Stage & Screen

Chris Aylmer's Situation

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 13:33:54 +0100

Chris describes ‘The Situation Is’ as a short film ‘'The Situation Is ' is based on Jack and Charlie, two small-time criminals sent to deliver a package to a particular location. On arrival they discover a dead body and a large amount of cash. Jack's lack of communication in informing Charlie what the package actually is leads to an unlikely confrontation. Amidst much clumsiness and confusion the pair struggle to complete the task they originally thought so simple’.&nb...

Something Borrowed . . .Something Blue: New Voices at the Abbey Theatre.

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:46:59 +0100

Aideen Howard is Director of the Abbey Literary Department since 2006. She is responsible for overall development, commissioning and generation of new work for the Abbey and Peacock stages, while also tasked with animating the Abbey repertoire, striving to find that balance between new work and reinterpretations of past Abbey plays.

Howard set up the New Playwrights Programme (NPP) in 2008 out of frustration resulting from the high quality of the unsolicited scripts that were arrivin...

Damian Kearney and his Flamboyant Bird

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:23:12 +0100

The Flamboyant Bird and his writing style owe their origins to Damian’s childhood in Cork. He revealed, "I began with where I grew up in Cork - even that took a few hours to identify as a good starting point. And I had always found it funny to try and get my grammar "wrong" on purpose, so that was one place I found I could easily think in a slightly original way. This led to my writing in a Chorus/Conscience character, Notboddy, who speaks a bit oddly. Helen Norton plays Notboddy in the s...

Unspoken: Writing Satire with Gerry Stembridge

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:22:22 +0100

Praise for Unspoken

UNSPOKEN - A tale of Ireland in the sixties. ‘Full of human warmth and social detail . . . . Unspoken is about the arrival of modernity, new Ireland versus old . . . [Stembridge] is reminding us that the larger moods of history begin in the small moods of individual moments. And he has done an excellent job of capturing both.’ IRISH TIMES

‘Gerry Stembridge is an outstanding, if somewhat unacknowledged, Irish artist . . . Anyone interested ...

The Smaller Whispers: Talking Madness and Movies with Terry McMahon PART II

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:16:39 +0100

Two similar incidents happened in Dublin around the same time that provoked my own evaluation of the class system in Ireland. There was a gang attack outside a nightclub in Dublin where a kid, Brian Murphy, got killed. When we hear of phrases like “gang attack” in Ireland we equate it with bad haircuts, tracksuits and working class accents. Four educated Blackrock College students beat Brian Murphy to death. The standard laws that apply to the aforementioned working class were suddenl...

The Smaller Whispers: Talking Madness and Movies with Terry McMahon PART I

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:22:46 +0100

Describe your movie Charlie Casanova in a sentence.

A ruling class sociopath kills a working class girl in a hit-and-run and uses a deck of playing cards to determine his fate.

Was this your first film in SxSW?

It’s not just my first film at SXSW, Charlie Casanova is my first film anywhere. SXSW was the world premiere and I attended all three screenings.

Tell us a little about your background?

I’m from a small town in Ireland and estranged from my family for some time....

Perseverance and Self-belief with Ferdia Mac Anna

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:09:21 +0100

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

I always knew. I used to draw picture book stories as a kid. Man from UNCLE or Have Gun will Travel or James Bond inspired fiction. Then I began to write prose fiction and got a bit of praise from my English teacher and it all went to my head and made me think - hang on, I can do this. Really do it. Even when I was in rock bands in the 70s and 80s, I kept a diary, which is, alas, un-publishable but a good source of, how should one put it, let's say...

Going Places with Miriam Gallagher

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:32:18 +0100

At school, Miriam excelled at English and Latin but found Maths was not exactly her forte, "I was eventually allowed to abandon the torture of algebraic equations and obscure riddles about trains leaving stations at 10 o'clock and confusingly arriving before they set out, or so it seemed to be to me." Her real passions always lay in the English language and literature, although she was often scolded for sticking long words into her school work, "It really annoyed me as I had taken the tro...

"A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament." Oscar Wilde

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:13:38 +0100

From Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, to Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, George Moore, and Sean O'Casey, Irish playwrights have a tradition of excellence that is still with us today. Writers such as Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Denis Johnston, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness,and John B. Keane have all made their mark on the world stage.

Following in this rich literary tradition, scree...

Each Day is a Blank Page: Will Govan meets Shane Connaughton

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:01:31 +0100

It is a tradition in the town of Redhills to welcome back locals who’ve done good – priests returning from the missions, winning football teams – and one that they continued when the local band paraded through the town in Connaughton’s honour after the making of The Playboys. ‘That was the height of my life, really,’ Connaughton says.

Back in 1958 the young Connaughton set off to Hornchurch in Essex with the idea of becoming a pilot, forgetting all about Ireland as soon as he stepped...