Reviews

Love and Fury: The Passion of Jonathan Swift by David Heap

Reviewed by Jesse Weaver on 20 July 2011 1 - 26 July, 2011; on tour. in St Patrick's Hospital

The resonance generated by a performance of Jonathan Swift’s later writings in a lecture hall in St. Patrick’s Hospital is even more keenly felt when it’s realized the majority of the audience are made up patients who reside there. Swift’s role in the hospital’s foundation...

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City of Clowns by Raymond Keane

Reviewed by Derek West on 19 July 2011 3 - 20 July, 2011; on tour. in An Grianán

Barabbas lives on, despite the vicissitudes of funding cuts that threatened its survival. This version of City of Clowns is, in the words of Peter Crawley “a pared-down post-boom show.” Crawley’s interview with the Director, Maria Fleming, gives a fascinating background to the contraction...

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Love and Money by Denis Kelly

Reviewed by Matthew Harrison on 18 July 2011 11 - 23 July, 2011 in Nuns Island Theatre

When Denis Kelly’s Love and Money was first produced six years ago, there was prescience in its revelations about early twenty-first century Mammon and its taboo demigod: crushing debt. Indeed, Kelly seems to have been more visionary than many contemporary analysts in throwing the spotlight on...

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Nuts and Bolts by Fiona Looney

Reviewed by Susan Conley on 18 July 2011 July 14 - August 20, 2011 in Bewley's Cafe Theatre

The use of monologue in the theatre is generally a device, within the larger aspect of a play, whereby we are allowed to hear the inner thoughts of a character to which we would not normally be privy. The use of monologue as the whole play is not something new and strange, and indeed some of Ireland’s...

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The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead by Robert Hewett

Reviewed by Jesse Weaver on 16 July 2011 28 June - 29 July, 2011 (on tour) in the Helix

The audience is met by a row of stiff and faceless mannequins with their backs to us, each draped in disparate costumes and each topped with a wig of varying colour and style. While one of these on their own would be a banal sight to behold, the odd phalanx they form at the back of the playing space...

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Plaza Suite by Neil Simon

Reviewed by Harvey O'Brien on 15 July 2011 15 - 30 July, 2011 in the Pavilion Theatre

In Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, three separate stories are linked by a shared space: suite 719 of New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1968. In the first, a workaholic man in a mid-life crisis is frustrated by his wife’s acceptance of his symptoms, from an obsession with weight loss to a potential...

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Misterman by Enda Walsh

Reviewed by Matthew Harrison on 11 July 2011 11 - 24 July, 2011 in Black Box Theatre, Galway

Flying in from the tinselly world of Hollywood movie blockbusters, Cillian Murphy touches down as an avenging angel in the gritty Galway Arts Festival premiere of a new version of Enda Walsh's darkly funny Misterman. In a transformed Black Box Theatre, the powerful forces of Catholic guilt, small-town...

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1984 by George Orwell, adapted by Patsy Hughes

Reviewed by Paul Devlin on 09 July 2011 5 - 9 July, 2011 in Crescent Arts Centre

In light of recent game-changing revelations about the extent of unethical journalistic practices and links between the media, politicians, and the police in the UK, a theatrical staging of George Orwell’s 1984 seems especially apposite. Orwell’s novel is a classic work of modernist angst...

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The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

Reviewed by Donald Mahoney on 05 July 2011 28 June - 9 July, 2011 in the Pearse Centre

“Frailty, thy name is woman.” The declaration in the first act of Hamlet is not merely the grief-stricken Prince of Denmark's attempt to rationalise the flight of his widowed mother into the arms of his father's killer. It can also be read as a subtle put-down of all of womankind. After this,...

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Pinching for my Soul by Elizabeth Moynihan

Reviewed by Sheena Madden on 04 July 2011 29 June - 16 July, 2011 in Focus Theatre

Ever prayed to be stricken by a 24-hour bug or searing migraine so that you could put life on hold for just one day? The pressures of modern life sometimes exhaust a person’s soul to the point where physical immobility is preferable to the prospect of having to get out of bed and start the day...

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