The 39 Steps is a classic adventure novel by John Buchan, and an early but influential thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, and now a witty stage play paying irreverent homage to both. Richard Hannay is the dashing, pencil-moustached hero, unwittingly caught up in an espionage adventure when he tries to protect a beautiful, mysterious foreign agent… read more +

Karl Shiels is a broken man. It wasn’t the six-month, unpaid labour of love installing Dublin’s newest fringe theatre, the Theatre Upstairs at the Plough pub on Abbey St, that broke him. The excitement in the theatre community and rave reviews had long since repaid that. It wasn’t the bleak midwinter, when burst pipes cut… read more +

“Inside the mind of a paedophile,” said the headline last Sunday. The article, by the Sunday Tribune’s Ali Bracken, told the story of the serial abuse of children by the California-based Irish priest, Oliver O’Grady – in his own words. It was “the affection of the hugging,” that O’Grady particularly enjoyed; it “awakened within me… read more +

One day at the dawn of the 1960s, a remarkable script landed on the desk of the director of the Abbey Theatre, Ernest Blythe. Blythe was in his 70s. He had retired from politics almost 30 years earlier, and had been managing director of the Abbey for 20. His was a staid directorship, and the… read more +

‘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 +

They say you need your bad luck to strike during the dress rehearsal, at the latest. The dress rehearsal for Swan Lake went smoothly. On opening night, over 2,000 people mingled in the foyer and bars of the new Grand Canal Theatre, celeb-spotting or simply being celebs. The staff, who had been practicing their drills… read more +

Aged 16, I got my break in the theatre. Playing a broom carrier in the school production of Macbeth, I arrived for the performance to find myself promoted. A classmate had fallen ill. My new role was that of the Captain in the second scene: gravely wounded from battle, he reports to King Duncan how… read more +

For almost a century the Irish who died at Gallipoli were largely forgotten. In the week that their memory was officially honoured for the first time, with Mary McAleese’s visit to the Gallipoli war graves, a series of letters uncovered in the National Archives tells a vivid story of the sacrifice of two Dublin brothers… read more +

Eamon de Valera once said that if he wished to know what the people of Ireland were thinking, he had to simply look into his heart. Today, the politicians prefer to rely on polls to know what the people are thinking, while de Valera’s role as a moral grandstander has been largely usurped by my… read more +

Michael Harding was going to be a priest. It was the era of Vatican II, of liberation theology, or worker priests pursuing social justice. The church, he thought, was the place to be. He was already, by passion, a writer. Aged 14, he was given a manual typewriter by his uncle, and knew that was… read more +