A century ago, at the Abbey, a young writer mentioned women’s underwear in a new play, and the audience rioted. Fifty years ago, in the Dublin Theatre Festival, a young director staged a play that involved a condom being thrown on stage, and the director was arrested. Then, last year, in the Dublin Fringe Festival,… read more +

I’ve been neglecting this site of late but am straining to catch up now. This is a piece on David Hare’s latest play at the National for Le Monde Diplomatique. At the start of David Hare’s play on the financial crisis, The Power of Yes, a character called the Author says: “This isn’t a play”…. read more +

Karl Shiels was very nearly famous. Eleven years ago, he was cast in a new play by an obscure young playwright that was to open the new theatre in Tallaght. Shiels starred alongside Aidan Kelly; the playwright was Mark O’Rowe and the play was Howie the Rookie, and it was the most ferocious piece of… read more +

“I was a convicted criminal at the age of two.” Michael Kennedy, a costumier by trade, has a story to tell. “I was found wandering in Killenaule, Tipperary.” Soft-spoken and gentle mannered, Kennedy spent his working life backstage at the best theatres and opera houses. But that’s not the story. “My mother had died, and… read more +

This is re-posted here to tie in with next week’s column, on the forthcoming production of Rough by Grace Dyas at the Axis Ballymun. Originally published in Village, 2007. On the evening of May 21, 1957, a Garda Inspector arrived at 18a Herbert Lane, an old coach house on a laneway off Baggot St in… read more +

Do you believe Brian Lenihan or David McWilliams? IBEC or the Unions? Were the bankers gangsters, or simply suffering from hubris? If conflict is at the heart of drama, then the collapse of the Irish economy should have proved a goldmine for dramatists. A society swept up by irrational exuberance; lone voices shouting stop; pantomime… read more +

The actor Donal Donnelly, who died on Monday in Chicago, aged 78, was best known to the public for his cinematic roles in The Godfather: Part III and The Dead, but is remembered by his friends primarily as man of the theatre. “He was the real thing, a fabulous stage actor,” said Noel Pearson. Born… read more +

On a night in October I sat in a tiny theatre in Temple Bar and watched and listened as ten ordinary men sang a cycle of songs about their lives and Ireland. When it finished, too soon, the woman beside me said, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to have liked that,”… 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 +

On a wall in the lobby of the Abbey, near the cloakroom, sits a discrete plaque, unveiled by Sean Lemass in 1966.  It commemorates the seven company members who downed tools to take up arms in the 1916 Rising. One of them, an actor named Sean Connolly, was the first Irish casualty of the Rising,… read more +