REVIEWS!

So, we've had a change of pace! Rather than posting each review individually, we're going to keep them all together here - just look for the title of the show you want to know about and click on through!


Happy reading.

A Feast of Bones

★ ★ ★ ★    “Sinister yet superbly silly” (Entertainment.ie) 

★ ★ ★ ★ “A fantastically realised show” (The Irish Times) 

Beastie

★ ★ ★  “[Transformed] from storytelling exercise into something more special...[Children] got lost in the action” (The Irish Times) 

The Critic

★ ★ ★ ★  “A celebratory salutation to the history of performance in Dublin” (Irish TheatreMagazine) 

“Played with zeal” (No More Workhorse) 

★ ★ ★ (The Irish Times)

 

Desire Under the Elms

★ ★ ★ ★ “Artful, austerely beautiful and appropriately severe” (The Irish Times)

★★★★★ “Fresh and new” (Irish TheatreMagazine) 

 

A “most powerful Corn Exchange production” (The Independent)  

“Filled with impressive performances” (No More Workhorse) 

 

Dusk Ahead

★ ★ ★ ★ “The simplicity of setting is matched by purity of concept” (The Irish Times) 

★ ★ ★ ★  “an ever imaginative company” (Irish Theatre Magazine) 

“Perfection” (The Independent) 

The Events

★ ★ ★ ★ “An attempt to embody the effects wreaked upon an entire community rather than individuals” (The Irish Times) 

★ ★ ★ ★  “The struggle to comprehend the things that are utterly incomprehensible” (IrishTheatre Magazine) 

★ ★ ★ ★  “Almost unfathomably good” (Entertainment.ie) 

Germinal

★ ★ ★ ★   “A smart, witty and stylish production” (Irish Theatre Magazine)

“One of the highlights of the Dublin Theatre Festival” (No More Workhorse) 

 

Ground and Floor

★ ★ ★ ★ “Thought provoking, unsettling and determinedly enigmatic” (The Irish Times) 

“Intriguing” (The Independent) 

The Hanging Gardens

★ ★ ★ (The Irish Times) 
 

★ ★ ★ ★   “Powerfully written”  (Entertainment.ie)

I’ve to Mind Her

★ ★ ★ ★ “An emotionally affecting portrait of the self-sacrifice of a teenage carer” (The Irish Times) 

Margarete

★ ★ ★ ★   “An empathic experiment in narrative and artifice” (The Irish Times)

Maeve’s House

★ ★ ★ The Irish Times 

The Rape of Lucrece

★ ★ ★ ★   “Cracked with sorrow, bristling with quiet rage” (The Guardian) 
 

★ ★ ★ ★    “Camille O’Sullivan’s solo performance is a triumph” (The Times) 

★ ★ ★ ★  "Hypnotic" (The Irish Times)

riverrun

★★★★★ “Alien, but Irish; serious, but profoundly funny; innocent, yet seductive” (Entertainment.ie)

Taramandal

★ ★ ★  “A sentimental depiction of the big dreams of a small fry” (The Irish Times)

Three Fingers Below the Knee

★ ★ ★ The Irish Times 

The Threepenny Opera

★ ★ ★ ★ “Subtly and profoundly human” (The Irish Times) 

“A loud, brash and fun performance” (No MoreWorkhorse) 


This Is Not My Voice Speaking

★ ★ ★ “Clever, slickly choreographed and well executed” (The Irish Times)

Winners and Losers
“A dose of wry humour and a raw perspective (NoMore Workhorse) 

Some further news and general festival reviews can be found at the links below: 

Irish Theatre Magazine on riverrun

The Guardian: Michael Billington's festival round-up  

Totally Dublin: An interview with Richard Maxwell on Neutral Hero

Totally Dublin: An interview with Megan Kennedy on Dusk Ahead

Totally Dublin: An interview with Yaron Lifschitz on Wunderkammer

The Irish Times: on The Hanging Gardens by Frank McGuinness at the Abbey Theatre

The Irish Times: "Culture Shock": Fintan O'Toole's mid-festival round-up 

Review: Desire Under the Elms

Desire Under the Elms

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin

★ ★ ★ ★   

No matter how many people suffer in Greek tragedy, we can usually decide on a single tragic hero: Oedipus, blind and raging; Phaedra undone by her own hand; Medea avenged and inhuman. 

But who is the tragic figure in Eugene O’Neill’s play, indebted to the ancients, from 1926? Is it Eben (the assured Fionn Walton), youngest son of a New England farmer’s second marriage, who will do anything to reclaim a property he believes is his? Or his easily duped brothers, Simeon and Peter, paid off to forsake their inheritance when gold rush in “Californ-i-yay” looks more promising? Or is it their father Ephraim (Lalor Roddy), a vain, embittered coot, who combines his narcissism with Old Testament severity?

Perhaps the answer is best expressed by Janet Moran’s bright-eyed Abbie, the 35-year-old wife whom Ephraim brings home one day, who becomes queen of all she surveys: “It’s purty! I can’t b’lieve it’s r’ally mine.” You hear that last word repeated throughout O’Neill’s play, a study in venality, property and sexuality, which is really the tragedy of the possessive pronoun: Oh, my.

Taking possession of O’Neill’s play is no easier task. Set in 1850 and written with stifling details of imagery and voice, where elm trees hang over this motherless space with “a sinister maternity” and characters speak in hermetically-sealed phonetics (“Ye’re aimin’ t’ swaller up everythin’ an’ make it your’n,” Eben tells Abbie, who intends to swaller him with a sinister maternity). Sophocles wrote indifferent to Freud’s opinion but O’Neill writes in the shadow of both, leaving little to the imagination and less to interpretation. 

Corn Exchange’s solution is artful, austerely beautiful and appropriately severe. Director Annie Ryan strips everything back: now, there are no trees, just stripped slats of wood on a barren terrain; as clear a statement on the enduring worth of property as you will encounter. Maree Kearns’s set makes no distinction between interior or exterior spaces at all. An abstract painted grey horizon reflects Sinead Wallace’s beautiful lights in golden dawns and fateful twilights and, pointedly, no character ever seems quite at home.

The boldest conceit is in voice, early established by almost unrecognisable Luke Griffin and Peter Coonan as the gawping brothers, with strong Ulster accents. This seems less like a political comment than a dramaturgical fix: bringing them unfussily closer to home. 

The tragedy itself remains dirt simple, achieved with perfunctory shifts in character and plot. But Ryan manoeuvres through it, against Mel Mercier’s guiding music, with a supple sense of physicality: Coonan and Griffin retreat from Fionn Walton’s contract as though it were a dangerous animal, Janet Moran stretches out in insolent seduction, and Lalor Roddy skitters around in both merriment and aggression. These are striking new motions through age-old patterns, the embodiment of human will contorted by fate. 

Most resonantly, it creates a startling meditation on inheritance, the possessions and histories, needs and disorders, that are handed down generational lines. In that endless cycle of hope and despair, desires still seem eternally new, just as tragedy exposes its much deeper roots. 

Ends October 13

Peter Crawley

The Dublin Run of The Events

The Events, Actors Touring Company UK

The Actors Touring Company have now left us, and we're all sad to see them go!

Want to see how they got on in Dublin? Check out the story of The Events here

And for a Patrick Lonergan review of the show, click here

If you get the chance to catch The Events as it continues its run elsewhere, DO! You won't regret it.

Oct 9 - Nov 2 Young Vic (London)

Nov 5 - 9 Hull Truck

Nov 12 - 16 Bristol Old Vic

Nov 19 - 23 Birmingham Rep

Nov 26 - 30 Drum Theatre Plymouth

 

 

Taramandal, The Tadpole Repertory

Bikram Ghosh, Cast Member and Production Manager, introduces us to Taramandal

Bikram Ghosh

So, it falls to me to introduce our play Taramandal to you. And I’d like to do that by telling you about two of my fellow actors: both of them play the same roles in the play – in fact, one has replaced the other for our current run – but as actors, they stand on different ends of a continuum (or is it a carousel?).

Tarun is a founding member of our repertory and he has as much ownership of/affection for this work as any one of us. Soon after our first run of the play three years ago, Tarun moved to Bombay to test his luck in Bollywood, in Bombay movies – pretty much the only success story in terms of making a living in show business, and also, pretty much the only acceptable marker for Success.

 Every time we’ve decided to run the play, Tarun’s taken a break from waiting for work in the Industry to rehearse and perform the play. But this time, he has work: work he can’t sacrifice; work that will open doors in a city of crowded hallways. He isn’t pursuing work as an actor any more, though. He’s working as an assistant director

Sandeep Shikhar

So, we asked Sandeep if he’d be interested in doing a play about actors and ambition. Sandeep is an actor and writer in Bangalore, where he also partners his wife and parents his child. He’s about a decade older than Tarun, and has spent a good while acting in repertory theatre in Delhi and writing for TV in Bombay. Now in Bangalore, he works with the Indian Ensemble theatre company, which mostly comprises ex-IT professionals (or soon-to-be ex-IT professionals). The weather is generally a treat and he has laughter lines etched deep into his face. I suspect he gets bored every now and again. It’s nice.

The role we really needed Sandeep for is that of a casting agent in Bombay – a breed of gentlemen who Tarun has learnt a lot more about in the past few years, and Sandeep bid goodbye to many years ago. Other than the ones who he is friends with, and the ones his friends eventually became, of course.

 It goes without saying that a scene shifts when an actor is replaced. It is remarkable to me, though, how this change has been wrought: the empty space Tarun left in this story about actors and ambition, to seek success in the Industry, has been filled by Sandeep, who left the Industry to seek success elsewhere.

Our play, ladies and gentlemen, is humbly about actors and, if you will, the Elsewhere.

Thank you.

Bikram Ghosh - Cast Member and Production Manager

The Tadpole Repertory, India

Mallika Tenaja

Chennai, setting up

Taramandal in production

Taramandal runs from Oct 8-12 in Project Arts Centre (Cube)
For more information and to book tickets click here