THE WATERFORD COLLECTION REVIEW

June 24, 2014 / gorgeousgael / Leave a comment

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THE MUNSTER EXPRESS 24^th June 2014

ARTS & THEATRE COLUMN

COLLECTION OF PLAYS REVIEW Tom O’Brien

The Co Waterford-born playwright and novelist, Tom O’Brien has just had another successful three week run with another new play, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Poles, in London’s Pentameters Theatre. The play despite its provocative title with echoes of a time when ‘No Irish’ might have given it a London context, but this play is set in an Irish town. I was not able to attend its premiere, but Alan Cliff the (up to last year) Waterford-based playwright went along and gave me his considered opinion. Alan is studying theatre in Manchester.

He described the play as complex in structure with at least four aspects overlapping; the return of a son-in-law, who has married an Aboriginal Australian and this brings out themes of racism and bigotry; a revelation of another characters bi-sexuality; the introduction of drugs into the family via a hostage situation; the revelation of an illicit family member’s affair. The London reviews suggested some confusion with themes of racism, immigration, identity and a longing for the past, spiced with sexual repression.

To coincide with this production O’Brien has brought out a collection of three plays, all with Waterford connections, with the title, The Waterford Collection, and its three plays show the detail and proven ability of the author to forge a career for himself. I still find it hard to understand why no Irish or indeed no Waterford theatre group have as yet staged one of his plays. Stagemad Theatre Company were to do so, but it never came to rehearsal stage.

The cover is impressive with three pictures of the new bridge. The first play Queenie is a 5-hander and tells a poignant story of Victoria Dwan who has been institutionalised, and is now being ‘released’ back into the community. This features open-air stage dancing at Granagh Cross, as she wheels around an indigent accordion player in a pram. This seems so surreal and Beckettian, with a wild theatricality. Queenie is a troubled soul who has second-sight. The play is beautifully ‘threaded’ with music and songs.

The second play, Money From America, is a much darker play about two brothers and a farm. Lardy has spent a lifetime toiling on the Co Waterford farm for little reward, and his older brother Jack returns from America and sees the farm as his rightful inheritance. This conflict involves two female partners, who would not be out of place in a McDonagh play, and it has a dark and dangerous resolution.

The third play, Johnjo, is a one-hander, a monologue set in the late seventies, and is a study of Johnjo McGrath from cradle to grave, from the Comeragh’s to wartime England and the dark underbelly of the construction industry. This is a harsh unrelenting play, but it held my attention all the way, and it is filled with songs and music that is as nostalgic as it is ironic.

Such was the success of the recent Pentameters production that they will present another Tom O’Brien play in London in July, about the women in Brendan Behan’s life, and still no Waterford production. Liam Murphy

available @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent

Self Doubts and Life’s Stories

June 23, 2014June 23, 2014 / gorgeousgael / Leave a comment

You got your MoeJoe working MichaelJohns! ‘Cromwell’ was a fun production. We still hope to tour Ireland with it – following the Cromwellian trail, as it were – if we can raise the finance. The saddest news is that our wonderful director of the show, Owen Nolan, died earlier this year. A brilliant actor/director/musician. He will be missed.

ps. I was looking for the ‘top shelf writer’ and then realised it was me you were talking about! With flattery like that you could well end up playing the violin in Cromwell’s New Model Army!

MoeJoe Musing

I love the thought that sometimes our best jokes turn into our life’s stories, and turn out to have been our best ideas. When I was in High School, I used to laugh when people said things and then their lives turned on an axis and they had to eat their words, in good ways. Well, my own life’s story and direction has taken one or two of those amusing turns, too. My miraculous marriage, my beautiful kids, my aspirations. I joked about all of these at one point or another in my life, cynical in my perspective, doubting it all. I doubted that a person like me would ever find and win the heart of a woman, and then she came along and won mine, held in still-willing thrall for more than 20 years. I doubted that I would ever be a father. She has given me two children…

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HAMPSTEAD GIRLS

June 23, 2014 / gorgeousgael / 1 Comment

HAMPSTEAD GIRLS

A better class of person

Adorns the Hampstead

Red-bricks and glass

Whether lounging in the chic-lit bars

Or just lolling in the grass

Hampstead ladies in particular

Ride their bikes with elegance

And sip their foamy cappuccinos

With practised nonchalance.

On the pavements and in the cafes

There are no sightings

Of the culturally bereft

Even down-and-outs

Lean quite boldly to the left.

John Betjeman could not complain

Or call on Hampstead Heath

For bombs to rain

Nor suffer scorn like poor old Slough

Who he had deemed

Not fit for any humans now

Those air-conditioned bright canteens

In Hampstead’s glades will not be seen

And there’s plenty grass to graze his cow

Hampstead Heath’s as green as Ireland now!

my latest poetry collection – 67 – is now available @ http://www.tinhuttalespublishers.co.uk/67/

BRENDAN BEHAN’S WOMEN ON RADIO

June 22, 2014 / gorgeousgael / Leave a comment

BRENDAN BEHAN’S WOMEN @Pentameters theatre ,Heath St, Hampstead NW3 – 3rd – 20th july.

listen to radio interview on link below

THE SILVER TASSIE

June 21, 2014June 21, 2014 / gorgeousgael / Leave a comment

I Finally saw THE SILVER TASSIE at The National Theatre last night. What a play, and what a performance! O’Casey’s great war play – or should that be anti-war play – has finally found its natural home.
review:
Act one is set in a Dublin pub, where the victorious football team is celebrating their victory in the cup – the Silver Tassie of the title. Most of them are home on leave from the trenches and are having one last celebration before heading back to France.
Act two, whic…h is set in what appears to be a bombed-out Monastery, drips with symbolism, and the realism of act one has been replaced by a fantastical second one. The soldiers, battered and beaten by their experiences, cower among the ruins,trying to make sense of all the madness, seeming at times to be worshipping the huge gun which pokes its nose out at one corner of the stage. Whether the inference is that religion is as bad as war,or that it causes war, I couldn’t make my mind up,but that there is a clear link between them is certainly implied. The booming and flashing was quite alarming at times, never moreso than at the end of the act, when the huge gun is trundled centre stage, loaded and then pointed directly at the audience, resulting in another almighty bang and a flash that had me seeing stars momentarily.
Acts three and four deal with the aftermath; act three with with the gassed, the shell-shocked, the maimed and the blind trying to recover some kind of normality in hospital; act four at the celebratory dance at the football club where the story began. Here the wheelchair-bound footballer who had won The silver Tassie for the team and his blinded friend finally realise that for them life will never be the same. The ending is surreal, several girls dancing with their ‘scarecrow’ partners, falling down and picking them up,falling down and picking them up…

Brilliantly done and great writing. 5*****

BOOK REVIEWS ON THE STREET

June 21, 2014June 21, 2014 / gorgeousgael / Leave a comment

Homeless Bookworm

Philani is a homeless man in his mid-twenties in Johannesburg, South Africa. Many people in his situation simply stand at corners begging. And that can sometimes meet basic needs…but it certainly doesn’t set a person apart or motivate people walking or driving by to donate.

But Philani does it differently. Every day he takes his ever-changing library to a different corner and sets up a sort of impromptu literary discussion group and bookshop.

For anyone interested, he will review his books and then you can buy one from him. In this way, he raises money for himself and his homeless friends as well as spreading happiness.
Philani says;

‘Reading is not harmful. There’s no such thing as harmful knowledge. This thing is only going to make you a better person.’

And if he has a kids book you’re interested in, it’s free, so that you can give it to a child.

Ride on ,Philani my friend!

See all my books for sale on amazon @ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tom-OBrien/e/B0034OIGOQ/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1388083522&sr=1-2-ent