Old houses ashed to no man’s land. Priam advances, but his arm’s stopped listening. He’s near forgotten his dead sons and the sacking. Another man’s son ghosts over him. Black eyes and blood stepped, the Prince is up for mincemeat. Barefoot and red faced, Hecuba cannot believe her family wiped...
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The morning following my interview with New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, taken place in a calm meeting room in Derry’s Seamus Heaney Homeplace, something terrible occurred. I, alongside the rest of Northern Ireland woke to a horrific video. A man had reportedly been attacked on North Belfast’s Kinnard...
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The author Roddy Doyle has a quote about funerals that I think always rings true: “Did you ever laugh at a funeral? Of course I laughed at a funeral. Did you ever not laugh at a wedding? Yeah, it’s so fucking boring. I’d much rather be at a funeral. Much...
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He’s come to spread the good word. two men the old KING and the young HUME meet and mirror in ‘68. a great and ghastly year, where fiery passion came to burn out their nations. a baptist preacher a papist college teacher with language to make...
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Nationalism proved the constant takeaway from 7 May’s local elections. Nationalist parties won in Scotland, Wales and, most perceptively, in England. The clinging gains made by the SNP and the groundbreaking upsurge of Plaid Cymru shot nationalist First Ministers to power, mirroring a similar upsurge from the nationalist Sinn Fein majority in Stormont. One can look at the political makeup of the UK now and...
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Scowling. Squinting. Decaying jowls. A reptilian, piano key smile. A dirty jacket and hat. In the prologue to the RSC’s production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Mark Gatiss creeps into the titular role. His entrance, introduced in the middle of the prologue, comes as stark. Moments earlier, we...
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I walk here, on a early Warwickshire morning, with frost tipping the tress around me, in my grandfather’s shoes. They are large shoes. Owned by two men I never knew. Many stories I’ve been told, Have kept them around, milling about, in my head. They’re the shoes of a whole...
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In Willy Russell’s two-hander play Educating Rita, there is a monologue where the main heroine talks of her desire for more. She speaks of being in the pub with her family and friends, all singing some song from the jukebox, turning round and seeing her mother crying. “I said ‘Why...
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“When the sun stands at its zenith, he is at one with our shadow; then, in the hour of incandescence, history begins.” – Heiner Müller The old, short man takes a few steps. History is moving. Beaten into a pulp, he gets up again. A man with no legs, keeps...
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For when did a play deliver any justice? He wrote in a drunken daze – a long-faced father writing a gigantic storming tragedy, pulled out from his own smallness. This story moves through the dark times. Some total regime. Lear’s union, strung together by brutish greed. Where’s there’s nothing you...
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Euphoria, ecstasy– an abundance of amoral goodness is what comes to mind when I think of The Bacchae. Euripides’ last play is like many final works; radical, disjointed and at some points lacking the fire that earlier successes once had. The central anti-hero Dionysus pokes, prods and gouges out the...
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Roald Dahl is experiencing a rebirth in British theatre, albeit in widely different ways. I saw Mark Rosenblatt’s biographical drama Giant last summer. That was one of the most powerful plays of the last twenty years, a detailed expose of a complex, utterly fascinating writer. After watching John Lithgow’s Dahl...
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It’s a bright, chilly Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the rehearsal room for WUD’s newest production: The Bacchae. Euripides’ swan song, originally performed posthumously after his death, is a play that was made to rattle an audience. It’s amoral, it’s cynical, it’s dialectal, with the central demigod Dionysius seducing...
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