New Arrivals make for great drama

Have you ever spent any time in a house that was lived in by a diverse group of immigrants? Have you ever wondered what life is like for the Roma, the Africans, the eastern European who are living in what used to be one of the most homogeneous places in Europe? I saw Arrivals last …

Can’t Forget About You … or David Ireland

I was at David Ireland’s uproarious play Can’t Forget About You at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast on Thursday night and it was even better the second time around. The audience, which included comedienne Victoria Wood, were rolling in the aisles in a story where Stevie (Declan Rodgers), a 25-year-old Belfast boy falls in love with …

Dunne scores

Billboard posters were torn from their moorings, flags strained on poles, branches waved like a furious Italian, hats rolled down the street – yes, the force of nature that is Niamh Dunne was in town today to play as part of the Out to Lunch festival in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. Limerick-born Niamh, best-known as a …

Petunia and Mórga

Belfast city of music  sound like a NITB soundbite but there is a lot of truth in it. Moving on Music has been breaking musical glass ceilings for ages now with bands that might not be on everyone’s lips but with amongst people with a sense of adventure and wonderfully eclectic tastes in music, they …

Mixed Marriage

  The Lyric Theatre has unearthed a forgotten gem to begin its Tales of the City series. The St John Ervine play Mixed Marriage, running at the Lyric Theatre until 23 February, deals with Belfast’s sectarian history (and therefore, sadly, its present) and is set at the time of the  1907 Dock Strike but the …

Zoe Conway and John McIntyre

While the blades of a police helicopter whirled noisily in the grey skies above the Black Box, inside was a thing of beauty and light. Belfast has long been a bipolar city and Saturday showed both sides of its character. Outside, loyalist rioters were throwing petrol bombs, stones and fireworks at police with reports too of …

The Playboy of Armagh

  The Playboy of the Western World – what’s the point? This was probably an impudent first question to ask someone who had been expending blood, sweat and tears preparing for a run of the John Millington Synge’s classic at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre but in a country which arguably relies overmuch on getting out the …

The Plough and the Stars

  If Sean O’Casey is up in Socialist heaven, he is probably looking down at Ireland and saying “I told you so. Have ye not seen The Plough and the Stars?” Well, the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Plough and the Stars is in Belfast until Saturday this week before continuing its tour and the …

Songs that scare children …

Who’d have thought that death was so life-enhancing. Other people’s deaths of course, fictional people at that and creatures whose often grizzly ends have been wrapped up in a shroud of melody and sung for the entertainment of all God’s chillun. And out of that ménage has grown Cathy Davey’s Songs to Scare Children (but …