Author: The Reviews Hub - Ireland

Creator and Performer: Regan O’Brien Director and Choreographer: Jason Byrne and Ella Clarke MotherKraft begins with Regan O’Brien’s powerful voice reverberating in the big open theatre. O’Brien has an enchanting presence and you immediately want to listen to her; she held court alone on the bare stage. In fact, the opening very much felt like a Viking chant, and there was something quite primal and unique about it! On the back wall there were projected images of shapes and lights moving in a static manner, which shifted and changed as the performance went on. MotherKraft was an audio and visual…

Writer: Jon Fosse Director: Johan Bark Bestseller, a lovely café on Dawson Street, also serves as a theatre for Glass Mask Theatre. The audience was seated at little tables (a rare treat in the theatre world) which was the highlight of the experience. An adult son visits his mother after a long time apart. Their reunion is one of reckoning, the son confronts his mother for abandoning him as a child, leaving him with a religious grandmother and then his father. The set up of the story – with themes of abandonment, motherhood and choice running through it – has…

Writer: Thomas Bernhard Director: Tom Creed Power. Hate. Anger. Civil Unrest. Sound familiar? This is the world of The President, a 1975 play resurrected for a Dublin audience in a time that recognises far too well the feelings and fears it encapsulates. A dictator, the President, and the First Lady are preparing for a funeral. The sudden death of their closest ally The Colonel, has left the embattled couple descending into fear, paranoia, isolation. Only a few actors grace the stage and the couple dominate as everyone else around them has either fled or turned against them. This is a…

Writer: Lady Augusta Gregory Director: Eoghan Carrick The Rising of the Moon by Lady Augusta Gregory, founder of the Abbey Theatre, and patron of the Celtic Revival, is a political play that was first performed in 1907. The play’s main theme is about political awakening and political independence. The moon is the symbol which signifies the emergence of Irish freedom. The inspiration for the play arose when Gregory was passing the gaol in Galway as a child, she says I used to look in awe at the window where men were hung. I used to wonder if ever a prisoner…

Writer: Oscar Wilde (German translation by Hedwig Lachmann) Director: Bruno Ravella  The Bord Gáis Energy Theatre is packed out for tonight’s impressive performance of opera Salome. The drama in one act with no interval, is an edited libretto by Richard Strauss based on Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 French play, Salomé. It’s an operatic retelling of John the Baptist’s (Jochanaan) gruesome death at the behest of Herod Antipas’ (Herodes) step-daughter, Salome, after the Judaean Preacher spurns her amorous advances. Leslie Travers’ set and costume design are a surprise when the lights come up to Narraboth (Tenor Alex…

Writer: Siofra O’Meara Director: Simon Geaney After a successful run in the 2022 Dublin Fringe Festival Siofra O’Meara’s Blister returns to the stage at the Project Arts Centre, reprising its cast and director, and living up to its positive reviews. Blister is playing in the Cube, which is a wonderfully versatile space, and Jess Fitzsimons Kane’s set is an island of pillowy white to be explored with the eye as the audience waits for the show to begin. O’Meara takes to the stage with her co-star Eddie Murphy as Linda and Patrick, returning to Patrick’s studio flat after a successful…

Director: Sahand Sahebdivani  Sitting in this brightly lit, relaxed setting the audience were deliciously unaware of the beautiful meandering path of storytelling we were being led into. This is storytelling in it’s finest where the audience is brought into a whole other world and taken through layers of emotion and led to laugh out loud hysterically one moment and then shed tears in another.  The storytelling takes us from a melancholy story of family mental health issues to wonderful and weird Irish myths and legends that initially seem unconnected but then a realisation that the stories themselves were an escape…

Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan has today won the inaugural Pratchett Prize, along with the actor Bryan Murray, for their work on her play An Old Song, Half Forgotten. This major award “acknowledges the contribution of a scientist, artist, activist or person living with dementia who, collaboratively or individually, works to reduce its impact”. The prize honours best-selling UK author and humanist, Terry Pratchett, who passed away in March 2015, aged just 66, from complications of Alzheimer’s. Pratchett had campaigned vociferously to raise awareness of this debilitating and cruel disease. When Murray phoned Kinahan to tell her he must drop out…