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The Abbey curtains up second in the curious case of the duelling Sean O’Casey productions for the 1916 centenary, but their rendition of his 1926 provocation surpasses the Gate’s Juno .

O’Casey’s final Abbey play depicts the Rising exploding the lives of the extended Clitheroe family and their tenement neighbours. The socially ambitious Nora Clitheroe (Kate Stanley Brennan) is cordially disliked by her neighbours Mrs Gogan (Janet Moran) and Bessie Burgess (Eileen Walsh). Voluble dislike exists within the Clitheoroe clan as preening Citizen Army peacock Uncle Peter (James Hayes) is tormented by the Young Covey (Ciaran O’Brien) for his ignorance of true socialism, and ridiculous garb. Ignoring these political spats is Jack Clitheroe (Ian-Lloyd Anderson) who resigned from the Citizen Army on being passed over. However, when it’s revealed he was promoted, but Nora hid the letter from him, Jack furiously leaves her to join a monster rally whose Pearse-derived rhetoric stirs the patriotism of even the disreputable Fluther (David Ganly). The Rising sets the scene for looting and Nora’s undoing…

English director Sean Holmes has spoken of how he approached the text as if it was a Shakespeare play, not bound by its period. This aesthetic is evident everywhere, from Jon Bausor’s intimidating steel staircase with multiple landings, to Catherine Fay’s modern dress costumes including hardhats, via Paul Keogan’s disruptive lights which render the Figure in the Window a glare from a big screen in a pub, to Philip Stewart’s thumping music between acts, and it pays off in spades. Needless to say this is all very much ‘Not Chekhov’ to reference the multiple audience walkouts back in October at a similarly radical take on The Cherry Orchard. But it works, and works gloriously. Consumptive Mollser (Mahnoor Saad) singing the national anthem at the start of the show (in a transparent bid to bring the audience to their feet at every performance) before coughing blood; Fluther, Mrs Gogan, and Mrs Burgess all directly cajoling and heckling the audience; Fluther robbing cans and puncturing one which sprays the audience before he desperately tries to drink it hands free – all these touches bring a Shakespearean vividness and rambunctiousness that casts these characters in a new light. Fluther’s drinking, whoring, and disdain of piety and patriotism becomes Falstaffian, Hotspur and Lady Percy hover over the abrupt parting of the Clitheroes, and King Lear shimmers over the finale’s madness and dead bodies, not least because O’Casey’s final kick in the teeth does in his more abrasive version of Cordelia.

The Plough and the Stars continues its run at the Abbey Theatre until the 23 rd of April.

Have you read Jenersky’s Thesis on the Origin, Development, and Consolidation of the Evolutionary Idea of the Proletariat ?

Orson Welles is being feted anew for the centenary of his birth, and he even projected his personality from beyond the grave with the 2013 publication of My Lunches with Orson. Peter Biskind edited long-neglected tapes of Welles’ weekly LA lunches with fellow director Henry Jaglom to produce a book of rip-roaring table talk. But having Welles captured on tape gives rise to an unsettling thought about his late career… Here’s a teaser for my HeadStuff piece on Welles.

Some academics are now stressing the performative aspect of interviews. When writers give interviews, what they say in them can’t be neatly filed with what they write in letters or diaries, because an interview is a public dialogue not a private monologue, and two self-conscious performances are colliding for the sake of publicity. Indeed Welles requested that Jaglom tape their conversations for posterity, so there is undoubtedly an added dimension of self-conscious showing off on his part. There is also the further understanding that a good raconteur is not hobbled unnecessarily by facts or consistency. So Humphrey Bogart is a coward who only starts fights in places where he knows the waiters will intervene in one story, and a man of true courage and admirable integrity in another story – for the sake of the story.

Click here to read the full article on how Welles’ areas of expertise multiply, how he indisputably talks nonsense about Verdi, and how this need to be feted as a renaissance man may have scuppered his chances of a HBO show.

Brace yourselves! Michael Shannon has been confirmed to attend International Literature Festival Dublin on Friday 22nd May to participate in Bodies That Can Never Tire. the Festival’s celebration of William Butler Yeats’ 150th Birthday.

“That he follow with desire/Bodies that can never tire”

In WB Yeats’ great play, An Baile’s Strand. Cuchulainn is asked to take an oath to defend the country. Against his will he agrees and sings the oath, including the lines above. Being half man, half god, Cuchulainn himself is a ‘body that can never tire’, but in these lines Yeats focuses on the artist’s inner drive to satisfy dreams, visions and supernatural impulses. These ‘bodies that can never tire’ are different for everybody, and fuel ambition, obsession, and revolution. They are central to artistic creation, and the stuff of ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’.

A unique celebration of the legacy of Ireland’s great national poet, Bodies That Can Never Tire will enchant in the beautiful surroundings of the historic Smock Alley Theatre at 6pm on Friday 22 nd May, with proceeds from the event going to Temple Street Children’s Hospital.

A specially commissioned piece interwoven with music, poetry, and spoken word, Bodies That Can Never Tire will showcase Irish actors Clark Middleton (Birdman ), Sean Doyle (Fair City ), Aoife Duffin (What Richard Did ), Aoibhin Garrihy (The Fall ), Lorcan Cranitch (King Lear. The House ), and Maeve Fitzgerald (Gate’s Pride & Prejudice ). Spoken word contributions will come from Katie Donovan (Rootling: New & Selected Poems ), Deirdre Kinahan (Spinning ), Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy ), with music from composer Tom Lane (HARP | a river cantata ), Songs in the Key of D choir, folk trio The Evertides, and hip hop artist Lethal Dialect.

And of course the star attraction is the spoken word contribution of Michael Shannon, a man whose name has graced the top of the best acting awards lists hereabouts numerous times in the last few years. Shannon is probably best known for his turn as General Zod in Man of Steel. and his driven government agent in Boardwalk Empire. But his most productive creative partnership has likely been with writer/director Jeff Nichols on Shotgun Stories. Take Shelter. and Mud. Shannon has done acclaimed theatre work as well as explode off the big screen with snarling charisma, so the chance to see him in the flesh on the Dublin stage is a rare one and to be grasped with both hands.

Tickets to all events are available online via www.ilfdublin.com

Box Office Filmbase, Curved St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 (11am-6pm Mon-Sat, 12-5pm Sun)

T: +353 (0) 1 687 7977

International Literature Festival Dublin features over 90 events in 19 venues over 9 days. Now in its 17 th year the Festival has grown to become one of the most prestigious events in Ireland’s literary calendar. This year attendees include Irvine Welsh, Jon Ronson, Paul Muldoon, Anne Enright, Alexander McCall Smith, Anne Applebaum, Elif Shafak and Oliver Jeffers.

The Man in Two Pieces. a new play starring Stephen Brennan and Gerard Adlum, premieres in Theatre Upstairs this week. It marks the beginning of a year-long residency in Theatre Upstairs for rising company Fast Intent (Nessa Matthews, Sarah Finlay, Gerard Adlum). I talked to actor and playwright Gerard Adlum ahead of his work’s debut.

Here’s a taster of the full interview which will shortly appear on HeadStuff.org :

Q:The Man in Two Pieces premieres Tuesday April 7th in Theatre Upstairs. How would you describe your play about a young boy’s experiences with a ramshackle vaudeville troupe in 1920s Ireland?

A: I think it’s bittersweet, elegiac, a love-song to a lost way of life. Like The Boy in the play, the audience should get caught up in this whirlwind of a show.

It appeals, I hope, to the romantic inside all of us. Plus, it’s got a jittery strongman and a very serious hypnotist.

Q: Fast Intent take their name from King Lear’s first speech, their debut show was Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes. and since then they’ve performed Macbeth and a Pinter double bill. Are Shakespeare and Pinter then the greatest theatrical influences, or are there other playwrights (or indeed directors) that are equally important: both to you as a playwright, and to the other members of the company?

A: Those two writers are, for me and most people really, about as good as it gets. There’s not a day goes by that one of their lines doesn’t pop into my head. I think all of us in the company hold them in high regard. There’s nothing worse, as an actor or director, than working with a poor script. You’re hamstrung from the beginning. You end up trying to hide the play, not celebrate it. Fast Intent like words. Pictures are important too, yes. But it begins with the written word.

Q: Fast Intent, apart from a Culture Night series of historical monologues in Dublin Castle, haven’t tackled Irish subjects. Was it important to begin the residency in Theatre Upstairs with a play set in Ireland?

A: It’s not something we were particularly conscious of at all. At the end of 2014 we did discuss certain themes we’d maybe like to explore during the residency, the notion of “Irishness” was one of them. Some of the others were “misfits and outsiders” and “togetherness”. This play does address all of that.

The Man in Two Pieces is now running at Theatre Upstairs.

Actor Steven Berkoff returns to writing verse drama for the first time in decades with this entertaining if slight production.

Berkoff is an actor recovering from hostile reviews of his first outing as a playwright. Licking his wounds, he is comforted by the kind words of his playwright friend played by Jay Benedict, who insists he is a fantastic actor and the critics could not forgive his presumption. And the mutual flattery escalates even further when their actress friend played by Andree Bernard arrives, to be told what a great artiste she is; even if she is understudying a soap star on the West End. And then things kick off into not so much a lament as a tirade, at the state of the West End, the cult of theatre directors, the arrogance of playwrights, and, above all, the agony of the actor’s life and the importance of what they do night after night; for themselves and for the audience.

That might sound a bit off-putting, but this splenetic hour is filled with humour and self-awareness. Berkoff knows that an actor turned playwright moaning about revivals in the West End, and how directors like them because they get a cut of the proceeds, will seem dangerously like personal carping by Berkoff himself. And so he turns it up to 11: we get Berkoff moving himself to tears over the West End being a morgue; “Poor Chekhov dragged out again, leave the poor bloody sod alone”; full of clueless screen actors; “If you don’t remember your lines you do it fifty more bloody times. But in theatre there is only one take, and it goes on all night, every night, until you get it right!”; while dedicated actors like Berkoff and Bernard are left on the scrapheap, abandoned even by Benedict.

Berkoff’s use of verse is not like Joss Whedon’s use of rhyme in his musicals. You’re rarely waiting for a pay-off from a Berkoff line, instead it sounds like normal speech with the occasional unexpected rhyme. And, performed on a bare stage, with only an ornate chair for decoration, the focus is on the physical theatre Berkoff perfected after studying at the Lecoq school in Paris; so well displayed in Ballyturk some weeks back by a younger veteran of that school, Mikel Murfi. Imaginary cigarettes are lit with hands where the thumb waggles for the flame of a lighter. Othello, Macbeth, and Lear come to life for a few lines by dint of a change in posture and tone of voice. Berkoff ages himself by stooping and playing deaf. Indeed by the end Berkoff, age 77, was drenched in sweat…

The Actor’s Lament is a late and almost disappointingly short work from a master, but, while his age precludes the full powerhouse style of his youth, his physical theatre is still to be revered.

The Actor’s Lament continues its run at the Gaiety Theatre until September 6th.

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