Reviews

Elizabeth is a first-person account of being a cocktail bar pianist, the musician – maybe a very talented musician – tinkling away in the corner in some venue or other where the main business is drinking, chatting and hooking up.  Live performance muzak.  Rarely listened to with any attention, often ignored completely, interrupted, regarded as interruption, the pianist asked to ‘tone it down’ or ‘play softer’, or harassed by sexist put-downs and well-worn pick-up lines, cut off any time by recorded ‘house music&r

In the tradition of contemporary Irish theatre, Conor McPherson mixes humour and the macabre in this gritty black comedy. His characters are as graphically realistic as the cluttered, shabby room in which they meet – and under the direction of Maeliosa Stafford, they meet with the rhythm and cadence that make them uncompromisingly Irish in a play that moves frighteningly quickly at times – and just a bit slowly at others.

There are surely more plays and films set around dinner tables than we’ve all had hot dinners. Almost. Dinner parties of course are highly theatrical affairs and Moira Buffini really lets hers rip in her 2002 play, Dinner.

Set in an English country manor, bitch hostess Paige supervises a surreal menu to mark the publication of her husband’s hit philosophical opus.  A former stockbroker, Lars’ book is some Nietzschean ode to righteously selfish action, and the dinner guests match its values …. 

Jamaica Zuanetti’s play is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s observation: “It is, again, one of the loving woman’s misfortunes to find that her very love disfigures her, destroys her, she is nothing more than this slave, this servant, this too ready mirror, this too faithful echo.”