sun 13/07/2025

Ireland

London Assurance, National Theatre

For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant...

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Horses come to Storyville

Thoroughbred documentary Race Horses comes to BBC Four

Horses, Liz Mermin's "intensely strange" but bewitching documentary about a year in the life of a trio of Irish "horse athletes", has already been seen at the Sheffield Doc/Fest and at the ICA in London. Now, recut and retitled Race Horses, it comes...

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Dara O Briain, touring

What a joy to welcome Dara O Briain back into the stand-up fold. The Irishman has been away from live performance for five years because he has been busy hosting the panel show Mock the Week and mucking about in boats on various Three Men... series...

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Ondine

Neil Jordan’s smaller films have often betrayed a fascination with wispy visitants from the borderlands of gender. In The Crying Game the beautiful young call girl turns out, in one of cinema’s more jawdropping reveals, to be somewhat less she than...

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The Bible: A History, Channel 4

For six years from 1988, when Sinn Fein was banned from direct broadcasting, Gerry Adams could be seen on television, but not heard. Instead, actors would read his words while his lips soundlessly moved. What would the architects of that ban have...

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The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a murdered 14-year-old who hovers in metaphysical limbo over her grieving family, was once to have been filmed by the Scottish director Lynne Ramsay. On the evidence of Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and...

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Tom Paulin on Translating Medea

I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured...

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Photographic Gallery: Niall O'Brien, Art Work Space

'Xavier', from Niall O'Brien's 'Good Rats' exhibition

Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the...

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Interview: Liz Mermin on Horses

From the horses' mouths: Liz Mermin aimed to make her film from the perspective of the horses

Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly...

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The Rivals, Southwark Playhouse

How to be silly in Sheridan's most famous play: Celia Imrie and Harry Hadden-Paton in The Rivals

'Tis the season to be jolly. Or, if you're a small theatre and choose not to stoop to panto, time perhaps to be a little light, anyway, tickle some tastebuds. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) is his best-known play, followed by The...

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Duke Bluebeard's Castle/Rite of Spring, ENO

There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the...

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Cara Dillon, Union Chapel

With her impish looks and translucent, near-perfect voice Cara Dillon does well to avoid the “coffee table” epithet.  As a "product" she looks prime for mass marketing into the suburban dinner party circuit. But as an artist she is much better...

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