• The Gift

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    Note: The Gift is best enjoyed without the mildest of spoilers. Just to let you know. Even when playing entirely reasonable characters, Jason Bateman tends to come off like a bit of an asshole. His performances usually radiate a faint smugness or superiority – understandable as the token straight man amongst buffoons, idiots and Tobias Funke, licensed analrapist. The Gift, the feature directorial debut by Joel Edgerton, the Australian actor who wrote The Rover, expertly mines Bateman’s reserves of smarmy unlikability, as one half of an upper middle class couple starting a new life in the Los Angeles suburbs. In pure…

  • Ohio Impromptu @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    The legend on the sign reads ‘The Captain’s Word is Law’ and so it is on the boat ferrying a group of Beckettphiles to Devenish Island for a sunset performance of Ohio Impromptu. When it comes to Samuel Beckett’s plays, however, even beyond the grave Beckett remains very much the captain, with his estate watching closely for any interference with the meaning or spirit of the work. However, as director Adrian Dunbar demonstrated last year with Catastrophe – his striking directorial debut of Beckett – following Beckett’s guidelines is the surest way to success. “If you start fiddling around with…

  • Waiting For Godot: Berliner Ensemble @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 6, 2015 - By 

    Almost sixty years to the day since Waiting for Godot’s English language premier in London, which then prompted The Observer’s Kenneth Tynan to write that it “jettisons everything by which we know the theatre”, Samuel Beckett’s most famous play still has the capacity to delight, provoke and confound in equal measure. Yet from the off, there is something a little unusual about this production of Waiting for Godot by the legendary Berliner Ensemble. Stage left, removed from the performance space but conspicuous is a small table and chair. On the right, an old, rather regal looking armchair. Above the theatre’s…

  • Stirrings Still @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 3, 2015 - By 

    Rain pours steadily and the water lies in pools on the road, shooting up like silver ribbons as the bus moves through the Fermanagh countryside. The hills of Donegal flank the route to the left. They say that Lough Erne lies in Fermanagh half the year, while Fermanagh lies in Lough Erne the other half; no matter, the wet July weather can’t dampen the enthusiasm of the Samuel Beckett fans heading to a secret destination to see a theatrical performance of the playwright’s final prose piece, Stirrings Still. The secret locations for performances have become a popular facet of the…

  • Love & Mercy

    July 30, 2015 - By 

    The fidelity that musical biopics tend to have towards the chronology of public record – especially when the subject or their families are still alive, and liable to kick up a fuss over films playing fast and loose with their story – makes it difficult to know what parts to keep and what do ditch. Live fast, die young stories are good because you can fit everything in to a tight arc of glamourous decline. Complex, sprawling careers are more challenging, but can be can be reduced to a single period for convenience. Others take a more experimental approach, like Todd…

  • Lisa Dwan @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    July 28, 2015 - By 

    Talks related to Samuel Beckett are an integral feature of the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival. This year, the inaugural Billie Whitelaw Memorial Lecture in the Southwest College commemorated the late Beckett actress who passed away in December 2014. Lisa Dwan, in a very real sense the heir to Whitelaw, had the honour of delivering the first Billie Whitelaw Memorial Lecture and gave a talk every bit as captivating as the interpretations of Beckett’s plays that have won her unreserved international acclaim. In introducing Dwan, the festival’s Deputy Artistic Director Liam Browne quoted a New York Times review of…

  • True Story

    July 28, 2015 - By 

    The last time James Franco and Jonah Hill were in a movie together, 2013’s This is the End, Hill got a Satanic cock up the ass and Franco was munched to death by self-appointed cannibal king Danny McBride. Franco and Hill trade up in the respectability index for True Story, a flat cat-and-mouse two-hander based on the ‘true story’ of Christian Longo, wanted by the FBI in 2002 for the murder of his family, and the disgraced journalist who wrote a book about him. Hill is Michael Finkel, an ambitious New York Times reporter who is fired for embellishing a cover story on modern slavery and…

  • Station to Station

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Doug Aitken’s Station To Station – a collagist multimedia project spanning numerous major US cities and “off-the-grid” locations – is an unusual experience. Recorded over a three-week, four-thousand mile trip in late 2013, Aitken’s film encapsulates all manner of experiences and ethea in relation to being on the road in a contemporary America. Filmed on-board and around a customised, neon-coated train, and through a series of live “happenings”, Station To Station is at once frenetic and contemplative, not only in its content, but also its kaleidoscopic structure. Collaborators range from world-renowned musicians (Patti Smith, Jackson Browne, Beck), to experimental artists…

  • Eden

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Eden is a cautionary tale based on the life of director Mia Hansen-Love’s brother Sven and shows the dizzying highs and soul-destroying lows of Paul (Felix de Givry) and his uniformly charmless friends in the 90s Garage House scene in Paris. Paul is really only the protagonist through the sheer amount of time we spend with him. He sort of bubbles up through the ranks through sheer ubiquity, his friends, similar pouters in knitwear, seem no more or less attractive than he does. We’re just stuck with him for two and a half hours. This, perversely, is one of the…

  • May B @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    July 27, 2015 - By 

    Ten spectral figures, white-faced, in white night-clothes come slowly onto the stage. They stand stock-still and silent in the dim half-light. Minutes pass. Schubert’s plaintive Deer Leiermann from the Winterreise song circle accompanies their numb vigil. A shrill whistle-blast signals slow shuffling. Another, more urgent, commands greater synchronized movement. The figures draw into a circle and grunt in unison. A tighter circle, more grunting. Walking mechanically to and fro in step, panting as one. Walking, panting and grunting rhythmically as one. Suddenly as one they face the audience. The one staring at the other in powerful symbiosis.  “Fini, c’est fini,”…