The House when the play’s ‘hero’, returned emigrant Christy Cavanagh, replies to an invitation to the local dance by “straighten[ing] up as a man might to adjust his belt” and banging the inviter’s...

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The Man Who by Seamus Collins

Reviewed by Jane Coyle on 09 June 2012 9 and 10 June 2012 in The MAC, Belfast

Hot on the heels of its lively revival of Raymond Scannell’s Breathing Water, Chatterbox has come to the 2012 Pick’n’Mix Festival primed and ready for a run at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Pick’n’Mix is the brainchild of Belfast’s Old Museum Arts Centre (OMAC),...

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Travesties by Tom Stoppard

Reviewed by Christina Hunt Mahony on 09 June 2012 9 - 23 June, 2012 in Pavilion Theatre

It’s nearly forty years since Tom Stoppard’s Travesties first appeared on the London stage and it’s difficult to calculate the degree of seismic postmodern shift in sensibility since then. Bolstered by technology that facilitates the fracturing of chronology and narrative, recent drama...

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, adapted by Patsy Hughes

Reviewed by Terence Blain on 08 June 2012 5 - 9 June, 2012 in Brian Friel Theatre

One benefit of adapting literary classics for theatre is that their core issues can be presented in snappy fashion to digital-age audiences who may forever have lost the habit of patiently traversing bulky nineteenth-century novels for their leisurely edification. Patsy Hughes’ lean distillation...

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