Reviews

Fight Night by Gavin Kostick

Reviewed by Harvey O'Brien on 10 May 2011 10 May - 10 June, 2011 in Bewley's Café Theatre

Fight Night is a straightforward piece of storytelling exploring the mind/body dynamic of an Irish male boxer who fights inside and outside the ring for much the same reasons. This is a classic narrative/psychological archetype that dates, if not quite to antiquity, to far enough back in the popular...

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One by Michael Scott

Reviewed by Jennifer Lee on 09 May 2011 9-14 May, 2011 in Project Arts Centre

Michael Scott’s latest work makes for one lovesick evening of poesy. The first of a trilogy of plays, One introduces us to the deadbeat, despondent victim of lost love (Byrnes), who exhibits all the symptoms of inconsolable heartbreak, from his vacant stare to his un-ironed shirt. Scott’s...

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Reviewed by Tom Maguire on 05 May 2011 5 May - 5 June, 2011 in the Lyric Theatre, Belfast

The very spareness of Sabine Dargent’s set for The Crucible strikes the eye with the force of a Rembrandt painting. Dark wood-panelled walls enclose on three sides a simple bed stage left and a chair and table stage right, set on a floor of stained boards. Overhead hangs a truss of heavy wooden...

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Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Reviewed by Fintan Walsh on 04 May 2011 4 May - 11 June, 2011 in The Abbey Theatre

Shaw’s theatre may have preceded television shows like 'Britain’s Got Talent' and 'The X Factor', yet in Pygmalion (1912) the playwright anticipates the pleasures and dangers of harnessing the dreams of a working class girl and attempting to turn her into a star. Modest by today’s ambitions,...

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'Silence and Darkness': Beckett x 4 by Samuel Beckett

Reviewed by Fintan Walsh on 20 April 2011 13 - 23 April, 2011 in Focus Theatre

Mouth on Fire was established last year with the intention of staging the shorter plays of Samuel Beckett. Directed by Cathal Quinn, 'Silence and Darkness’ is a programme of four pieces rarely performed in Ireland. In Rockaby (1980) an old woman (Nolan) swings back and forth on a rocking chair,...

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The Ugly One by Marius von Mayenburg

Reviewed by Siobhán O'Gorman on 15 April 2011 11 - 17 April, 2011 in Nuns Island Theatre

A rising star in German Theatre, Marius von Mayenburg gives us the “unspeakably ugly” Mr. Lette, inventor of a plug known as the 2CK Convertor. Lette (O hAoláin) is astonished to find out that he will not be presenting the appliance at an upcoming convention: his assistant Karlmann (Tierney)...

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I am a Home Bird (It’s very hard) by Talking Shop Ensemble and Shaun Dunne

Reviewed by Jesse Weaver on 13 April 2011 11-16 April, 2011 in Project Arts Centre

In a recent Irish Times opinion piece, Fintan O’Toole argued, in part, that the generations growing up during the Celtic Tiger era are unique in the State’s history, as no other generation before them has had the hope of sustained success dashed so utterly. This is also true of their experience...

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The Exodus by Jonathan Burgess

Reviewed by Paul Devlin on 13 April 2011 13 April – 26 September, 2011 in Waterside Theatre (on tour)

The Exodus is fairly representative of a strand of practice within Northern Irish theatre where the default aesthetic is a kind of dreary naturalism. Jonathan Burgess’s new play concerns the events surrounding the displacement of Protestant families in the late 1960s and early 1970s from the west...

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The Cure by Conal Creedon

Reviewed by Liam Heylin on 11 April 2011 11 - 22 April, 2011 in Half Moon Theatre, Cork

Conal Creedon has extricated The Cure from his highly successful Cork trilogy of short plays premiered in 2005 during the European City of Culture year. Under his own direction this time, the one man show is standing on its two feet and shows no signs of jetlag after its arrival back in Cork from the...

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The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Reviewed by Derek West on 08 April 2011 8-16 April, 2011 in The Complex, Smithfield

This is a stimulating, provocative and deeply-flawed production trying to find a style of its own and to accommodate William Shakespeare to our times. Lianne O’Shea’s world is more board-walk Dublin than Venice – restless, edgy, intimidating and capable of erupting into deep antagonisms...

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