Showing posts with label Willfredd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Willfredd. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Dublin Dance Festival Makes Historic Commission

Liz Roche's Sailing to Byzantium-inspired Bastard Amber marks the first commission of an Irish choreographer for the Abbey stage.


Dublin Dance Festival has an extra skip in its step. Last year's festival saw an increase in audience attendance by 57%, due in large part to festival director Julia Carruthers’s commitment to outdoor and free events. In what is possibly her final year in the role (a call for applicants went out in January), she has managed to secure the Abbey Theatre for the duration of the event, as well as the historic first commission of an Irish choreographer for the theatre’s main stage.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

More Irish Theatre Highlights of 2014

School was out this summer and some of the first graduates of The Lir lent serious verve to Selina Cartmell's kinetic staging of Punk Rock


I already made a list of my top 10 Irish theatre productions of 2014 but here are more highlights that deserve mention ...

Thursday, February 27, 2014

WillFredd Theatre, 'CARE': For More Than Just a Day

WillFredd's mindful production is a sincere portrayal of palliative care and its mixing of medicine and mirth.

Project Arts Centre,
Feb 20-Mar 1


My review of CARE coming up just as soon as the doctor and nurse go have a little chat ...

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Theatre Roundup at the Big House Festival

Castletown House, Kildare
Aug 3-5


Yesterday I teamed up with my mother for the Big House Festival - the cultural carnival of music, theatre and dance that is occupying the grounds of Castletown House this bank holiday weekend.

While consulting our festival programme and making our game plan for the day, an elderly man in sharp dress sat opposite us. He gently mentioned that he didn't mean to cause offense by sitting with his back facing us - he was hungry for a bite to eat and wished to study the menus of the nearby food venders.

My mother struck up conversation with the gentleman, remarking on the beautiful scenery. He seemed to know a lot about the property and its different stages of refurbishment. This made us both curious as to who he was, and it was my mother's investigative skills that called it: "You're a Guinness, aren't you?".

Mr. Desmond Guinness bought the Castletown House estate back in 1967. As an author and conservationist of Georgian art, he had bought the property to protect the house and preserve its majestic architecture. However, the costs of such were monumental, as he sadly recalls to us how the building had to remain empty for a few years. Today it is a heritage site maintained by the Office of Public Works.

Desmond's attention seemed to keep straying past our heads and towards the lively crowds of people entering the site. Director Jo Mangan of the Performance Corporation is reputed for animating public spaces, and her Big House Festival has converted the heritage site into the grounds for a fabulous pageant. It seems to make Mr. Guinness smile.

We say our goodbyes and head towards the meadow for Pillowtalk's Catch of the Day. Here we meet a story-telling sailor spinning tales from his canoe in a lake. The actor comes off as sharp and charming in what is a combination of rehearsed performance and improvisation. Director Rosemary McKenna hands you a net to fish out a message in a bottle that when read aloud prompts the actor to tell stories of the sea in tuneful rhyme and verse (from the pen of playwright James Hickson, I'm guessing, who we see scribbling into his notepad under a nearby tree).

It's a small and sweet number, which feels a little strange from a company who usually drive for more provocative material such as Philip Stokes's Heroin(e) for Breakfast and the devised Anna in Between. Like all the performances at the festival, they have to be kiddie-friendly, but this criteria seems to have muted their more dramatic devices.

A new dance performance choreographed by Emma Martin shows that you can stage a dance performance at a family festival while being unafraid to challenge minds. Come Dance With Me is performed by a cast of dancers with intellectual disabilities from Celbridge's St Raphael's centre.

We immediately question what to scrutinse in this work: the skill set of the performers? What Martin is seeking to project about intellectual disability? But over occasionally broken lines of choreography we are drawn into the faces of the performers, who are having a blast - a beautiful presence that is pure and un-rigid. In dazzling ballroom costumes they strut and waltz to sweet arrangements (gathered by competent composer Tom Lane, I suspect). A narrative begins to take shape with scenes humorous but also completely moving. A romantic waltz unveils an intimacy that has remained invisible to us all our lives.

The Big House also saw the relocation of WillFredd's fantastic FARM from its origins as a rural space disrupting the urban world to the environs of an actual farmyard.

As performer Emma O'Kane removes the harness from Ralph the Pony, I overhear a spectator asking a friend: "Is this a part of the play?". The segment has always been presented candidly, respecting the verbatim source of the scene. But when queen bee Marie Ruane and the boys perform their barbershop quartet, FARM dazzles both child and adult alike. And the line-dancing scene being performed at the front steps of Castletown House is a pretty cool sight.

I was wondering if director Sophie Motley would go for a more naturalist staging now that the show was being performed on a farm site but its gaps in its illusions are still here. Perhaps the biggest example of this is the scene with the allotments where the plots are empty despite being described as being full of carrots. But when a child says that he can't see any carrots, his mother tells him: "Use your imagination".

I think this is what this show is ultimately telling us to do. You have to fill in some of the realism for yourself, and that requires some internal questioning. As it is said in Paul Curley's powerful monologue at the end, "the land doesn't lie", and finding our way to our own relationship with the land may require some play in between the literal and the representational, the farm and the theatre stage (neither of which FARM can probably be performed), to somewhere deeply personal.


Monday, July 8, 2013

WillFredd Gets the Lay of the Land as Masterful FARM Returns

Emma O'Kane and Ralph the Pony return in FARM


"I still live a little bit by Brian Friel's introduction to Dancing at Lughnasa, which is Ireland is thirty years behind everywhere else".

It's a fitting ethos for director Sophie Motley, considering that her 2012 masterpiece FARM evokes many of the same feelings twenty years on from Lughnasa about the sanctuary of rural Ireland and the imposing nature of the urban world. Since then, studies have discovered that the migratory patterns of Irish people moving from the countryside to the city are a more recent occurrence in comparison to other European countries. FARM unearths that still ripe sentimentality buried under the concrete pavements.

Motley is a director with WillFredd - a company who uses light, sound, and movement to guide action similar to how a play text conventionally does. In FARM expect to be led through the warehouse space by Sarah Jane Shiels's shimmering lightbulbs overhead, to hear the gentle hum of Jack Cawley's guitar score kick into the upbeat strum of a seisúin, and to witness Emma O'Kane's choreography whip up a line-dancing scene that skillfully trumps any barn-dancing stereotype associated with country people.

The company collaborate closely with different communities, a method which brings its own concerns of representation and truth. "You have to create something that you can feasibly and respectively show back to that community", says Motley. So far they've been doing a fair job. Their 2011 debut FOLLOW inspired by actor Shane O'Reilly's personal experiences coming from a household of deaf parents, harnessed the theatrical possibilities of sign language and resulted in a show accessible to both deaf and hearing audiences alike.

"With FARM the process was a lot more pastoral", she says, referring to the close involvement of social rural organisation Macra na Feirme and various farmers they interviewed. These communities create the performance content, which then allows Motley's beautiful directorial vision to play with form while reflecting truthfully the sentiments of their collaborators.

Motley reveals that actor Paul Curley, who she was adamant to have involved in the production considering his growing up on a farm in Galway, introduced the company to the concept of Meitheal - the old Irish tradition where members of a community would gather and help each other harvest their crops - a tradition that for the most part has vanished in the advent of agricultural machinery. This became a leading force in the devising of the piece as an emphasis was placed on how an audience could experience Meitheal in the space.

"People look out for each other", she says, "and you don't always get that in the city. You get it in the odd little enclave in Dublin where Old Dublin still is. But so many people don't know their neighbours and I find that kind of astonishing".

It's what every artist strives for: the acquisition of a true subject. WillFredd, with an artful subversion of invented narrative, sweetly sway us closer to the truth - a rare and exceptional feat. FARM creates a uniquely Irish sense of community, and there's no denying the sublime power of Marie Ruane's soaring ballad or the spectacular transformation of Ralph the pony (Motley's secret weapon) to bring us in touch with those miraculous properties of the land, of rural togetherness, all to sadly perish when you step back onto the street when the performance ends.


FARM runs July 9-13 at the Lir.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Big Guns Called In for Festival Director's Last Fringe

Promotional art for HotForTheatre's upcoming new show Break


The highlights of the 2013 Dublin Fringe Festival (Sept 7-22) have been announced, which, of course, is the last festival overseen by artistic director Róise Goan.

Headlining international acts include glam singer/theatre artist Taylor Mac and an abridged version of his upcoming 24-hour project where he performs a pop classic from each decade in the twentieth century. Scottish-born Nic Green traces her national and personal lineage in the dance and music performance Fatherland.

The Gathering strand of the festival brings home-gig to Irish comedian Aisling Bea in a double bill with Dead Cat Bounce's James Walmsley, as well as a headliner to Maeve Higgins and her new show about her "break-up with Dublin" and the abandonment issues that arise from her move to London.

WillFredd's Sophie Motley and Sarah Jane Shiels are also at hand, collaborating with renowned musicians Caoimhin Ó Raghallaigh and Nic Gareiss in a performance about the role of mice in "traditional music, science, and in our daily lives". Meanwhile, fantastic to see great faith placed in the Galway-based Blue Teapot Theatre Company, whose acclaimed production of Christian O'Reilly's Sanctuary seems to be growing into a national hit.

In Irish theatre, the spotlights are appropriately shone on the two biggest success stories born from Goan's direction of the festival over the past five years.

Louise Lowe was already making strides with her fantastic site-responsive work with ANU Productions, but World's End Lane - the first installment of the nearing complete Monto quadrilogy - in the 2010 festival was a game changer. The success meant that the company migrated to a bigger platform in the Dublin Theatre Festival with Laundry (2011) and The Boys of Foley Street (2012). They return to the Fringe with Thirteen, where the company turn their theatrical historicity back one hundred years to the events of the 1913 Lockout with "a series of thirteen interconnecting works combining performance, installation and digital technology allowing audiences to immerse themselves in the tumultuous events of 1913 as they unfold in present day Dublin"

The 2010 festival also marked the debut of playwright/performer Amy Conroy with superstar hit Alice I, which, along with follow-up The Eternal Rising of the Sun (2011), has had enough fire to fuel constant touring both at home and abroad. Her company, HotForTheatre, has become an exemplary touring company in Ireland, seeming to hit every venue in the country. Conroy has also gone on to become a treasured and insightful literary voice, writing about courageous souls in modern Ireland. Truly exciting, then, is her return this September in greater company than before with Break - a performance interrogating the public education system and the priorities of the institution that precede those of the individuals.

The full details of this year's programme will be released August 14. However, below is a list of other productions we know going to Fringe because their Fundit campaigns say so ...



  • Rise Productions, The Games People Play - The creative team behind the highly successful Fight Night are back, this time with a modern retelling of Tír ná nÓg where the mythical paradise relocates to Drumcondra. Gavin Kostick back on script, Bryan Burroughs back on direction, starring the cunning Aonghus Óg McAnally. 


  • Louise Lewis and Simon Manahan, The Churching of Happy Cullen - Also marking the centenary of the Lockout, this physical theatre performance about a mother's rite of passage though a tumultuous period in Ireland's social history already received a promising work-in-progress showing at THE THEATRE MACHINE TURNS YOU ON VOL.3. Lewis always gives a striking performance.

  • Denis Clohessy, Animus - Having lent majestic music scores to The Corn Exchange and Rough Magic, composer Denis Clohessy's new project is a "music-driven revenge tale" and is propped up by an exciting design team including Aedín Cosgrove and Jack Phelan, and stars the charming Lucy Camille Ross. 

  • X & CO, KITSCHCOCK - Anthony Keigher's pop star persona, 'Xnthony', becomes obsessed with stardom in this exploration of the anxieties and insecurities in a "world that continues to blur the line between public and private identities". 

  • John Rogers, Decision Problem [Good Time for Questions] - Rogers's piece of science fiction theatre "charts the origin, rapid rise and possible future of computers", shining light on humanity's place in an increasingly digital universe. 

  • 50% Male Experimental Theatre, FIGURE IT OUT - Male may be in the title but this new performance is about the complexities of female identity, with use of dance, live music and film.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Irish Theatre in 2012: Sacred Duties


In keeping with tradition I decided to do another write-up on the year that was, theatre-wise.

Last year I wrote about how I felt about lists and how un-useful they can be, so I'll be keeping with the approach of a discussion. Feel free to contribute in the comments section below.

On the subject of 2012, you'll probably have noticed that this blog has been inactive for most of it. This has been a result of time commitments to PhD research, work, a foray into making theatre (which is perhaps better left undiscussed), and to writing about theatre elsewhere and being paid to do so.

However, I've been thinking a lot recently about returning to the self-publishing ways. Aside from the insane amount of other things I have to do, I've found myself capable of writing faster, and so I think a weekly blog post is certainly achievable.

So please stick around (any press managers out there please retain my contact information!), and I'd like to wish Happy Holidays to all who have been around these parts, even if they have been quieter than usual.

My thoughts on Irish Theatre in 2012 after the jump ...


Saturday, September 24, 2011

WillFredd Theatre, 'FOLLOW': Breadcrumbs


The Lir, ABSOLUT Fringe 2011
Sept 13-17


My review of Follow coming up just as soon as I see another seahorse ...