Reviews

Where Did It All Go Right? by Ponydance

Reviewed by Patrick Brennan on 08 August 2010 6- 8 August, 2010 in The Left Bank, Kilkenny

Where Did It All Go Right? is a highly engaging and charming adrenaline rush of a contemporary dance piece, where the emphasis is most definitely on contemporary. With no little skill, Ponydance manage to recreate an intense clubbing-cum-pop sensibility and style of dance that yet is underpinned and...

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Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh, adapted for stage by Conall Morrison

Reviewed by Siobhán O'Gorman on 07 August 2010 3 – 8 August, 2010 in Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Patrick Kavanagh’s semi-autobiographical character Tarry Flynn reveres literature and, like a Romantic poet, fancies himself as a specially-inspired mediator between nature and man. He believes that all ordinary objects and acts can carry within them “the energy of the imagination”....

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Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh

Reviewed by Siobhán O'Gorman on 06 August 2010 3 – 7 August, 2010 in Town Hall Studio

Permeated by a sense of entrapment, the theatre of Enda Walsh is at its best when performed in intimate spaces. While real freedom seems just beyond the grasp of many of his characters, his romantic two-hander Disco Pigs is more hopeful than much of his later work. As the adventures of Pig and Runt descend...

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The Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault

Reviewed by Christina Hunt Mahony on 05 August 2010 26 July - 04 September, 2010 in Project Arts Centre

Dion Boucicault’s melodrama is enjoying a resurgence of popularity, but in truth it has rarely been out of fashion for long in more than a century. The convincing staging of such melodrama requires a consistently calibrated approach in which acting, costuming, staging and direction convey a single...

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At the Hawk's Well by W.B. Yeats

Reviewed by Donald Mahoney on 04 August 2010 27 July - 7 August, 2010 in Factory Performance Space, Sligo

“Wisdom must have a bitter life,” sing the Musicians near the end of Blue Raincoat’s production of W.B. Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, a curious, if oddly satisfying lunchtime diversion now playing at Sligo’s Factory Perfomance Space. There are bitter lessons for the...

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The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh

Reviewed by Patrick Lonergan on 04 August 2010 15 July – 21 August, 2010 in Young Vic Theatre, London

When Martin McDonagh’s Leenane plays first appeared in Ireland, they seemed exciting for many reasons: their delinquent humour, their rootedness in (but distance from) the Irish dramatic tradition, their wilfully transgressive attitude – and, in particular, their disorientating blend of the...

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Bondi Beach Boy Blue by Benny McDonnell

Reviewed by Úna Kealy on 03 August 2010 26 July - 7 August, 2010; and on tour. in Jerome Hynes Theatre, Wexford Opera House

Set in Kilkenny and Sydney in the year 2000, Bondi Beach Boy Blue dramatises the story of Declan, a talented young hurler, whose dream of making the senior county panel is ended by a crippling knee injury. Declan is 17 and about to leave school; his mother has died four years previously and his relationship...

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Vincent River by Philip Ridley

Reviewed by Pádraic Whyte on 03 August 2010 2-7 August 2010; then on tour until 28 Aug. in Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

First produced in 2000, Philip Ridley’s Vincent River is a stark reminder of the continued occurrences of hate crime and homophobic attacks in society. Drawing upon events of his youth and the murder of a friend in the 1980s, Ridley creates two characters trying to come to terms with a death which...

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The Plough and the Stars by Sean O'Casey

Reviewed by Sara Keating on 27 July 2010 27 July - 25 September, 2010 in The Abbey Theatre

Sean O’Casey’s classic tragi-comedy has for long been strangled by its realist form. To glance through the text is to get side-tracked by detail. Every cup and saucer, every chair, every changed location (and there are four distinct spaces over four acts) is described as if the writer is...

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Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Reviewed by Fintan Walsh on 20 July 2010 20 July - 25 September, 2010 in the Gate Theatre

Designed by Michael Pavelka, the set of the Gate Theatre’s production of Death of Salesman angles backwards giving the impression that the characters are trapped inside a giant ‘V’, the jaws of which could bite down at any moment. Upstage, a suggested strip of brownstones hovers overhead....

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