• La Bohème @ Carlisle Memorial Church, Belfast

    September 28, 2021 - By 

    “Love, alone command me!” The venue for Northern Ireland Opera’s comeback opera after eighteen months of Covid-19-inflicted anxiety, lockdown and isolation was different – an abandoned 19th century church, as opposed to the Grand Opera House. The socially distanced crowd in this former place of worship was small – ninety instead of the usual thousand that typically pack Belfast’s opera house. But one thing had not changed in the interminable, surreal interim – NI Opera’s capacity to deliver a world class show. Giacomo Puccini’s enduringly popular La Bohème may have seemed like a safe bet for the full-scale debut of…

  • Cameron Menzies: A Bohemian Rhapsody

    September 13, 2021 - By 

    Storytelling on the grandest musical scale returns to Belfast when Northern Ireland Opera dusts itself off after a difficult eighteen months to present Giacomo Puccini’s much-loved opera La Bohème. This Parisian story of lust for life, of artists struggling to make ends meet and of uncertain futures, chimes loudly with these times. For NI Opera’s Artistic Director Cameron Menzies, who only took up the post in March, the road to La Bohème has been something of an opera in itself. “It’s been extraordinary,” the Australian laughs. “Yes, it’s a massive undertaking but people have worked so hard, with such dedication…

  • This Is How We Fly @ Solstice Arts Centre, Navan

    January 17, 2020 - By 

    The setting is unusual for This is How We Fly’s gig at Navan’s Solstice Arts Centre. It isn’t the circle of chairs, perhaps forty, that surround the musicians. In-the-round-concerts, after all, are not uncommon. It’s the fact that the audience is on the stage with the musicians. Through a gap in the curtain the empty theatre is discernible. It feels like a private party. TIHWF was brought together by fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, in what all thought would be a one-off gig at the 2010 Dublin Fringe festival. Swiftly approaching its first decade together, the simpatico between Ó Raghallaigh, reeds…

  • Endgame @ Project Arts Centre, Dublin

    December 17, 2019 - By 

    “You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that!” When tackling any of Samuel Beckett’s plays, never mind one of his most emblematic, the challenge for a theatre company is how to leave its own imprint while navigating the author’s exacting directions. As people enter the Project Art Centre’s theatre to take their seats they are greeted by a recorded reading of Endgame’s text and stage directions. The voice is mechanical, almost synthetic. Beckett wanted actors to downplay the emotions in this farcical tale of stagnation and hopelessness. Pan Pan Theatre, however, has other plans. Pan Pan Theatre has scored notable…

  • Cascando @ Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

    August 12, 2019 - By 

    It’s too far to see the expressions or to hear the reactions of the rowers gliding past as they observe twenty figures clad head to toe in black-hooded robes like Medieval monks, walking silently along the riverbank in single file. A penny too, for the thoughts of the two children, and their dog, on the opposing bank of  The River Erne. The ‘audience’ in this immersive piece of theatre is moving to the rhythms of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Cascando, headphones under hoods relaying this new interpretation by the award-winning Pan Pan Theatre. Created by Aedin Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn…

  • Pas Moi/Not I @ Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival

    August 5, 2019 - By 

    A broken mind is a terrifying notion. Once gone, so too, has a large slice of the humanity. Isn’t that why we hurry past the insane, with their babbling interior monologue, on the street? It’s a brave playwright who subjects an audience to the mad jabbering of a fractured mind, delivered relentlessly  at the speed of thought for a dozen minutes. And in the pitch black, with only the speaker’s mouth illuminated. Samuel Beckett, who was many things, was nothing if not a courageous writer. Beckett’s Not I, a powerful and unsettling portrait of the isolation of madness, returned to…

  • BFF19: Another Day of Life

    May 3, 2019 - By 

    Confusão: chaos, anarchy, confusion. The word runs through Raúl de la Fuente and Damian Nenow’s Another Day of Life like a leitmotif. Little wonder. Their compelling animation-cum-documentary, adapted from the Ryszard Kapuściński book of the same name, depicts the Polish journalist’s three-month sojourn in Angola in 1975, as the country bloodily tore itself free of five hundred years of Portuguese colonialism. Kapuściński, in his book, described the situation as ‘a cosmic mess.’ This is the first film to address Kapuściński, the Polish Press Agency’s Africa correspondent between 1957 and 1981. During that time, in which he also worked in Asia and…

  • John Cooper Clarke @ Ulster Hall, Belfast

    May 1, 2019 - By 

    “It’s let’s see who’s still alive in Belfast night”, the fifty-something-year-old man said, entering the foyer of the Ulster Hall. For the city’s former punks any gig by the movement’s old guard is reason to turn out, even it if is for a poetry night. John Cooper Clarke, to be fair, is no ordinary poet. Since the 1970s, Salford’s punk-poet extraordinaire has surfed the highs and lows of an unfashionable business, rhyming and riffing on everything from sperm tests and inner-city poverty to the crumbling NHS, metrosexuals and Bono’s stolen trousers. At seventy, this great satirist is perhaps more relevant…

  • Samuel Beckett’s Watt @ Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire

    April 23, 2019 - By 

    “Nothing. But was that not something?” A stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is a fairly mad endeavour. Dense, absurd and peppered with extraordinarily long lists of the possible permutations of ordinary events – comings and goings, goings and comings – Watt is perhaps Beckett’s least celebrated novel. Yet this bleak tale of a non-descript man in domestic service for an indeterminate number of years to Mr. Knott, whom Watt learns nothing about, is laced with wonderfully absurdist humour. It is this comic seam, essentially, that Barry McGovern mines in this one-hour, one-man tour de force, on Dun Laoghaire’s…

  • Rigoletto @ Grand Opera House, Belfast

    October 11, 2018 - By 

    “I’m denied that common human right – to weep” It’s entirely apt that Northern Ireland Opera’s staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto should be set in modern times. Apt because its salient themes – celebrity and vanity; the objectification of women and the presumed privileges of patriarchal society; the dangers of herd mentality; and, in an age of #MeToo and on-line trolling, the consequences of bullying and mockery – all resonate loudly today. A cast of international opera stars grace the Grand Opera House stage for this powerful NI Opera production, but the other protagonist is the set (Kaspar Glarner) –…