• 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…

  • 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…

  • 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) –…

  • What Where @ Happy Days Enniskillen Beckett Festival

    August 16, 2018 - By 

    Even before the passengers disembark at a secret destination in the Fermanagh countryside, the drama has begun. Franz Schubert’s Winterreise provides the soundtrack en route before the bus stops. The door opens. A woman in green overalls gets on. Megaphone in hand, a bandana masking her face, though oddly, with an opening for the mouth. She walks silently down the aisle, scrutinizing the faces as though searching for the guilty party. Silence descends amongst the passengers. Search over, the woman gets off the bus, as do the passengers, who find themselves in front of a green cattle shed or some…

  • Eugene Onegin @ The Grand Opera House

    July 11, 2018 - By 

    ‘Where are they now, those golden days of my youth?’ The past hangs over the characters in Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin like a veil. The folly of youth and the burning shame of costly pride are not dimmed by the passage of time, but are instead, only magnified. Early in Scottish Opera’s vibrant production there is a potent sign that the bucolic surroundings of harvest time and the budding spirit of spring love might soon be dispelled.  As Madame Larina (Alison Kettlewell} and Nurse Filipyevna (Anne-Marie Owens) reminisce about the courtships of their youth, and as the matriarch’s daughters…

  • Cosi Fan Tutte @ Grand Opera House, Belfast

    November 26, 2017 - By 

    Who is immune to a little flattery? Who, if anyone, cannot be seduced? Who, if we’re honest, is not tempted by forbidden fruits? As Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte would have it, nobody – least of all women. All Women Do It translates the title of Mozart’s opera, written in the prolific period before he died. Near-full houses for three nights in The Grand Opera House for this Northern Ireland Opera production was proof that Cosi Fan Tutte remains one of the most popular operas in the world. It wasn’t always so. In fact, it wasn’t until the twentieth…

  • 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…