Reviews

The Veil by Conor McPherson

Reviewed by Karen Fricker on 05 October 2011 Opened 27 Sept, continues in repertoire in National Theatre, in the Lyttleton Theatre

Consider these ingredients for drama: a crumbling big house in the Irish countryside ca. 1822. Financial desperation on the part of the widowed lady of the house, extreme enough to prompt marrying off her only daughter in England. Increasingly impoverished and restive tenants. A spirit presence in the...

Read this review

The Painkiller by Francis Veber, adapted by Sean Foley

Reviewed by Lisa Fitzpatrick on 30 September 2011 29 Sept - 16 Oct, 2011 in Lyric Theatre, Belfast

The Painkiller is a new adaptation of Francis Veber’s Le contrat, which was filmed in 1973 as L’emmerdeur (usually translated as A Pain in the Ass) with Jacques, and again in 1981 as Buddy Buddy, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It tells the story of a contract killer who checks into...

Read this review

The Bother with the Brother by Val O’Donnell, adapted from Myles na gCopaleen

Reviewed by Christina Hunt Mahony on 29 September 2011 26 Sept - 15 Oct, 2011 in Bewleys Café Theatre

This is the Mylesian Year – the centenary of the birth of Brian O’Nolan, also known as Myles na gCopaleen, author of the tales of The Brother which appeared regularly in his column in The Irish Times. We don’t think of Brian O’Nolan in the first instance in connection with the...

Read this review

Airswimming by Charlotte Jones

Reviewed by Miriam Haughton on 28 September 2011 27 Sept – Oct 1, 2011 in The New Theatre

There are no bad women in Ireland, only fresh virgins and married mothers. That was the dominant narrative of twentieth-century Ireland, agreed by Church and State and complied with by family and community. For those fallen women, witches, deviants and the mentally ill, high walls and stolen decades...

Read this review

The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge

Reviewed by Karen Fricker on 27 September 2011 17 Sept – 26 Nov, 2011 in The Old Vic Theatre

In the middle of the last decade in Ireland, we had the Playboy wars: back-to-back stagings within months, by then-Abbey artistic director Ben Barnes and Druid’s Garry Hynes, of the Synge classic: the former a bizarre stylistic muddle, the latter a consummate slice of heightened realism that successfully...

Read this review

A Serving of Pinter (three shorts plays) by Harold Pinter

Reviewed by Ger FitzGibbon on 27 September 2011 27 Sept – Oct 1, 2011 in Half Moon Theatre, Cork

One of the most chilling moments in Harold Pinter’s One for the Road is when the almost silent, battered-looking prisoner realises that his wife and son are also being tortured. He looks up at his interrogator and says “kill me”. It comes across as a plea – one human being...

Read this review

Cooking with Elvis by Lee Hall

Reviewed by Jane Coyle on 24 September 2011 22 Sept - 22 Oct, 2011 (on tour) in Waterfront Studio, Belfast

The trouble with a well-crafted preview or rehearsed reading is that it runs the risk of eliminating or diluting that exquisite first gasp of disbelief when an unexpected plot twist or turn of events subsequently occurs in full production. Bruiser took the opportunity offered by the Pick’n’Mix...

Read this review

Voices from the Cailleach by Paula McGlinchey

Reviewed by Liam Heylin on 22 September 2011 22 September 2011 in Bandon Town Hall

The central character here yearns for the possibility of being able to cross over to the spirit world from time to time. And this theatrical venture seeks something similar in the production of a piece based on the Rooney prize-winning book of poems by Leanne O’Sullivan, Cailleach, the Hag of Béara....

Read this review

The Hen Night Epiphany by Jimmy Murphy

Reviewed by Sheena Madden on 19 September 2011 19 Sept - 22 October, 2011 (on tour) in Focus Theatre

With his new play, The Hen Night Epiphany, playwright Jimmy Murphy set outs to deconstruct the complexities of the female bond. When bride-to-be Una drags her two friends, her future mother-in-law and her fiancé’s godmother to her newly purchased run-down shack (“only 80 minutes from Dublin”)...

Read this review

Futureproof by Lynda Radley

Reviewed by Mark Fisher on 10 September 2011 7 Aug–10 Sept, 2011 in Traverse Theatre and Dundee Rep

Viewed on 7th August, 2011. Only in the Edinburgh festival, with its enormous profusion of theatre, would you be unsurprised to come across not one but two plays involving the separation of conjoined twins. One was Mokwha Repertory Company's production of The Tempest in the Edinburgh International Festival....

Read this review

« First
« Previous
Page 47 of 81
Go to page:
Next ›
Last »

The content of Irish Theatre Magazine and this web site is solely the opinion of the authors and not necessarily of the editors.

Website design & development by