• Rare Replay (Microsoft, Xbox One)

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    Back in the day, gamers had to wait five or six minutes for a game to load, the anticipation only slightly dampened by the horrific beeeeee tcchhh noise and the hypnotic parallax bars juddering up the sides of the screen. I am speaking specifically about the joys and woes of playing on a ZX Spectrum, for that was my platform of choice, a computer so hi-tech that it came with a whopping 48k of memory, later almost trebled to 128k. This little wonder was also linked up to a cassette player, which meant that anyone with a tape deck and…

  • 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…

  • Cruising – Cruising

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    Sometimes a band name can elucidate the direction in which its songs will travel.  Cruising are a case in point, named after a book/film delving into the dark underworld of a serial killer who picks up homosexual men from the New York S&M scene to murder.  EP cover emblazoned with a black leather biker jacket, band name studded across the shoulders, and PVC leather hat a la Jesse “Boots Electric” Hughes, worn in promo photos runs with the theme. There’s more than a whisper of iconic female rockers like Joan Jett, Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene.  Understandably so, given that…

  • Phaedra @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 14, 2015 - By 

    The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival’s tentacles are spreading ever further throughout Fermanagh. It’s a reach matched by its artistic ambitions, with ever more imaginative site-specific venues and events to match. The Necarne Equestrian Centre in Irvinestown’s abandoned Necarne Castle is a dramatic enough setting – an almost gladiatorial arena – but nothing quite prepares you for the sight that greets you as you enter the dark chasm of its interior. The twenty one musicians of the Ulster Orchestra in wide circle formation is impressive in itself but right in the centre is the towering figure, some ten metres…

  • 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…

  • The Host – Esalen Lectures

    August 13, 2015 - By 

    Pulling absolutely no punches when it comes to leaving his imprint on the electronica scene, Belfast’s Barry Lynn (Boxcutter) – The Host for his latest release – has compounded a long track record of compelling, experimental arrangements with his new record, the Esalen Lectures LP. Given Lynn’s seemingly savage pursuit of originality though, this probably wasn’t the most difficult of tasks with a back catalogue as remarkable as his – various remix credits for heavyweights like Amon Tobin or our own Space Dimension Controller, all whilst his tenure for Planet Mu garners more notches than a backroad motel bed-frame. The…

  • Angry Birds 2 (Rovio Entertainment, iOS / Android)

    August 13, 2015 - By 

    One cannot help but be impressed by the Angry Birds phenomenon. There are few other apps that have been so downloaded to so many mobile devices and other platforms the world over. Quite the achievement for the once relatively unknown Finnish development house Rovio Entertainment, who has developed the initially wacky idea of a war between birds and pigs into an all-conquering, money-raking force of doom. The appeal of the Angry Birds franchise is easy to identify, as it takes no time at all for casual gamers to adapt to the simplest of concepts: knocking structures over by catapulting little…

  • Sun Kil Moon @ Open House Festival, Bangor

    August 12, 2015 - By 

    “People love me. Some people hate me. A lot of people love me, but some people hate me. Some people anonymously go on to the internet and say cruel, hateful things about me. But that’s ok. That’s ok. That’s ok because it means you’re somebody when that happens to you. It means that you’ve arrived. It means that you can lie in bed at night with a warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach. Some people hate me and some people love me. Some people come to my shows and write big, long essays about how much they love my music…

  • All That Fall @ Samuel Beckett Happy Days Festival

    August 10, 2015 - By 

    How do you stage Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall in a festival setting when Beckett was, for the most part, dead against theatrical interpretations of it? Though there had been stage translations authorized by Beckett, notably by Deryk Mendel in Berlin in 1966 and by Christopher Hampton in Calgary in 1967, the writer seemed to regret such translations and would later say no both to Ingmar Bergman and Laurence Olivier’s requests. When Director Max Stafford-Clark – former Director of the Royal Court Theatre, London – approached the Beckett estate about realizing All That Fall he was asked what…

  • 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…