The Engine

  Big Man at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 28th October, 2022 A one hander like Big Man , or, in proper English, a dramatic monologue, is extremely difficult to sustain for 70 minutes or so.   Usually, the audience become increasingly agitated at the thirty-minute mark and/or drifts away.   So, it is to actor Tony Flynn's credit that he manages to engage with a personal account of a failed relationship. The anti-naturalistic stage and absence of props was vaguely reminiscent of German expressionism.   A white stage riven with black cracks and a gaping white hole was alternately transformed into a black stage with white lines by James McFetridge's lighting design.   Lighting was used throughout the play to offer the actor a spotlight when he provided a more intimate digression, part of his unfolding story.   Flynn's anecdote about a gay relationship with a younger man in the Ardoyne rarely commented on sectarianism at all but shone a light into gay lif...

  THE GAP YEAR by Claire McMahon at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast Directed by Benjamin Gould Set director – Stuart Marshall Lighting Designer – James C McFetridge Sound Designer – Garth McConaghie The Gap Year is a crowd-pleasing romp conceived by Claire McMahon and presented by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.   It begins, somewhat dis-ingeniously, at the beginning with a wake, and goes off like an arrow shot in a straight line ahead or a lone crow flying across a horizon. Three women go off on a year out facing crises of ageing such as bereavement, Alzheimers, and separation.   Unlike Shirley Valentine, they don’t decide to travel to sun drenched beaches, warm seas and pina coladas but to a danker, wetter place which is all too familiar, namely their own country, the counties of Ireland, setting foot in every Irish county on the way. The set design is efficient and effective, a landscape abstract serves as a backdrop, a hillside that could be anywhere in Ireland ...

 Translations by Brian Friel at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4th of May 2022  Translations by Brian Friel at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4 th of May 2022   The first performance of Brian Friel’s revived play Translations at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast was in 1980 in Derry starring now world-famous actors Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea.   The location of the first performance was deliberately chosen, an attempt to foreground a city often left at the margins of theatre by bigger centres like Dublin and Belfast.   Translations was the first play produced by Field Day, a cultural initiative by Friel, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Stephen Rea, and others, designed to address issues of nationalism, culture, language and identity at the height of the period of instability and political violence in Northern Ireland known as ‘the troubles.’   The play has a history just as it reflects on the history of a locality in relation to larger, complicated changes s...

  WALTER SICKERT at the TATE BRITAIN on TUESDAY 26 th April 2022   Brighton Pierrots by Walter Sickert, 1915 Walter Sickert was born in Munich in 1860 and eight years later travelled with his family to London.   His father was also an artist, indeed Sickert began his career by imitating his father’s work.   Sickert initially trained as an actor, indeed fascination with the theatre is in evidence throughout his career.   Sickert trained at the Slade School of Fine Art before working as an assistant to established artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in 1882. Walter Sickert, Self-Portrait 1896 Sickert adopted Whistler’s signature style of muted tones and dull, realist colours.   However, by 1885 Sickert had met French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917).   He began to follow Degas’s meticulous preparation which included a planning grid and bolder use of colour.   This can be observed in works like Shop Front, The Laundry (1885, pencil,...

  Kyosai at the Royal Academy on the 21 st, April 2022   Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889 is regarded as the successor in Japanese art to Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) who helped to shape the Ukiyo-e (floating world) painting style.  Whereas Japan had been relatively isolated from the outside world for 260 years, Kyosai witnessed the arrival of the first western fleet and increasing Westernisation.  This was initiated by the Meiji dynasty in 1868 when the Tokugawa shogunate was toppled and imperial power restored after centuries of decline.  The emperor had come to represent spiritual power whereas, the Shogun (meaning roughly ‘army commander’) the secular, military power of the Japanese state.  Although the Shogun was technically the emperor’s servant, the emperor had been marginalised and deprived of significance for centuries.  The Meiji restoration signified the decline of the shogunate.  The emperor moved his seat of power from Kyoto to Ed...

  The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum on the 19 th, April 2022   The famous standing stone circle on Salisbury Plain known to us as Stonehenge was not unique.   The new exhibition at the British Museum offers us an understanding of the construction of Stonehenge, details of other henges and standing stone circles in Britain and the near continent.   Such sites were important in pre-history for communal religious worship until changes in society and the advent of metalwork came to mean that precious objects became more important than sites.   These changes occurred when new arrivals like the Beaker people (known as this because of the characteristic bronze beaker they used) who came to Britain about 4,400 years ago, reinvigorating the local economy and technological means too.   It is thought that the Beaker people all but wiped out the Neolithic farmers that occupied Britain until their arrival.   Stonehenge was built between 5000 and ...

  Inspiring Walt Disney at the Wallace Collection on the Thursday, 14 th April 2022   This new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is an unexpected delight, detailing the influence of French art of the rococo period on Walt Disney cartoons like Cinderella (1950) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).   Born in 1901 in Chicago, USA, Disney attempted to join the army from High School in 1918 but his application was rejected as he was too young.   Instead, Disney forged a birth certificate and joined up as a Red Cross ambulance driver, arriving in France in November after the armistice.   This was Disney’s first encounter with Paris where he glimpsed the rococo visions that he was later to incorporate into his films.   Later, in the 1930s, Disney returned to Paris to see the sights once again and while he was there, he acquired a library of 330 books, consisting of European fairy tales and books of art and architecture which he used as a basis for some of hi...

  Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Tate Modern, Sunday 10 th April 2022   The international reach of Surrealism is what is at stake in this exhibition, from its origins in the French art movements in the 1920s to its global extensions in the USA, Japan, literally everywhere. Eugene Granells Los Blasones Magicos del vuelo tropical 1947 Co-Founded in 1924 by Andre Breton whose Manifeste du Surrealisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) defined surrealism as “a pure psychic automatism”.   The word Surrealism was first coined by the French poet Guillaume Apollonaire when he used it in reference to the ballet Parade which contained music by Eric Satie.   The movement was formed out of Breton’s preoccupation with authors like Rimbaud, Jarry and the current ideas of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.   Breton even went so far as to join the Communist Party in 1927, but he was expelled six years later, a typical trajectory for a Surrealist in the 1920s and 30s.   By 19...