The Engine

Paul Muldoon: One Thousand Things Worth Knowing: Faber & Faber: 2015 Clive James: Sentenced to Life: Picador: 2015  These are two very contrastive books both making a clear announcement through their titles. The first is brash claiming something unbelievable just as the German author Karl May, author of Winnetou, claimed to speak more than 1000 languages. Clearly Paul Muldoon’s meeting with America has also made him feel entitled to be just as bold and brash as the New World is. By contrast Clive James’s book is a valedictory epistle aimed at the guts but also demonstrates that James still has a good deal to say and the means to do so. Clive James is still able to be funny even if he now is terminally ill but like so many people who declare such things manage to yet persist. James aims his six shooter at plenty of high and low targets which include Laura Riding, who is depicted as endearingly barmy, intoning her high-brow stuff to the initiated only (yet somehow we realise t

Alice took a Detour and other meanderings by Karen Georghiou (Rag Publishing, London, 2014) Karen Georghiou’s book based on the Alice in Wonderland stories by Lewis Carol is a mixture of stories, poems and drawings derived from the original material yet also bringing something bright, interesting and refreshing to intrigue readers. Nonsense poems and nonsensical stories start out by declaring ‘why are we here reading this story?’. ‘Well we must be mad’ and that’s a good enough reason to read whimsical nonsense, isn’t it? The Cheshire Cat retorts similarly to Alice and then we are on our way down the rabbit hole and beyond the Mad Hatter’s tea party probably being clobbered by or clobbering the Bandersnatch, the Jubjub Bird or even the mighty Jabberwocky. The problem with this collection is possibly declared in its title which sets out too clearly authorial hesitations about the Lewis Carol original. The collection lacks a central cohesiveness that might have connected together s

Agnes Martin at the Tate Modern    This is a major retrospective of the work of American artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), a name unknown beyond the circles of the avant-garde. Unusually Martin evaded an early realist period or perhaps the Tate has somehow tastefully avoided presenting it. Instead Martin began her art career as an Abstract Expressionist in the period summed up by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956). After Martin had negotiated her influences, which included Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) and Barnett Newman (1905 – 1970), she gradually began to find her own voice as an abstract and then a minimalist artist.  Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterians and lived on a farm before her family moved to Vancouver. Martin then moved to Washington, USA, to help her pregnant sister and finished her education and then art education there. Apparently she had a brief career as a naturalist painter in the 1950s before turning to abstract for

THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN by Sean O’Casey at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on the 18th June, 2015  CREDITS Malcolm Adams Mr Gallogher Gerard Byrne Mr Mulligan Lloyd Cooney Tommy Owens Muiris Crowley Mr Maguire David Ganly Seamus Shields Dan Gordon AdolphusGrigson Louise Lewis Mrs Grigson Amy McAllister Minnie Powell Mark O’Halloran DonalDavoren Jamie O’Neill An Auxiliary Catherine Walsh Mrs Henderson Wayne Jordan Director Sarah Bacon Set and Costume Designer Sarah-Jane Shiels Lighting Designer Mel Mercier Composer and Sound Designer Maisie Lee Assistant Director Sue Mythen Movement Director Katie Davenport Design Assistant BOOKING DETAILS FOR THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN Dates: 12 June – 1 August Previews: 12 – 15 June on the Abbey stage Times: Tues – Sat 7.30pm, Matinees Wed and Sat 2pm Wednesday matinees 24 June and 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 July. Tickets: €13 – €45 / Conc. €13 – €25 Sean O’Casey’s (1880 – 1964) tragi-comedy set in May, 1920 in the aftermath of the Iris

By the Bog of Cats by Marina Carr at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on the 5th September, 2015   Watching this play without any kind of background reading, foreknowledge or forewarning, it would appear that the author follows and abides with excruciating exactitude to the unities of time, place and character laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics. Of course it hardly comes as a surprise to learn that the play is a version of Euripede’s Medea. By the Bog of Cats is both populist and poetic in its stylistic rendering of antiquities most controversial, enfant terrible and intrepid revolutionist Euripides who eventually died in exile in Macedonia rather than imbibing a cup of hemlock as his contemporary Socrates did. Euripides has come down to us as something of a misogynist but this is a fallacious accusation because Euripides alone among his other great contemporaries Aeschylus and Sophocles really does take the side of women and other outsiders and victims. His Medea is such a victim. Th

Sonia Delaunay at the Tate Modern May 4th 2015   Sonia Delaunay began her career in fine art then gravitated towards applied art but also changed from being a figurative artist to an abstract one. Her career in art is also synonymous with the 20th century, her handprint on its history unmistakable, looming and ominous.  For a long time she was only known as Robert Delaunay’s wife but this changed from the 1950s onwards when her part in the European avante garde from the early 20th century onwards was finally acknowledged. Obviously Robert and Sonia Delaunay were an artistic partnership and the works she completed also seem part of her husband’s oeuvre as if the two formed a patent symbiosis. Sonia Stern (1885 – 1979) was born in Odessa before the Russian revolution. She was adopted by her wealthy uncle thus becoming Sonia Terk and this allowed her to travel to Karlsruhe in Germany and then to Paris in 1904 in order to study art. Her initial influences are cited as being the work

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, May 2015 Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden at the Tate Modern on the 3rd of May, 2015  The first painting in this exhibition which grabbed my attention was Dumas’s portrait of Phil Spector. Firstly, his police mug shot without his wig. Secondly, replete with wig at his murder trial for the killing of actress and fashion model Lana Clarkson. Dumas’ seems to become more obsessed than preoccupied as her painting career develops. She followed up these works with portraits of Lady Di which seems sculptured and austere and Naomi Campbell which seems a more personal and subjective work and in keeping with the mix of the figurative, expressionist and primitive that typifies her work.  Marlene Dumas (1953 - ) was born in South Africa but grew up in Holland. Her painting reflects upon her early life in Africa evidenced by her involvement in painting and putative involvement in radical politics (and the politics of Africa which is not often seen in the wor

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM at THE ABBEY THEATRE, DUBLIN,  on Saturday 28th March 2015  CREDITS  Fiona Bell - Titania and Hippolyta Andrew Bennett - Nick Bottom Des Cave - Robin Starveling Declan Conlon - Oberon and Theseus Shadaan Felfeli - Indian boy John Kavanagh - Lysander Peadar Lamb - Francis Flute Stella McCusker - Peaseblossom Barry McGovern - Demetrius Gina Moxley - Helena Máire Ní Ghráinne - Mustard Seed Áine Ní Mhuirí - Hermia Des Nealon - Tom Snout John Olohan - Snug David Pearse - Egeus and Peter Quince Geraldine Plunkett - Cobweb Daniel Reardon - Puck and Philostrate Helen Roche - Moth Gavin Quinn - Director Aedín Cosgrove - Set and Lighting Design Jimmy Eadie - Composer and Sound Designer Bruno Schwengl - Costume Design  The Imperial tongue has no great incongruity at the Abbey Theatre since all the great Irish (but really Anglo-Irish) playwrights wrote in it rather than the native Gaelic but the presence of the great avatar of the English language is real

Poets of the Great War: Faber & Faber, 2014: Robert Graves, Selected Poems; edited by Michael Longley   Faber have released a set of volumes of the Great War poets to coincide with the centenary of the conflict. World War 1 was fought at a time when the dominance of the moving image was not yet complete hence the plethora of written testaments presented here. The war was also yet more gruesome and extreme since it was industrialised and mechanised and thus different from earlier wars (with perhaps only the Boer War fought around the turn of the century giving the British a foretaste of what was to come). Therefore, the written medium was the most immediate way to record the events that were happening and obviously had none of the fallibility and cumbersome qualities of cameras of that era. There were poets in later wars but the Great War threw up so many disparate voices, clear evidence of the unbelievable psychological destructiveness of the fighting, the evocation of feelings

History  The Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory. Its precursors were the Irish Literary Theatre and Frank and Willie Fay’s National Dramatic Society. With patronage from Miss Annie Horniman, premises were purchased on Old Abbey Street and on December 27th 1904, the Abbey Theatre opened its doors for the first time.   CREDITS – SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER (1773) by OLIVER GOLDSMITH  Gary Crossan Dick Muggins/Thomas Lisa Fox Bet Bouncer/Bridget Manus Halligan Tom Twist/Jeremy Jon Kenny Mr. Hardcastle Mark Lambert Sir Charles Marlow Charlotte McCurry Molly Slang/Pimple the Maid Caroline Morahan Miss Hardcastle Janet Moran Miss Neville Sean Murphy Aminadab/Diggory Rory Nolan Hastings Marion O’Dwyer Mrs. Hardcastle David Pearse Tony Lumpkin Bryan Quinn Jack Slang/Roger Marty Rea Young Marlow Conall Morrison Director Liam Doona Set designer Joan O’Clery Costume designer Conor Linehan Composer and Sound Designer Ben Ormerod