Review: Christ Deliver Us! by Thomas Kilroy

Thomas Kilroy’s new play for the Abbey is an awkward work, marred by obviousness and by the tired, cumbersome conceit of relying on twentysomethings to play fifteen-year-olds.

And yet it is also a foundation myth for 21st century Ireland, eschewing the minor notes of nuance in favour of the major chords of sweeping social drama.

Kilroy’s play tells of the travails of a group of teenagers in a small Irish town in the 1950s. The boys get lathered by the Christian Brothers, the girls beaten by their parents; and all are terribly afraid of their bodies.

(Aaron Monaghan excels as the most mature of the young men while, opposite him, Aoife Duffin has moments of startling brilliance.)

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: ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ by Tom Murphy

Published in the Sunday Tribune, July 6, 2008

In the Gents before opening night of ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’, two gentlemen were recalling the original production of the play, from 1975. This is a particular habit of Tom Murphy’s audiences, and it is difficult to leave a Tom Murphy play without overhearing at least one conversation about the original production of ‘The Gigli Concert’. This can be a little alienating. In 1975, I was one.