Truckers, gamers & Rimini Protokoll

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 outfit called Rimini Protokoll.

David McWilliams: An outsider at the theatre

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 selling prescription medicines. The others were junkies, thrusting cash at him, craving a slow-release hit.

The guards let them be. Inside the Abbey, the staff were nonplussed.

From Brazil to Temple Bar: Theatre of the Oppressed

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 roused and inspired by it. And then came the play’s turning point. The hero – a poor man – was being beaten down by the rich man. The director stopped the play, and turned to the crowd.

Review: Stockard Channing in Earnest

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 satire of the upper classes. None of her cast could fake it in Brideshead Revisited, or Cameron’s cabinet. Without that innate sense of breeding, the play loses some of its sting.

Review: Bernard Farrell’s Bookworms

Bernard Farrell launched his career over 30 years ago with a farce about six people at a group therapy session, I Do Not Like Thee Dr Fell. In Bookworms, literature has replaced therapy, but the form is the same, and so is the intent: to poke fun at the foibles of the age.

The book club is a worthy setting for a farce, and Farrell cracks his best jokes out of the contrast between the sedate stereotype and the reality: a smalltown bear pit of social one-upmanship and sordid pasts.

The play’s successes lie in its conventionality.

The Theatre Upstairs: Au revoir

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 the water supply, and closed the theatre down just after it had opened, that broke him. He gritted his teeth and, eventually, like the rest of the country, his theatre was back on the road.

Irish theatre, child abuse, and The Kiss

“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 urges to be affectionate in return.” When an altar boy he liked, aged ten or eleven, arrived at the sacristy, he said, “I might go over and give him a hug, and if he responded by allowing me to hug him and offered to hug me in return, that sort of gave me permission to continue at that point.”

The Evidence I Shall Give at the Abbey

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 Abbey survived his reign on a diet of “forgettable and now forgotten farce, melodrama, and Irish-language pantomimes,” as the Dictionary of Irish Biography pithily records.

But this play was to be different. It was by a judge, first of all: Richard Johnson of the District Court, Tralee. And it tackled an issue of then rising controversy: the breaking up of families by the state-supported system of industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories.

Olwen Fouere in Sodome, my love

Olwen Fouéré is even more beautiful in person.

Sitting in tracksuit and cardigan in a light-filled dance studio in Dublin, hurriedly eating a packed lunch, the French-Irish actress exudes a warmth and charisma that belies the often aloof, statuesque roles she plays on stage.

The late Irish actor, Donal Donnelly, remembered

The actor Donal Donnelly, who died on Monday in Chicago, aged 78, was best known to the public for his cinematic roles in The Godfather: Part III and The Dead, but is remembered by his friends primarily as man of the theatre.

“He was the real thing, a fabulous stage actor,” said Noel Pearson.

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1931, to Irish parents, James, a doctor from Tyrone, and Nora (nee O’Connor), a teacher from Kerry, the family soon moved to Dublin, and Donnelly attended Synge St CBS, where he acted in school plays alongside Milo O’Shea and Eamonn Andrews.

After an apprenticeship at Callaghan’s outfitters on Dame Street, he left the trade to join the Gate Theatre, and subsequently joined Godfrey Quigley’s Globe Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. He later moved to London, where he met his wife, Patsy, a dancer, on the stage.

His break came in 1964, when he was cast as Gar Private

Review: ‘Translations’

Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 10, 2008

It’s not difficult to imagine Brian Friel and his Field Day buddies sketching out the framework for ‘Translations’, in Derry in 1980. They start with the premise of setting it during the 1830s Ordnance Survey, an exercise that involved “standardising” Irish place names in brutish English: a scenario that provides for an encounter between coloniser and colonised but that doesn’t carry the baggage of nationalist mythologising. Brilliant.