The Engine

Alien: Covenant (director Ridley Scott, starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston) This seems to be the most interesting entry in the Alien franchise after the first film but coming rather belatedly when the director Ridley Scott is on the verge of becoming an octogenarian. Obviously at that age people begin to consider their own mortality and the script is much more introspective than previous instalments except for Prometheus .  There are references to high art such as Michaelangelo, Wagner and P.B.Shelley but they are somehow integrated into a script which is both insightful and hollow.  The script, however, is the main issue with the film.  Visually Covenant offers us some new and intriguing sights but the sound design (I hesitate to use the term soundtrack because that isn’t quite right) is the feature that sets the film apart.  A dull rhythmic thud accompanies the action along with some intriguing leitmotifs (obviously, Wagner is referenced seemin...

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by OSCAR WILDE at the THE MAC, BELFAST On Tuesday 11 th of April, 2017 Team Director                         Lisa May Musical Director          Matthew Reeve Designer                         Diana Ennis Lighting Designer         Zia Bergin-Holly (Irish Times Theatre award winner - Best Lighting Design) Cast Lady Bracknell                             Ross Anderson-Doherty Miss Prism                 ...

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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      ...

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 c...

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 exhibitio...

SICILY: CULTURE AND CONQUEST at the BRITISH MUSEUM   "So scatter brilliance over the island which Zeus Lord of Olympus gave to Persephone and, his hair falling forward with his nod, promised that he would raise up fertile Sicily with its high and prosperous cities to be pre-eminent on the plentiful earth! Pindar (c522-443BC) First Nemean Ode Between 800 and 700BC the early Greeks and Phoenicians began to colonise the island of Sicily and by 734 BC the Greeks had established their first settlement at Naxos.   Earlier peoples had lived on the island but little certain is known of them and the entire early period mostly consists of legend.   It is known that the early peoples valued the volcanic rock obsidian, obtained from the volcano that dominates the eastern half of the island, Mount Etna, but later peoples imported metal for making weapons.   Greeks began leaving the mainland to seek colonies under the pressure of population expansion.   Sic...