The Irish Times

Carr transfers Woolfe’s internal conflict to the stage with a little help from Derbhle Crotty. In a summer house on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by the eternal wrest of ocean waves, a crushingly disappointed boy has recently been put to bed. His protective mother stares at a lighthouse across the bay, dreading his recollection […]

Garry Hynes directs The Cherry Orchard, a play she says that’s still of the moment. Power comes in many forms. There is physical power, inherited power, seized power. There is the extraordinary and frequently unexpected power of strong feelings, and the insidious power of unhealthy ways of being that drag us into decline. Add to

From her irreverent early work to ‘volunteering her breasts’ for DruidShakespeare and on to her fresh take on O’Casey’s Juno, Crotty has never been one for convention. Many actors can tell you about the history of their characters, the backstories assembled from clues in the text, educated guesses or creative leaps of the imagination. But

The director’s extraordinary take on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, reworked by Mark O’Rowe and starring Aisling O’Sullivan, Derbhle Crotty and Marty Rea, feels like a sweeping epic as a whole, but moment by moment it feels intimate and detailed. The most obvious thing about Garry Hynes’s extraordinary production of Shakespeare’s Henry plays is that it is

Druid carve four Shakespeare plays into an epic of regal succession, and drag the kings down with the people where they belong. There’s nothing quite as beautiful, or as torturous, as the crown of England we see in Druid’s remarkable staging of Shakespeare’s Henriad, its four plays carved into a lean and propulsive telling by

Acting is a profession, a job, but it’s also a compulsion says Derbhle Crotty. DERBHLE CROTTY speaks like a writer, with a rich, poetic turn of phrase. When I mention this she is mortified, apologising for “the state of my metaphors” with an embarrassed laugh. But she goes on to draw a constructive comparison between

“Hearts are trumpery?” inquires the German tutor Herr Schaff at the beginning of this delicately amusing and forlorn exploration of love. Of course, Schaff, considering a hand of cards, doesn’t quite know what he’s saying. For him the Russian language is an elusive and slippery character – beautifully performed, in Brian Friel’s 1992 version of

There are exceptions to the rule that young dramatists don’t really find their voice until a first play has been staged. Christian O’Reilly, whose full début, The Good Father, is Druid’s contribution to the Galway Arts Festival, is not one of them. His play is a voyage of discovery, as much for the writer as

With The Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh made the most brilliant debut in modern Irish theatre since Tom Murphy and Noel O’Donoghue’s On the Outside 1959, a parallel given added poignancy by O’Donoghue’s untimely death in the summer. McDonagh, like Murphy, seemed to emerge fully formed with a miraculous gift for dialogue, an eerie command

There were many memorable portrayals in 1996, and an astonishing fusion of over 100 actors into one seamless ensemble performance in Silviu Purcarete’s recreation of Les Danaides, by Aeschylus, in a basketball arena in Tallaght. But here I must focus on the individual actors named below, who shone so brightly. Donal McCann returned in his