If it is true, as the women in Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom recite, that “no man is an island,” then why does it seem as if we are too often drowning in a sea of gobshite*? Walsh, who now resides in London, is a bit of a rogue amongst his playwriting peers, eschewing [...]
Category Archives: Theatre
The Emperor Jones at the Irish Repertory Theatre
October 25, 2009 – 4:18 am
Those who haven’t read Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones will leave the Irish Repertory’s new production occupied with a single question: is this a bad play, or is it just a contrived staging? They’ll be nearly mystified at their dulled senses and likely disappointed that the spectacle hasn’t inspired less ireful considerations. (Those who’ve read [...]
Review: The Playboy of the Western World at New York City Center
October 14, 2009 – 7:00 am
Early twentieth century Irish theater has a hard time in America today. The accents, which are integral to the cadences of the old peasant idiom, are frequently a problem for our actors, who not only struggle to produce plausible tones but often deliver limply the words of the theater’s great writers, W.B. Yeats and J.M. [...]
Andrew Gilchrist’s ‘James V’ Showing May 13th
May 7, 2009 – 5:55 pm
Much has been written on the theater’s relation to cinema. Not long ago, André Bazin suggested that the connection is far older and closer than is generally admitted, and that if we hope to understand one form, we ought to understand the other. But today it is the divergence between theater and cinema that seems [...]
Ayckbourn’s Conquests
April 14, 2009 – 3:29 pm
When you’re watching a play, do you ever wonder where the characters go when they leave the room? Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests” answers this question; each play in the series shows the same six characters in a different room of the house during the same unhappy weekend. Although the plays are self-contained and [...]
Paradise Now on Earth
September 22, 2008 – 3:32 pm
“As long as you have people working for money and not love, there will be violence.” In light of current events, I believe this message from the Living Theater‘s Paradise Now carries some weight. Released on DVD earlier this year by Arthur Magazine, this 1968 performance has been on my mind. Perhaps I have been [...]
