Here’s a piece of advice they won’t tell you on a creative writing degree course: “Being a plasterer is a good job if you want to write plays.” But then, John McManus is not a very conventional playwright. He doesn’t read plays. He’s barely seen any. (Ten, in his life, he thinks.) He hasn’t studied… read more +

Deirdre Kinahan was walking in the bog near her home in Meath one morning when a flash of colour caught her eye. The bog is a vast expanse of dark browns and purples and blues, and the bright colours seemed incongruous. She approached, and saw that they were flowers. Attached to the flowers was a… read more +

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 +

The theatre director was a young idealist, and he wanted to change the world. He brought his theatre group to a rural village, where the people were mired in poverty. In the village square, they put on a play. It was a simple fable of how the rich oppressed the poor. The village audience was… read more +

“Inside the mind of a paedophile,” said the headline last Sunday (May 2). 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… read more +

There are two things that Irish actors can’t do: verse, and class. When Rough Magic tackled The Taming of the Shrew two years ago, director Lynne Parker found a solution, of sorts, in a very Irish rendition of the play, roughing it up and embracing regional accents. Parker has done something similar with Wilde’s great… read more +