“My dream,” says Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey, “would be to have The Plough and the Stars during Easter Week 2016 broadcast globally. It’s a no-brainer.” Whatever about staging Sean O’Casey’s anti-heroic 1916 play at the Abbey during the centenary celebrations, broadcasting it globally? Just a few years ago, such an idea would… read more +

January 29 2014: John Calder’s Godot Company is back on tour, with Happy Days. This article was written for the Irish Independent on the occasion of their tour of Endgame, in September 2009. See also this article for Le Monde Diplomatique. * “The whole place stinks of corpses,” says Hamm. “The whole universe,” says Clov…. read more +

Phil Kingston was in his first year at London’s prestigious Central drama school when a senior staff member gave him some sage advice. “You can be a musician and a smackhead, but you can’t be an actor and a smackhead.” Kingston was a heroin addict. He paid for his addiction with his commission from work… read more +

I get a lot of emails for this column: largely press releases, but there are also the emails that come directly from theatre makers. If they’re writing to me themselves, they’re usually young and probably broke. Mostly, I can’t write about them: they get in touch too late; or their play doesn’t sound any good;… read more +

It may be tough out there, but Irish theatre is responding with hard-nosed good sense. With funding cut, there’s a new focus on what audiences want. And in times of recession, as Michael Colgan says, they want entertainment. Here are ten shows in 2013 that look likely to entertain, and may well inspire.

Recent Irish theatre has lacked a master imagination: it’s too long since we have seen a new play to rival the best of John B Keane or Brian Friel or Tom Murphy. Or so I wrote this time last year, reviewing the theatre of 2011. In 2012, Irish theatre found a master imagination again. And… read more +

In late September, 1843, Charles Dickens was sent a recently-published report on child labour in Britain. It enraged him. He set about writing a response; six weeks later, he was finished. It was published on December 19 and was an instant success. On Christmas Day alone, it sold 6,000 copies

She was “Ireland’s greatest living writer,” but had been forgotten by the time she died. She was the quintessential New Yorker, but her writer’s eye cast constantly about the Dublin of her childhood. She was famous for her independence of mind and of lifestyle, but she lost both as she gradually descended into bewilderment. 

The hero is a man who spits on Jews in the street. One of the romantic leads wins praise for winning, and converting, a young Jewish woman. The rousing climax involves the entire cast exulting in the humiliation of a Jew being forced to convert to Christianity. And this is the story of one of… read more +

Barely a few pages into Bay of Tigers, Pedro Rosa Mendes’ chronicle of travels in Angola in 1997, we learn “there are more than one hundred million mines buried in seventy countries, close to a tenth of them in Angola”. It is a depressing start, but in ways that may not be immediately apparent. Mendes… read more +