Tag Archives: enda walsh

2011: Let’s Hear It For The Best Bits.

  By Culch.ie | December 31, 2011 - 9:00 am | The Culch
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Well, that’s it. Come in, 2011, your time is up! And though we’re still busy sweeping up the debris after the budget and detangling mislaid election promises, let’s take a moment to remember the best bits of 2011, the stuff that didn’t make us tut, whimper or rampage across the Bog Of Allen throwing sods of turf at the sky. So pull up a chair (assuming there’s one you didn’t yet burn for firewood) and allow Culch.ie’s writers to take your mind off your boo-boos with our personal favourites from the year that was. A Head Full Of Jed 2011 definitely had its soaring pop culture highs and its devastating pop culture lows, from the joyful experience of standing front and centre at The Button Factory when Neil Hannon, Cathy Davey et al performed Vampire Weekend’s album for The JD Set in April, to the unbearable skincrawl of even accidentally … There’s more →

Review: Penelope by Enda Walsh (Druid Theatre Company)

  By Allan | August 14, 2010 - 6:09 pm | The Arts, Theatre
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Enda Walsh’s Penelope is a captivating hybrid of Greek myth and Irish characterisation. It appears to be baking under an Ithacan sun, but its characters have voices soaked in the grey of more northerly isles and names that underscore that origin. It’s not the first example of an Hibernian cowl worn over the shape of antiquity: James Joyce’s Ulysses is the most prominent one but Marina Carr, Macnas and Barrabas have also toyed with the trope in recent years. Penelope’s collision of anachronistic elements is a back story to The Odyssey: four suitors (Niall Buggy, Denis Conway, Tadhg Murphy and Karl Shiels) vie for the hand of Odysseus’ wife (Olga Wehrly) before his prophesied return, and their destruction at his hand. They reside at the bottom of a bloodstained swimming pool, listlessly discussing the taste of heat, and heat has them stripped to togs and gowns. The set, as one … There’s more →

Review: The New Electric Ballroom, Town Hall Theatre, Galway

  By Allan | April 24, 2009 - 4:32 pm | Theatre
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The first thing that strikes you about Druid’s New Electric Ballroom is the shockingly spare stage design. The lavish promises of the play’s title are dispelled immediately upon seeing the set. Immense grey walls wrap a raked floor and bare furniture. And with that misconception firmly in place, the gaudy colours of hope, regret and habit splash across the stage in Walsh’s absurdist tragedy. The setting, while indisputably Irish, is not any physical place, but that recognisable hinterland that borders Beckett and Ionesco, a place where ideas wear the flesh of people. 3 female siblings are trapped in an epic regurgitation of their memories of the New Electric Ballroom. For the youngest, her incarceration in these memories is vicarious- she is so familiar with the stories of a place she’s never been she prompts the elder sisters in their faltering and reluctant retellings of the dashed hopes of romance. It … There’s more →