Handbags, Hollywood and Wilde

For review of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety, see here.

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. (A new production by Rough Magic is in preview at the Gaiety from Tuesday.)

And yet the line isn’t particularly funny, or obviously satirical.

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.

Dublin’s new Grand Canal Theatre: a public-private partnership

They say you need your bad luck to strike during the dress rehearsal, at the latest. The dress rehearsal for Swan Lake went smoothly.

On opening night, over 2,000 people mingled in the foyer and bars of the new Grand Canal Theatre, celeb-spotting or simply being celebs.

The staff, who had been practicing their drills for two weeks in an empty theatre, wore an air of nervous, earnest excitement. Tailbacks formed at the entrance to the auditorium, as people stopped sharply, struck by the scale and elegant lines of the stage and theatre.

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.

Michael Frayn: failed playwright

Michael Frayn was a spectacularly unsuccessful playwright.

The Cambridge Footlights has for years provided British comedy with a litany of its brightest stars, from the Monty Python team to Fry and Laurie. In his final year at Cambridge, Frayn got the opportunity to write most of the Footlights annual Spring Revue.

Normally, the Revue is full of topical satire on current affairs, showbiz and the media, and transfers to the West End. Frayn decided to take an original approach and, heavily influenced by a play he had seen in London, he set about writing a more austere kind of comedy. As he recalls in his collection of essays, ‘Stage Directions’, “the humour was to be entirely abstract.”

Review: Solemn Mass for a Full Moon

Michel Tremblay’s play is a 90-minute walk along the Via Dolorosa. This is a play about the agonies of separation and betrayal, and Tremblay does not spare us in his depiction of that pain.

The structure of the play is simple, but ingenious. Six separate stories are told by the residents of an apartment block, standing out on their balconies to watch the full moon.

One of the stories is the joyous one of a young couple. The others are all stories of regret and fear: a gay couple, one of whom is dying of Aids, contracted while unfaithful; a daughter caring for her disabled father; and more.