The Engine

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 Engli...

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 ...

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 De...

Matisse: Cut Outs: Tate Modern: London: August 2014   Henri Matisse’s (1869-1954) cut outs are pictorial icons of the Twentieth-Century avant-garde but this exhibition explains their evolution in terms of the context of Matisse’s ageing and declining health. In a sense Matisse’s rejection of painting was an aesthetic choice but since he was primarily a realist painter cut outs offered Matisse a new direction. Obviously they allowed him to re-assemble his images, to test out the composition, allowing him to re-establish his images and their contexts. However, cut outs were also a practical response to the artist’s loss of mobility which had been caused by a colostomy, (a medical cut out). Matisse found novel ways of overcoming declining health and immobility. Yet Matisse, the great rival of Picasso and along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp a key innovator in modern art, was creatively vital and energetic to the very end of his life.   Matisse’s initial attempts at...

KASIMIR MALEVICH AT THE TATE MODERN  Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1879 to Polish parents, Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) could hardly be said to be Russian so unsurprisingly his initial attempts at art sought to establish his personal surroundings and then his”Russian” identity. Malevich lived through a time of incredible turmoil and rapid change in Russia. The serfs had only just been emancipated in 1861, a liberal constitution was still a dream and an ineffectual Duma (Parliament) largely served the Tsar's interests. Opponents of autocracy included Liberals, Social Revolutionaries, Social Democrats and Anarchists. Some of these groups had indeed given up democratic politics in the face of intense repression on the part of the Tsarist regime and had begun to embrace political violence and assassination as legitimate forms of dissent. Malevich represented a new class of artist revolutionaries who were rapidly outpacing both anti and pro democracy groupings. He recognised that his task w...

Jamie McKendrick: Out There: Faber & Faber: 2012  Readers who like poetry and, more specifically, those who like the poetry of Jamie McKendrick won't be disappointed by this volume. Others seeking a more restless, engaged voice which seems to be reaching out to the reader and the world may need to look elsewhere. Its not the language that the author deploys or the esoteric knowledge and polyglot foreign languages that are all amassed with some panache that will disappoint because, in some superficial sense, Out There , is a pretty persuasive volume of poetry. The language is dense, thought-provoking and multiple layers of references cleverly arranged cannot detract from the author's efforts. The trouble with this book is the author's dearth of anything much to talk about. In a poem like Psychostasia which seems to meaningfully sum up the futile stasis of the poem, a cathedral of language replete with references to Christianity, Classical mythology and the Ancien...

THE GREAT WAR OBSERVED IN ITALY AND IRELAND: FROM THE SOMME TO THE PIAVE 1914 - 2014  Today, Sunday 2nd March 2014, there was a table tennis tournament in Meolo, a town half-way between here and Venice, so I set out on the bike about 1.30 but didn't arrive until just before 3pm even though Meolo is only about 15km from here. The tournament was already finished, in fact my club, San Dona, had already gone but it wasn't a problem because I had enjoyed the bike ride. I cycled on the road past Musile di Piave and then turned left towards the mountains which were visible even though it was a dull, overcast yet dry day. Yesterday had been incredibly wet, torrential downpours and I had to endure a good soaking on the way back from college. I turned left and cycled inland to Fossalta di Piave. At last I had found the town where Ernest Hemingway sustained his wounds. There wasn't much in Fossalta, just some houses, some basic services and a small railway station. The countryside a...