The Engine

St Joan by Bernard Shaw at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast Production information Press night  September 15, 2016 Authors       George Bernard Shaw Adaptation         Philip O'Sullivan Director      Jimmy Fay Set         Grace Smart Lighting      Ciaran Bagnall Sound          Conor Mitchell Technical    Keith Ginty (technical manager), Philip Goss (set builder) Stage manager          Kate Miller (company stage manager) Production manager       Alan McCracken Cast includes     Alan McKee, Abigail McGibbon, Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Rory Nolan, Philip O’Sullivan, Tony Flynn, Kevin Trainor, Eimear Fearon Casting        Clare Gault Producer     Lyric Theatre, Belfast Running time2hrs 30mins There have been countless theatrical depictions of Joan.  She is a character in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 (1590) where her initial piety is exposed and she is rightly, according to Shakespeare, burned at the stake.  Shakespeare’s depiction is often seen a

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE at the TATE MODERN The new major retrospective of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at the Tate Modern follows a conventional re-telling of the narrative of the artist’s life. The early work, development and maturity, fame, the final years and the visionary final statements. The chronological narrative begins with the artist working in black and white, charcoal and pencil, in order to develop an abstract style and a truly American form of Modernism.   Georgia O’Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a northerner and daughter of Irish and Dutch-Hungarian parents. O’Keeffe turned to the landscape to create a specifically American form of Modernism distinct from the European form and used traditional American icons such as the apple, the prairie and flowers, symbols of the American wilderness and its fecundity. She did not turn to abstraction before encountering and documenting the natural world. O’Keeffe loved to walk in the count

PAINTING WITH LIGHT at the TATE BRITAIN   This exhibition at the Tate Britain traces the influence of photography in the 19th century through to the modern era. Some of the great names of early photography such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), are present in the exhibition but there are also unexpectedly obscure figures who are given prime position. The first room introduces us to the photographer Robert Adamson (1821-1848) and the painter David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) who established one of the first photographic studios in Edinburgh. Photography had been invented in 1839 although the camera obscura had been invented in ancient China and had been utilised by the artists of the Renaissance. During their four-year partnership Adamson and Octavius Hill took more than 4000 photographs in Edinburgh but it was their collaboration on the Disruption Portrait (1843-1866) a depiction of the rebel assembly that founded the Free Church of Scotland that initiates this exhibition. C