The Engine

  INTO THE WOODS MUSIC AND LYRICS BY STEPHEN SONDHEIM BOOK BY JAMES LAPINE DIRECTED BY CAMERON MENZIES At the Lyric Theatre, Belfast On the 19 th February 2022   Storm Eunice had just about reached Belfast when I ventured out on a wet and bleak Friday evening to see the Lyric Theatre’s new production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods.   I had already seen the film version but had not been impressed probably because there were too many actors of the kind that are famous for being famous and who could not sing very well.   The cast of the Lyric’s production were better singers and the production benefitted from a simpler, more economical approach to set design than what had seemed to be an overproduced, bloated Hollywood ensemble affair.   Anna Kendrick and James Corden were notably disappointing in the film version. In the Lyric’s version there was one set which was unchanged throughout the entire production.   Wooden logs make a ...

  Alfred Wallis at The Mac, Belfast on the 29 th of January 2022   On Saturday I went to see an exhibition of the work of Alfred Wallis at The Mac, Belfast.   Wallis was a mariner, a native of St Ives, born on the eve of the Battle of Sevastopol at the height of the Crimean war in 1855.   He was a sailor and fisherman on trawlers and deep-sea fishing boats, and these, as well as port landscapes, were the main subjects of his art.  Wallis was diminutive, possibly only 4 foot 6 and his origins were in Penzance.  He was never, apparently, accepted by the natives of St Ives. Like many primitive artists, Wallis began painting later in life, at the age of 67 after the death of his wife.   She happened to be 23 years older than Wallis and their relationship was seen by one of Wallis's earliest biographers as 'Oedipal'.   When he retired from his life as a sailor, he became a rag and bone man and created many of his artworks using the cardboar...

X’ntigone ( Antigone by Sophocles in a new version by Darren Murphy at the Mac on the fourth of February 2022)   The need for theatre was evident on a cold Friday evening in February when a full house sat down to watch Darren Murphy’s new version of Sophocles’s play Antigone .   Since we have been living through a pandemic the play does not shy away from connecting its subject matter to contemporary events.   The city of Thebes is engulfed in plague when Sophocles’s trilogy begins.   Oedipus has gone against nature, violated social taboos of patricide and incest, it is implied, and only his expulsion from Thebes will return the city to normality.   Sophocles fashioned the story of Oedipus from myth.   Oedipus was the son of Laius, who was in turn a descendent of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes.   Cadmus founded Thebes by killing a dragon, sewing its teeth, and thereby creating a race of men, the Spartoi , who helped him to build the city.   T...