Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

Anne Doyle is on Ray D’arcy’s show right now! She sounds like a right laugh: Anne for the Late Late Show we say!

Feature from today’s Independent. 

The comedy just gets better. McCrazy and Scarah make a joint appearance on Katie Couric to try back-peddle on her disastrous interviews last week. “Gotcha journalism”, “she didn’t hear the question properly over the noise”  - this pair of clowns should be defeated in a landslide in November. 

The Museum of the Moving Image has a brilliant online repository of all the presidential commercials going back to Eisenhower v Stephenson’s presidential race in 1952. 

Trailer…

Have you seen Ben Affleck’s grim thriller Gone Baby, Gone? Remember Amy Ryan, who was Oscar nominated (and should have won) for her electrifying portrayal of the grubby mother from hell? Well check her out having some rapping fun with Steve Carell in the new series of the US version of The Office. That’s versatility baby. 

My review of You Are Here in today’s Irish Daily Mail

You Are Here (Daytime and Night-time),

Quartiere Bloom, Dublin

Shows at 1pm, 3pm, 8pm and 10pm until October 12. See www.dublintheatrefestival.com

 Rating: 4 out of 5

Verdict: A highly original interactive experience that takes the term ‘fly on the wall’ to fascinating new heights.

 This year’s Dublin Theatre Festival is playing host to several major productions, notably Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Gregory Burke’s Black Watch, but few plays will be able to match Living Space Theatre Group’s You Are Here in terms of originality and sheer envelope-pushing innovation.

 For good and for bad, the modern city centre apartment is one of the most potent emblems of the Celtic Tiger boom, and here an actual apartment in the bustling Italian Quarter serves as both the setting for, and the central character of, a topical, almost philosophical piece that grants a voyeuristic look into the lives of four Dubliners, who have at one point or another all lived in or shared that same characterless pad.

 Every day during the festival, the show is presented in two 60-minute parts in the afternoon and at night, and for each one, the audience is given a colour-coded wrist band that determines which character and story they are to shadow in different rooms of the apartment: the adulterous couple (Aonghus Weber and the luminous Annemarie Gaillard), a homeless estate agent (Carl Kennedy, assaying the show’s most comical strand), and a depressed self-help writer (the wonderful Eleanor Methven). 

And shadow we most certainly do: standing viewers literally become flies on the wall, observing the action right up close, themselves becoming nosy, ghostly presences in a dwelling already haunted by the lives of its current and former occupants, an apartment where even the furniture, appliances and plants offer up character details and musings by way of voiceover and other sound effects.

Through this fragmented, open-ended, purposefully incomplete structure, playwright Ioanna Anderson, and director Tara Derrington, explore notions of home and what that word, that concept means in an age, and a city, rife with alienation and loneliness, and where rampant consumerism and ‘me-me-me’ self-involvement reign supreme.

Through random selection, this reviewer mainly followed Weber and Gaillard’s intimate story, which is told from different perspectives during the daytime and night-time shows. Naturally, I left wanting to know more about the other plots that I had to miss, but that’s just an excuse to catch another viewing, as is the opportunity each audience member is given to rifle through the apartment, snooping through its archaeology to find little clues – a sex toy, a bottle of pills, a photograph – that shed more light onto these four pawns caught up in the ultimate reality show.

This afternoon, I went to see I’ve Loved You So Long, an intense new French drama starring bilingual actress Kristin Scott Thomas – in an extraordinary performance – as Juliette, a woman released from jail after a 15 year prison sentence, and her struggle to start afresh with her life, and re-establish a relationship with her estranged younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein). Sounds grim, but it’s an engaging, tense and moving film, shot through with empathy and even the odd flash of humour that really is worth seeing for Scott Thomas’ Oscar-worthy performance. 

Tina Fey strikes again on SNL – this time doing Palin during that excruciating Katie Couric interview. With these two SNL performances alone, I think it’s fair to say that Fey has destroyed Palin’s credibility, and underlined her unsuitability for major office, more than any debate with Joe Biden ever could. Go Tina!