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.

Review: ‘No Man’s Land’

Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008

There are two moments in ‘No Man’s Land’ that are great theatre. Late in the first act, Michael Gambon, playing Hirst, a writer of apparent high class and distinction, lapses into a drunken, maudlin reminiscence. He is haunted by the dream from which he has just woken, of a drowning. “There’s a gap in me”, he cries, “I can’t fill it… They’re blotting me out. Who is doing it? I’m suffocating.” His words, as befits somebody still mired in half-sleep, and drink sodden, are barely coherent. But the fear is very real, and it shoots through his character and the play: it is, it seems, the age-old fear of abandonment – of being a fraud and, worse, being a solitary fraud.

Free theatre, from Belarus

Published in the Irish Independent, Saturday August 9, 2008

If you want to attend a show at the Belarus Free Theatre, first of all you have to find the mobile phone number of their manager. It’s not on the web. It’s not in the phone book. Just ask around until you get it.