If you enjoy Irish theatre as much as I do, I hope you’ll appreciate my Dublin Theatre Reviews. I was an actor in the eighties, and, at one point in time, I had played on every professional stage in Dublin, from the Project to the Abbey, the Gate to the Gaiety, the Peacock to the Olympia. I have a Teacher’s Diploma in Speech and Drama from the London College of Music, and was elected Information Officer for Irish Actors’ Equity for a couple of years. I’ve been writing for Hot Press magazine every fortnight since 1993. Despite leaving the profession and the country that same year, I still haven’t managed to get over my love affair with this most collaborative and experiential of art forms.
Now that I’m back in town, since late 2006, I find Irish theatre still as compelling, and Irish actors still as talented, as they were back in my day. Some of them are, of course, old friends and former colleagues, but most are new to me. New writing stimulates me the most, having created roles in plays by Jim Nolan and Michael Harding, Marina Carr’s first produced play, and, most fondly, a series of plays by Tom McIntyre.
Given the choice, I would risk going to a new play over a classic, most of the time, but I’ll always try to get to see a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a Chekhov (the last not just because I’ve played on the Moscow Art Theatre stage!) I love small studio spaces, dangerous performances and brave profit-shares. I hate stage Oirishry, bad accents, safe performances, and museum theatre, but love a good panto. I am rarely impressed with cold intellectual or political pieces, wary of star vehicles, dismissive of old chestnuts put on to please the tourists, and suspicious of bourgeois attempts to portray working class life. I love theatre that is deep, dark and disturbing. But laughter is good for the soul, too. The best evenings of theatre move me to tears, the worst bore me rigid.
I would hope that my enthusiasm for a particular show is catching, and that when I don’t like a production, you’ll understand why. I’m not going to write in an academic or objective style, or pretend to be an expert on any particular playwright’s work. Having been away for 13 years, I will have missed a large body of contemporary writing, and some well-established actors are completely unknown to me. But I will try to get across my subjective experience of every performance, because for me that’s what an evening of theatre is all about. If you agree or disagree with me, then please leave a comment or two, that’s the beauty of blogging! I would love to encourage people who have not been to a theatre before to get into it, and to really challenge the notion that it’s an elitist activity. With previews and matinées, it’s possible to blow your mind for the price of a few drinks, and there’s no hangover.
At the moment, reviews of Irish theatre productions are hard to find online. Yes there are some blogs that mention Irish theatre, (here‘s a nice one in Belfast) but the only consistently readable Dublin reviews that I can find are on RTÉ Entertainment and Luke Clancy’s The Loy.
I’ve discovered that my reviews feature consistently in the top one or two results in search engines, for those seeking information about a particular show, within a day of publishing them. Indeed, the idea for writing these reviews came from the realisation that one of the most popular pages on this blog was a short personal piece I wrote about attending the opening night of Homeland at the Abbey Theatre in 2006. Without any conscious effort on my part, it is the first result you will find if you google for information about it. It made me realise that there is a real hunger for personal accounts of particular productions, not just the official publicity and/or booking information.
Hopefully, if you like my perspectives, you’ll keep tabs on my reviews by bookmarking the review page, or by subscribing to the RSS feed. Or if you like, you can sign up to receive a short email notifying you of the name of the show I’ve just reviewed, with a link to the review.
Enjoy!
Dermod Moore