Review: Macbeth at the Abbey

‘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 someone who orders the murder of children, it is extraordinary how sympathetic he is.

Theatre in the Noughties: the decade’s top ten

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 responding to this challenge by including bits of video in their plays and calling them “multimedia”.

The response may have been glib, but the challenge was real. New media offer genuinely new means of entertainment and social interaction, and the expectations they create – of accessibility, interaction, and real-time response – are poorly met by the cumbersome form of traditional theatre.

Theatre under the radar in New York

First published in the Sunday Tribune, January 13 2008

It is six hours before Mark O’Rowe’s play, ‘Terminus’, opens in New York. The cast are doing the technical rehearsal. They’ve never been in the theatre before.

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 two other actors, Andrea Irvine and Aidan Kelly, are sprawled on the stage, each straddling a large shard of (mock) glass, looking bored.

“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.