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Ui: An Epic Extravaganza

November 17, 08 //
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Brecht is the love of my life- sorry, that just came out. My love in fact runs so deep that any production of his Excellency’s work is destined to fail when set against the backdrop of my enormous, insurmountable expectations. At the close of The Abbey’s current version of ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ therefore, I was left a shell of my former self having been bludgeoned and bombarded by the brilliance of this Brechtian extravaganza, which not only exceeded my wildest hopes, but blew them completely out of the water.

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‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’: An Interview with Tom Vaughan Lawlor

November 2, 08 //
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Times are bad, prices are rising and recession is looming: sound familiar? Before you jump to any justified assumptions, this is 1930’s Chicago not just another day in Dublin. Indeed the circumstances from which ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ arises strike an almost uncanny parallel to that of the world’s current political and economic climate- this is not lost on the Tom Vaughan Lawlor. A graduate of the Trinity Drama course, an ex RADA student and most importantly the lead in The Abbey’s current production of ‘Ui’, Lawlor has a lot to talk about- we start with his time at Trinity.

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‘Happy Days’ at The Abbey

October 30, 08 //
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Lots of us know Beckett’s famous words from The Unnameable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” This is tragicomic; but it’s also arrived at, accounted for. Whatever else he’s doing, the character that says this is definitely thinking it also. In Deborah Warner’s brilliant production of Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’, the central character, Winnie, played by Fiona Shaw, does as little thinking as possible. Instead we get a more domestic tragicomedy, one that we can recognise more as part of our own everyday happy days. Because the play’s strength is to see that our normal way of life is more like the inverse of Beckett’s famous formula: “I’ll go on! (I can’t go on.)”

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Delirium: Defying all logic

October 20, 08 //
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Delirium is Enda Walsh’s extreme reinterpretation of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, a hybrid of obscene puppetry, surreal dance, provocative animation and sudden song that envelop the sensibilities of an audience and transport them to a horrorscape of a family dynamic that demands collapse. The overall projection of play is the destruction of that which is too far beyond us to attain- the persual of disinterested lovers, disinterested fathers, and disintegrating spirituality.
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Romeo and Juliet rediscovered at the Abbey

September 8, 08 //
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While it could easily be suggested that the familiar tale of Romeo and Juliet has been done to death, Jason Byrne clearly begs to differ as he brings the play into its first ever full length production at the Abbey. His difference of opinion however, does not appear to stem from the same old platitudes that we continually hear about Shakespeare’s most famous play, such as love is timeless, their love is eternal and so it never goes out of fashion. Rather his fascination with the play emerges from his assertion that there are elements of the play that have been ignored or forgotten, that have been lost in its familiarisation.
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