Gate Theatre, 'The Mariner': Off a Duck's Back

Can Hugo Hamilton's play plunge the depths of the great silence that Irish men brought home from WWI? 

Gate Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival 

Sept 30-Oct 25

My review of The Mariner by Hugo Hamilton coming up after the jump ...

Abbey Theatre, 'Me, Mollser': Yous Are All Nicely Shanghai'd Now!

The Abbey primes the canon for young audiences. As Ali White's Me, Mollser expands the universe of The Plough of the Stars, it also makes O'Casey feel politically resonant.

I attended an industry showing of Me, Mollser by Ali White and have a few thoughts below ...

Best of Irish Theatre 2010 #4: Druid, ‘The Silver Tassie’

Town Hall Theatre, Galway

Sept 1-7 

 “There it is, the Silver Tassie, won by the odd goal in five, kicked by Harry Heegan”

– Harry Heegan

“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November –

November – that’s the month I was born”

– Croucher

“Our best is all behind us – what’s in front we’ll face like men, dear comrade of the blood-fight and the battle-front”

– Teddy Foran

It’s 1928, and W.B. Yeats is writing Sean O’Casey a letter. As artistic director of the Abbey, Yeats is writing to inform O’Casey that his latest play will not be produced by the theatre. O’Casey had written a tragic-comedy epic about Irish soldiers in the First World War, but Yeats finds that the writer has no claim to conceive the conditions of war – “You never stood on its battlefields or walked its hospitals”. 

It’s August 2010 and I’m catching regular sightings of Aaron Monaghan, Aoife Duffen, Derbhle Crotty, and Bush Moukarzel on the streets of Galway.

 

They’re all in town rehearsing for Druid’s production of The Silver Tassie.