Mike Daisey’s bid to understand the global financial crisis took him not to the heart of Wall St, or the City of London, or the hedge fund mecca of Dublin’s IFSC, but to a tiny volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. The story of how, and why, he got there makes up what… read more +

What do a pair of Bulgarian truckers and a female Indian call-centre worker have in common? And what have they got to do with the theatre? They were three of the most disarming performers I’ve seen in recent years. And they were brought to the Dublin stage by the same theatre company, an intriguing German… read more +

There was a scrum outside the entrance to the Abbey Theatre, but it wasn’t for tickets. There were raised voices, and a knot of people pushed against the glass doors. It looked like it could get ugly. But it was simply the free market in action. At the centre of the group, a man was… read more +

One of the most famous lines in theatre is just two words long: “A handbag?” It comes early in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a masterpiece of comic wordplay and barbed social satire. (For review of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety, see here.) And yet the line isn’t particularly funny,… read more +

Tom Stoppard spent his twenties broke, smoking and trying to write. He had a series of lowly newspaper jobs, and then went freelance, or “self-unemployed.” He was a theatre critic and, briefly, “the only motoring correspondent in the country who couldn’t drive.” He sent scripts to the BBC, and they commissioned him to write a… read more +