155 stories by "Chris McCormack"
If you've ever read Crime and Punishment now's your chance to get sweets pelted at you by none other than Dostoyevsky…
Drinking a crate of beer would loosen the tongue on most people but not the two women performers in Spitfire Theatre's production, part of the Fringe's Cze…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince lends more than enough colourful characters for Ezra LeBanks's jovial adaptation, produced by Californian physical theatre company Curbside. If …
When Los Angeles-based director Lars Jan unmasked the public intellectual Paul Abacus as a fictional creation, were any of us surprised (the name is a bit on the nose)? This project lit up t…
"I'm gonna sing you a sad song, Susie". The sombre lines of Kenny Rogers's break-up anthem float over our arrival at Fringe warrior Penny Arcade's (Susana Ventura) new show for Soho Theatre.…
The brainchild of Belgian musicians Jonas Vermeulen and Boris Vanseveren, backed by powerhouse producer Richard Jordan, this coming-of-age performance is played in an electric fusing of musi…
Imagine the lush trees and glistening waterways of the Garden of Eden replaced by a pathetic plot where the hearty Eve (Hannah Ringham), eagerly hobbling in one heel, and average Adam (Simon…
Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada's play was prompted into existence by the Fukushima nuclear disaster but the Bristol-based FellSwoop Theatre, in its poise and music, acts as if to inter…
"You got a lotta nerve, Jethro Compton, riding into this here town with not one but three shows under your belt." The quips of the saloon are contagious after Blood Red Moon, one part of Com…
It's time someone re-discovered the half-sunken caravan of Hester Swaine, the Traveller woman at the wild heart of Marina Carr's play from 1998. On first look, Monica Frawley's set for the A…
What explains the unwavering devotion of Emer, wife of Irish legendary hero Cúchulainn, whose husband was a known philanderer? In W.B. Yeats's play, first staged in 1922, she even invites…
What does it say of Lessness, a short prose penned in 1969 by Samuel Beckett, that its 60 lines were arranged at random, plucked one-by-one from a container? A structure inferred by chan…
With every strike of a match, Sal, the mannerly mother in Frank McGuinness's monologue, sniffs the sulphur and observes the incalculable time it takes for the light to go out. It's a simple …
It's clear early in the Gate's new production that a band of Russian aristocrats' card-playing and watercolour painting won't relieve the terminally bored Natalya Islayev (Aislin McGuckin), …
Why adapt Ulysses " James Joyce's towering, modernist tome " for the stage? The episodic adventures of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus set on mundane 16 June 1904 don't have the compactnes…
Photo: Hazel Coonagh. On a brisk autumn night two years ago, I found in the corner of a Dublin city centre car park a lost statue of the Virgin Mary and a torn copy of the 1916 Proclamation …
The world of Tom Murphy's 1983 play is filled with music: the chimes of the church bell signalling the hours, the rhythmic whacks of a telephone switch-hook to dial a connection, and, of cou…
When Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo presented a performance at a Japanese dance festival in 1959 in which a young man copulated with a chicken and, debatably, suffocated it between his legs…
"Then, England's ground, farewell; sweet soil, adieu". The tears that fill the eyes of Derbhle Crotty's banished duke Bolingbroke convey the heart of Druid's ambitious production of Shakespe…
"Oh, Cathleen ni Houlihan, your way's a thorny way!" In director Wayne Jordan's staging of Sean O'Casey's 1923 tragicomedy, the pedlar Seumas Shields (David Ganly) mentions the mythological …
If monsters aren't real then why do we tell so many stories about them? When the menacing shadow of actor Peter Coonan stretches large across the opening of Ross Dungan's new play for the 15…
Galway Theatre Festival may have exchanged its Halloween-webbing for the temperate beginnings of May, getting its foot in the door of the festival season before anyone else, but Agustina Mu�…
Nobody wants to look like a dope. Audiences mulling over the title of Daniel MacIvor's play may suspect a pretense; what 'it' we are supposed to be 'in on'. Instead of turning confused to yo…
There's a moment in the Abbey Theatre's production of Ibsen's drama when the wearingly bored Hedda Gabbler (Catherine Walker) and recovering alcoholic Eilert Lovborg (Keith McErlean) mull on…
During the most iconic scene in the Gate Theatre's production of Romeo and Juliet, an affable Romeo (Fra Fee) paces excitedly through the seating aisles, casting his eyes towards a secluded …
