Reviews

'Twas the Night Before Christmas/Oíche Roimh an Nollaig by Branar Theatre Company

Reviewed by Helen Cusack on 16 December 2013 29 Nov- 22 December 2013 in Pavilion Theatre Dún Laoghaire

It was 1948, “the year of the great excitement”, the year electricity arrived in Ballybrack. Branar borrows from Clement Clarke Moore’s classic poem to tell the story of one particular Christmas in the small rural town of Ballybrack. Unlike the poem, the town's excitement is not based...

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Rough Magic SEEDS: Way to Heaven by Juan Mayorga

Reviewed by Susan Conley on 14 December 2013 5 - 14 December 2013 in Project Arts Centre

It is part of the intriguing project of this play — an imagining of the production of the illusion of peace and wellbeing created in Theresienstadt during World War II — to present the dramatisation of a lie in order to disseminate its truth: that a well thought-out, indeed, a well-produced...

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Rough Magic SEEDS: Assassins by Stephen Sondheim

Reviewed by Susan Conley on 14 December 2013 5-14 December in Project Arts Centre

An intelligent choice for the assassination anniversary that’s in it, Assassins the musical is, itself, fairly bizarre. Its scattershot moments of brilliance, despite its impressive and energetic production at the hands of the cast and crew, are not sufficient to make its garbled concept hold together,...

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The Yule Tide Tales by Theatre Upstairs

Reviewed by Susan Conley on 12 December 2013 4 - 20 December, 2013 in Theatre Upstairs at Lanigan’s

It may very well be that many people’s first experience of theatre comes at Christmas time, either from being shepherded to the panto or the National Concert Hall, or from featuring as a shepherd in the school nativity play. Something about this time of year requires dramatisation, it would seem....

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Antimidas, or, Bankers in Hades by Evangelia Rigaki, libretto by W.N. Herbert

Reviewed by Wolfgang Marx on 12 December 2013 12-14 December in Samuel Beckett Theatre

Contemporary music theatre usually doesn’t favour comedy; most modern operas tackle weighty political and social issues or personal dramas without too much humour. So it is all the more remarkable that two modern comic operas were staged in Dublin in close succession: Gerald Barry’s The Importance...

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Three Monologues: Twinkletoes; Mustn't Forget High Noon; Christine by Jennifer Johnston

Reviewed by Jane Coyle on 11 December 2013 10-14 December 2013 in The Playhouse, Derry/Londonderry

During the years of the Troubles, the green and pleasant lands of County Fermanaghsuffered a high number of casualties. This beautiful, ostensibly peaceful rural landscapeconceals a multitude of tragedies, many of them inflicted upon good-living, Protestantfamilies, who have worked these fertile pastures...

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The Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault

Reviewed by Matthew Harrison on 10 December 2013 5 December 2013- 8 February 2014 in On tour - Galway, Dublin, Belfast, Sligo, Limerick

In the year that commemorated the 1913 lockout, and in the same week that a financially bruised and battered Ireland doffed its cap to departing IMF/EMC task masters, Druid Theatre opened its production of Dion Boucicault’s theatrical blockbuster of the 1860s -a Victorian melodrama in which a painfully...

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The Cavalcaders by Billy Roche

Reviewed by Jennifer Lee on 07 December 2013 25th October- 7th December in On tour

Billy Roche’s The Cavalcaders was first staged in Dublin in 1993, and is a play conceived from the playwright’s boyhood memories of a local shoemaker’s shop, a handful of songs he composed on a piano that was saved from a fire, his brother’s imagined showband, and the effect...

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Annabelle's Star by Mary McNally and Raymond Keane

Reviewed by Helen Cusack on 05 December 2013 26 Nov-30 Dec, 2013 in The Ark, Temple Bar, Dublin

Another Christmas, another wonderful production by the Ark. This year's Christmas production, Annabelle's Star, takes its audience on a magical wordless journey through loss and despair to hope and new beginnings. Set to beautiful original music by Conor Mitchell, Annabelle's Star tells the story of...

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The Trouble With Harry by Lachlan Philpott

Reviewed by Terence Blain on 22 November 2013 22-27th November in The MAC, Belfast

Harry Crawford or Eugenia Falleni? Man or woman? Father or mother? These are the extreme polarities of identity which at one time or another sit on the shoulders of the central character in Australian writer Lachlan Philpott’s new play The Trouble with Harry, presented by TheatreofplucK in the...

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