The Engine

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