• 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…

  • 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…

  • Fleabag @ Wyndham’s Theatre

    September 27, 2019 - By 

    There’s a feeling we have all gathered here for one last fix. We know the characters. We know the material. We even know the storyline. It’s as if die-hard fans have reunited for one last acoustic performance of their favourite band. Instead of singing along to their favorite songs, they’re mouthing the punchlines of crude jokes before erupting into laughter at a line they’ve heard 10 times before. Within two minutes we’ve already been flashed her black lacy bra from underneath her plain red pullover and been told that shes not obsessed with sex, but she just can’t stop thinking…

  • 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…

  • Purgatorio: Walking For Waiting For Godot @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 31, 2018 - By 

    “We are all born mad. Some remain so.” It’s been a wait alright. Six years, in fact, for the first English presentation of Waiting for Godot at the Happy Days International Enniskillen Beckett Festival. Had Vladimir and Estragon – Samuel Beckett’s beloved vagabonds from his landmark play – had to wait six years in vain for Godot to arrive, they surely would have hanged themselves from that famous tree. Previous editions of the festival have seen renditions in Yiddish, German and French – the language of the original manuscript – and now, like buses, two performances in English by different…

  • The Old Tune @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 27, 2018 - By 

      One of the great things about the Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival – and there are many – is the opportunity to experience rarely performed Samuel Beckett plays. The Old Tune, for one, doesn’t get too many run outs. Perhaps that’s because it’s comedic portrayal of two elderly men struggling with memory and the onslaught of modernity is considered too light for serious Beckett actors and directors – anxious to sink their teeth into the meatier existential stuff. However, in the hands of nuanced actors Barry McGovern and Eamon Morrisey, and with the subtle guidance of Director Conall Morrison,…

  • Don Giovanni @ Grand Opera House, Belfast

    November 22, 2016 - By 

    Beethoven branded Don Giovanni as frivolous, but as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote in a letter to his father in 1781: ‘For do you really suppose that I should write an opera-comique the same way as an opera-seria?’ For Mozart, Don Giovanni was an opera-buffa, though the much darker tones that underlie the comedic shenanigans make this an oddly complex psychological opera. This Northern Ireland Opera production wholeheartedly embraces the playfulness of Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto. And, with a Titanic-esque luxury liner providing the setting for the unfolding action, complete with icebergs in the distance, it’s hard not to imagine that…

  • Bizet: Carmen @ Waterfront Hall, Belfast

    May 4, 2016 - By 

    Lust, jealousy, betrayal and murder have always made for potent story-lines and there’s undoubtedly something of the Greek tragedy about George Bizet’s much loved opera, Carmen. Yet despite all the ingredients of a modern-day soap melodrama played out to a stirring musical score – and all condensed into a couple of roller-coaster hours – the National Opera and Ballet Theatre of Moldova’s performance of Carmen comes across as conservative and a little stiff. There’s no doubting the success of award-winning director Ellen Kent, whose colorful staging of the world’s great operas and ballets has been packing them in across the…

  • The 39 Steps @ Lyric Theatre, Belfast

    April 5, 2016 - By 

    Whilst not in the more exalted echelons of his esteemed filmography, The 39 Steps was, of course, fully – and, to date, most famously – realised via Alfred Hitchcock’s big screen adaptation of 1935, twenty years after its initial publication as an adventure novel by Scottish author John Buchan. Re-imagining the prototypical chase movie as a decidedly more idiosyncratic and entertaining proposition over 100 years from Buchan’s original, Bruiser and Lyric Theatre’s production promises much in the way of the former’s increasingly world-renown reputation for wonderfully innovative and wilfully unconventional theatre. Directed by Lisa May – artistic director and founder of Bruiser – one can’t help immediately admire the…