Redemption? Please. As much as you can spare.



Janey Mac, it's a while since I posted here. Not 100% sure exactly why that is? A culmination of various stresses and strains that have seen written output drop off undramatically. Partly seasonal, I guess - in that I tend towards visual work when the year gets brighter - and boy, has it been brighter recently! What was that big blue thing in the sky? Oh, the sky, you say? I see.

So, with our lease running out, I've been looking around for a smaller (cheaper) office - I think we've found a good one. Been painting quite a bit too. Been keeping a tight, slitted, watery eye on finances (emphatically small 'f'). Also, a glut of various familocentric activities - birthdays, communions, covert guerilla actions, yaddah yaddah. Stretched thin - but not in any buff sense - as borne out by the displacement factor upon my annexing of the kids' paddling pool (Archimedes would be shocked).

This whole recession has been encrusting itself on my consciousness too - pricing issues, projection anxiety, accusing spreadsheets - luvverly work if you can get it - the problem is in the getting? And also the remitting? So, shackled by the woes of the western world, I went along to see the stage version of the Shawshank Redemption a couple weeks back. Here's my review for the Evening Herald.

It's a good enough night out - no major surprises - except maybe that there are no major surprises. Peter Crawley reviewed it for the Irish Times and also contributed to The View. His thoughts about it being a potential musical seem quite on the money IMHO - I could see this rocking along nicely in the West End, if the songs were solid. And there's plenty of meat in the writing for some cracking numbers. Perhaps.

Anyways, I'll try and up the ante a little in the next week or so. For one thing, I've a couple of awards from fellow bloggers that I really should acknowledge and pass along. In facta, I'm considering bringing the full power of my sad little virtual dominion to bear in smelting said tributes down to one fused alloy - a killerwatt medallion of accord - then dispensing it throughout the Ethersphere at my whim. What do you think? Hubris Immaculata? Welllllll, we all have to flail sometimes. Ciao :-)

A Miller's Tale : All My Sons at The Gate



It seems fitting that The Gate’s production of All My Sons opened on the evening of d'Emergency Budget. Arthur Miller’s first successful play may be set in post-war America, but his underlying criticisms of capitalist immorality have a resonance here on home turf - profiteering fiscal egotism casts a long shadow, the ultimate cost still unclear.

Over three acts, the secrets coiled around the roots of the Keller household are laid bare within a remarkable set – a skillful evocation of post-war suburban affluence - all back porch, shade tree and picket fences. Neighbours pop in and out – no locked doors here – but as the play unfurls, we soon find that all is not quite idyllic.

Eldest son Larry has been missing in action for three years, his mother Kate still nursing unhealthy delusions of his homecoming. Self-made patriarch Joe and their son Chris realise otherwise – but even they can’t guess the full truth of his disappearance. And what of that court case and those flawed cylinder heads, responsible for the deaths of twentyone young airforce flyers? Slowly and painfully, truths emerge into the fading light of a balmy summer evening. What at first seems a family comfortable within their collective skins, soon reveals a host of faultlines, undermining romantic expectations and apparent neighbourly respect with moral culpability.

Money, money, money. Family. Country. World. All hinge on the results of individual decisions. When lust for the good life, and the profits necessary to maintain it, overwhelm the moral centre of any one individual, the resulting horrors can spring from the ground like so many planted dragons teeth.

A skillful ensemble cast brings us deep into the core of the themes here, with several stand out performances; Garett Lombard, in particular, shines with an immaculately paced performance as the idealistic Chris, conflicted between love, duty and battle-hardened morality. A classy production of a classic drama - well worth a look.

All My Sons run at The Gate Theatre has been extended due to popular demand until 13 June 2009, 8.00pm 
nightly. A version of this review originally appeared in the Evening Herald, 8.5.09

Irish Theatre Awards : Making a Mark

Sunday night saw Ireland's luvvies flock to The Burlo for the presentation of this year's Irish Times Theatre Awards. Seems to have been a swell occasion, with a special tribute award for Lynne Parker, artistic director of Rough Magic Theatre Company.

The Best Actress award was presented to Deirbhle Crotty, for her role as Masha in the Friel version of Chekhov's Three Sisters. You can read my review of that production here. I've seen Crotty a few times now, and she's (ahem) a class act. Depending on the material, she can bring an old-school showbiz sass to bear, while mining the emotional centre of her character. And she entertains; a great, expressive dry humour to her - even in darker outposts (think Rosaleen Linehan channeling Dorothy Parker). Crotty is currently appearing in Marble at the Abbey (see below). So, git yerself along to that lovely venue and catch the award-winner herself in full effect.

Best Actor went to Tom Vaughan Lawler, for his remarkable turn in The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, also at the Abbey. You can read my thoughts on that absolutely rivetting performance here.

Now, here's a little bit of trivia for you. You see that nice logo up there - emoting actor centre stage, elated shadow on the backdrop? Guess who designed that particular item, over twelve (if not more!) years ago? Yes, I'm happy to reveal that it was me! Not long after I'd plunged into my career as freelance graphic designer, I was briefed by (now-defunct?) marketing agency Dimension to create a 'figurative logo' for a newly planned theatre awards ceremony. It needed to be figurative so that a statuette could be developed. I did concept visuals for those too - but the final stauette design went a different way. At that time, the awards were to be sponsored by both The Irish Times and the ESB - meaning my beautifully conceived concept ended up with both those logos plonked on it - as well as a durrty great keyline box all round. Thankfully, a single sponsor now means some of the cleanliness has returned to the identity.

Having designed it on classic principles, with a long life in mind, I've enjoyed seeing the thing become a bit of an icon down the years. I hope it continues on as such - yet realise that one of these days it may well end up sacrificed, for a 'trendy' upgrade.

The illustration itself was created in brush and ink, then treated to a rigorous bout of 'moving-it-about-on-the-photocopier' - an earlier form of 'digital manipulation' - to create that pulled, distressed effect. I made oodles of these distorted copies, then cut and pasted the best bits back into a cohesive whole, scanning it into my trusty Power Mac 7500 for clean-up. Looking back now, I can see how influenced I was by the sculpture of Edward Delaney - particularly his famine piece in Stephen's Green.

The typography is a tweaked version of capitalis monumentalis letterforms, or Roman square capitals, as used for the inscription at the base of Trajan's Column from which the typeface - Trajan - takes its name.

Anyway, congratulation to all the winners - full list here - and best of luck to those who weren't successful this time. Hopefully, twelve months from now you'll be standing up there, along with my design work.

Marbelous Visions

Marble, a new play by Marina Carr, is currently having its World Premiere run at the Abbey Theatre. I went along last week to review it for the Evening Herald’s HQ magazine. You can read that review here. The themes, and the play itself, were running through my mind for quite a while after my tight deadline with the Herald. The result is a slightly more indulgent take on the play and its themes, which is now over here on Poetry Ireland's guest blog. Happy weekend all!

It's a Sunny Dublin Saturday!



So, did anybody manage to nab any art for themselves yesterday - seeing as it was Free Art Friday? I didn't find any myself - but I believe there was plenty about town. I didn't contribute, I'm afraid - next year, perhaps.

If you didn't manage to pick up an original Sean Hillen or Will St. Leger, no worries - you can always pop into the National Gallery to see the Turner watercolours. Or just enjoy another of my paintings, entitled, Bolg, above. It's not a haggis.

A Beautiful sunny (but cold) day in Dublin City today. I'm off down the country shortly - a flying visit to the southeast. Speaking of which, fellow Scalder Peter Murphy has a new book out. John the Revelator has already garnered enthusiastic praise from the likes of Colm Toibin ad Roddy Doyle, no less! He's interviewed in the Irish Times today.

For those staying in the City - there's a couple of attractive propositions once the sun has gone down;

The Shoestring Collective has their first event of 2009 tonight. As usual, the line-up is eclectic, feauring songs, comedy, piping and reading from Jinx Lennon, Enda Muldoon, Éanna Ó Muire and Colm Liddy respectively - and more! Details Here.

Also, tonight is your last chance to catch Classic Stage Ireland's production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale at the Project Arts Centre. Its a treat of a production - lots of energy and commitment from a predominently young cast, peppered with a few more mature contributions. Well worth a look. My review can be read here and - if you don't trust my perspective - Gerry Colgan reviews it for the Irish Times here.

Ho Ho Show

Meh-rry Crassmush! That's not me in the photo, but it sort of catches my mood of the moment. It's actually actor Patrick O'Donnell, demonstrating elvish ennui in The Santaland Diaries, based on David Sedaris' essay of the same name - playing every lunchtime at Bewley's Cafe Theatre until December 20th. If, like me, you find yourself underwhelmed by the meteorological, socioeconomic and psychological chills of this year's particularly fraught festive season, then Get Thee To A Clattery on Grafton Street for an hour of soup, sass and cynicism at all things sacharine. (i.e., it's a good laugh in a grim climate! My review is here. Gesundheit!

Resistable (Tour de) Force

Gawd - sorry about that dingy headline - couldn't resist. :->

Went along to review The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui at the Abbey Theatre for the Evening Herald last week. Review is online now over here. Its a great production, directed by Jimmy Fay and well worth a look. Curious how many of the issues that seep through the play bear relevance in today's troubled times. Of course its only our own recent insecurities that bring the focus of the developed world to bear on nastier aspects of economic politics. Outside of our whitebread enclave, the fallout from economic monsterism is a daily burden. The old 'virus-in-shoes' effect at play again. Anyway, get thee to the Abbey for some brainfood and you'll be treated to a virtuoso performance by Tom Vaughan Lawlor in the title role - shading Hitler, Mussolini, Richard III, Chaplin, Marx (Groucho, not Karl) into a remarkable, athletic meld. Sounds funny - and it is - in part. But things can dark very, very quickly.

I've seen TVL once before, playing Solyony in Brian Friels's version of Three Sisters, also at the Abbey. His performance then, as the histrionic army officer guest, was also a tumbling, skidding physical treat. There's a short interview with the actor over on Trinity News about his career to date and the challenge of playing Arturo Ui.

O Brothers!

As mentioned previously - I went along to review theatre O's production of Enda Walsh's Delerium at the Peacock Theatre last week, for those nice people at the Evening Herald HQ magazine. The review is now online and can be read here. The play runs until October 25th and I thought it was great craic! So do get along if you have a chance.

Also, if you fancy adding your voice to the critical mass, Irish Theatre magazine are running a Critic's Forum tomorrow (Oct 10th) at Project Arts Centre. A panel of critics, moderated by poet, playwright and presenter of RTE's Arts Show Vincent Woods, will be discussing some of the major productions from this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. Contributions from the floor will be welcome too. Kick-off is 4pm.

The Potentiality Exhibition

I Can / Can I?
on painting and potentiality

The current exhibition at Temple Bar Galleries sees three artists explore their relationship with painting. Sonia Shiel and Michael Coleman from Ireland and Hanneline Visnes, a Norwegian artist based in Scotland, ask questions of the medium that move from formal interrogation to downright cheeky.

Each artist examines their work in the context of Potentiality – a concept originally framed by Aristotle – which concerns itself with the potency of possibilities – ‘What if?’, ‘Where does this lead?’ and ‘Why / Why not?’. The exhibition is not an answer to these questions, but a process of investigating what it means to be a painter working in visual arts practice in 2008.

Coleman shows a calm, fixed installation of related canvases in juicy hues – a restrained progression from his body of compulsive, stylised painting. Visnes shows the most ‘traditional’ work here. A surreal motif involving raptors and jewellery is riffed out at various sizes, on unprimed MDF or paper, with an emphasis on controlled rendering. One larger piece is a very satisfactory resolution of deftly brushed filigree.

Shiel appears to have grasped the bull by the horns and wrestled it into a kind of submission. One of Ireland’s finest young painters (winning the Hennessy Craig award in 2004), she has long exhibited technical fluency. Recent years have seen her practice absorb increasingly experimental contexts. This is certainly true of her work here, to the point where paint is subverted, as in the case of Sal-on (shown above). As well as incorporating small canvases, paint also skins this assemblage, creating an almost theatrical construct.

There is risk here, in subverting the reverence which conventionally applies to gallery paintings. But this show is about risk – and questions. The biggest one of all? Are these the right questions?

I Can / Can I?
on painting and potentiality,
continues at Temple Bar Galleries until 20th September

This review originally appeared in the August 28th issue of Evening Herald HQ Magazine.

Raccoon in the Restaurant

The good people at the Evening Herald's HQ magazine (Hi Sue!) asked me to review Meridien Theatre Company's production 'Raccoon' which is currently running at Bewleys Café Theatre, during lunchtimes, until August 23rd. You can read that review here

This really is a very good show, so if you're in the Grafton Street area for lunch before the run ends, I'd recommend it highly. The writer is an American named Tom Hall and, based on this play, I'd think his short stories (I'm guessing he's written a few) should be well worth a read. That's if anybody knows where I might find them / him? According to the bumph, he's lived in Mexico, Cork & Wexford but is now based in Dublin. 'Raccoon' also features in a double bill 'The Lost Field' from Meridien - which will be touring nationwide this November - so keep your eyes peeled.

Meridien are a lively and innovative company, with some interesting work in their archive. Their forthcoming production is 'There Are Little Kingdoms' - a play based on the short story collection of the same name by Kevin Barry. Barry was a worthy winner of the 2007 Rooney Prize for this cracking collection of tales from small-town Ireland - one of the best debut collections of recent years. The author himself is adapting the work for stage, so make a note folks, this should be a pretty hot ticket, IMHO.

Hi. Again. At last. (For a while?)

Well now. In spite of many weeks of my non-posting (and the noticeable amount of quality long-term bloggers who are calling it quits) the blogosphere hasn't yet ground to a halt. A good thing? I think so. It's true that maintaining (any sort of quality in) a blog can be aright old chore - but what a great way to make and feed some of those synaptic contacts that internet technology always promised. And waffle freely.

I can't plead any kind of strategic decision behind my own recent lapse in posting. It just came down to being on holidays for the last two weeks and a bunch more weeks of random hectivity (hection?) before I went away (of which, more anon). Anyway, I'm back now - energised, tanned and typing again. Please do let me know if there's anybody left out there. I feel bad for disappearing just as a few people other than myself were starting to drop by. To be fair, I've always referred to my own wee cul-de-sac of the information superhighway as an 'intermittent' blog (Suffering the Intermit, anyone?) and so it has proven to be.

So, please allow me to re-kickstart proceedings by linking to a couple of (still-relevant) reviews which I penned for the Evening Herald before chucking a few more euros into Ryanair's coffers, and which appeared in my absence;

Chekhov via Friel : Three Sisters at The Abbey

Space Drama : Ulla Van Brandenburg at IMMA

Gillian Lawler at The Cross Gallery

Gillian Lawler is one of a new generation of young Irish painters who manage to bridge tradition and the demands of an art audience for whom working in paint is verging on anachronism – a falsehood, of course. It is to the credit of the Cross Gallery that quite a number of these painters have been associates of the gallery since it opened its doors in 1999.

I’m thinking specifically here of Sonia Shiel and David Begley, as well as Lawler. Each of these artists can be seen to have re-assessed traditional, if not classical, inspirations in recent years by bringing their own slants; Begley to the human figure, Shiel to the natural landscape, and now Lawler to the urban. All share a love of surface and the materials of the painted medium.

Gillian Lawler’s work first caught my attention with compositions redolent of drumlins or magmatic bulges, seemingly landscape based, but very stylised. However, the decisively appeal for me was not so much the organic geometry of the compositions as the wonderfully worked patina in which they were rendered. There was no hint of that ethereal clouding into abstraction that so many landscape-based abstracts choose to wrap themselves in. Here was a determined and interesting, regimented deterioration of composition and painted surface – allowing the underpinning drafts to become something worked intensely into existence.

Then, last summer, Lawler was awarded the prestigious Hennessy Craig Scholarship and The Whyte’s Award at the 2007 RHA Annual exhibition for work which had moved on from the organic curves of previous sources to embrace grid elements and areas of carefully underplayed brighter pigments, bringing a fresh momentum to her destructed grounds.

The current exhibition develops these elements further. While some organic curves reappear, they are as ambients to those grid-based elements which have now moved assuredly to a dimensional centre stage in all of the compositions on show.

The most striking piece, to my eyes, is a large canvas named ‘City on Stilts II’. Here, cuboid forms merge to a distressed, melded plane – calling to mind medieval cities, antique cabinets as well as some possible future tribal habitat. Dominent colours here are the eroded complementaries of Indigo and Apricot (also reminiscent of Shiel’s pallet) but with an aging influence of pale verdigris. A ground of parallels suggest municipality, tillage and the corrugation of machine processes. All is quiet however, the stillness of early morning in the city, or rather of the city viewed from outside.

Herein lies a key strength of the work on show. Each canvas presents a sense of an environment observed, as if by a cultural outsider – but which also realises itself as a contemplative inner vision. Where are these places – within or without? Who resides in their viewing?

Other standout works are a large ‘Untitled’ canvas, which calls to mind a timeworn apartment or office block, but also resembles some metaphysically chainsawed woodblock in its iteration of negative grid spaces. Of the medium sized canvases, ‘Tower II’ encapsulates that sense of ‘inner habitat’ as it’s subject suspends between ‘ground’ and ‘sky’ of questionable logic. All are rendered with love of surface that fuses deterioration and destruction with wonder and beauty.

Overall this is an excellent show by a painter who seems to have found her own ‘third place’ between tradition and the new. Larger pieces are fulfilled with no loss of craft compared with the medium sized canvases more familiar to me from past work. Despite the emphasis on ‘modern building developments’ in the artist’s statement and the description of ‘primarily abstract meditations on the possible long-term rise and fall of cities’ – I find these works resonate with deeper instincts. In perusing the common planes and surfaces of the urban human habitat, it seems that Lawler is triggering the locks of inner rooms and perspectives.

The exhibition runs until 3rd May. An edited version of this review appeared in the Evening Herald HQ magazine of April 24.