‘Macbeth’ is the everyman’s tragedy. He lacks the nobility of Othello, the intellect of Hamlet, the authority of Lear. He is Shakespeare’s premonition of Tony Soprano – always in slightly above his head, struggling to catch up, resorting to horrific violence in a bid to assert himself over a fate he can’t quite master. For… read more +

Ten years ago, the British theatre impresario Michael Kustow issued an impassioned plea for the theatre, in a book with the now quaint title, ‘Theatre@Risk’. Faced with the overwhelming forces of both the internet and global capital, Kustow wondered, would theatre survive? It seemed for a while during this decade that Irish theatre makers were… read more +

It is six hours before Mark O’Rowe’s play, ‘Terminus’, opens in New York. Eileen Walsh is standing in a dim crossbeam, shrouded in mist, talking out to the audience. Mark O’Rowe is coughing. A technician is talking loudly. A couple of others are looking at dimly-lit laptops, or moving quietly through the gloom, fixing things. “The drill for several years has been bed alone, then tears.” Eileen Walsh plays against the rhythm of O’Rowe’s verse. She lets the rhyme announce itself, as if her character were unaware that there were anything distinctive about her speech.