Silver Stars and the future of Irish theatre

On a night in October I sat in a tiny theatre in Temple Bar and watched and listened as ten ordinary men sang a cycle of songs about their lives and Ireland.

When it finished, too soon, the woman beside me said, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to have liked that,” and she was right.

They were love songs, mostly: about lovers, and love of family, and of country. Untrained and unabashed, this curious choir sang them with an honesty and starkness that would have been confrontational, were they not so gentle.

On tour with Terminus

‘Terminus’ is back at the Peacock in Dublin. This article was first published in the Sunday Tribune on 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.

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.