Latest news with #AbbeyTheatre
Extra.ie
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Top London school adds Panti Bliss memoir to curriculum
Panti Bliss's memoir is now being used to teach upper-class children about homosexuality. The 2014 book by Ireland's most renowned drag queen, titled Woman In The Making – Panti's Memoir, has been added to curriculum of the €35,000-a-year Alleyn's school in Dulwich, south London. The school is the alma mater of several famous people including Irish polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, movie star Jude Law, author PG Wodehouse and interior designer Laurence LlewellynBowen. The book has been chosen to educate young teens about diversity and 'queer theory'. Staff at the school told parents and pupils a selection of authors were being introduced as part of a 'genuine diversification' of the curriculum taught to Year Nine students, typically aged 13 to 14. Panti Bliss. Pic: Mark Stedman/Photocall Ireland Panti, AKA Rory O'Neill, 56, said of the recent development: 'I'm delighted that my book is being read by young people. 'I would hope that anybody who reads the book would learn about queer people and the difficulties about the time [of which] I was writing. Yes, if people read it and get something out of it – great.' The book contains several references to gay sex and how Panti's sexuality started to awaken as an 11-year-old in Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, in 1979 – the year Pope John Paul II visited Ireland. 'These two things were not unrelated. Looking back now, it seems almost inevitable that my gayness and my Catholicism were about to engage in their first bloody skirmish,' the book begins. The school says it aims to challenge 'white-centric, patriarchal and cisgender ideologies by adopting non-binary writers as part of a drive to diversify its teachings and explore queer theory'. Cisgender refers to individuals whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Panti Bliss celebrates the Yes result in the marriage referendum in May 2015. Pic: Rolling News The curriculum includes discussing topics such as 'toxic masculinity' in William Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest 'through the lens of colonialism'. Panti's autobiography, the school believes, will offer an insight into the challenges that he faced as a gay man growing up in conservative rural Ireland in the 1970s and '80s. However, not everyone in the British education establishment is happy about the inclusion of O'Neill's memoir in a reading list. Katharine Birbalsingh, known as Britain's strictest headteacher, recently questioned why themes such as racism and sexism were being prioritised in classroom discussions on the works of Shakespeare. Panti's memoir was critically acclaimed on its release 11 years ago, just before the passing of the marriage equality referendum in 2015, making Ireland the first country to endorse the legal change by public vote. Panti made a big media impact after a speech at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in February 2014, about the oppression and difficulty of growing up gay in Ireland. It has been viewed over one million times on YouTube. Panti later said: 'Young people tell me that they watch my Abbey speech in social studies class but it's not on the curriculum here, but anything that helps young people to understand is all good.'
Irish Examiner
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Theatre review: Tommy Tiernan and Aaron Monaghan star in The Cave, by Kevin Barry
The Cave, Abbey Theatre, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Kevin Barry rarely writes a dull sentence. His novels are packed with startling phrases that have you reaching for the highlighter pen, or simply reading them again for the sheer pleasure of it. And, in his new play for the Abbey, he puts into the mouths of the McCrea brothers, Archie (Tommy Tiernan) and Bopper (Aaron Monaghan), a stream of Irish kitsch and colourful reverie, mixed with the alienating absurdities of online life to create some startling contrasts and vivid, clashing images. It's Flann O'Brien meets Pat McCabe meets Enda Walsh meets Sam Beckett meets Tom Murphy meets Martin McDonagh, all played out on an outcrop of rock overlooking some benighted market town in Co Sligo. It's fun to listen to, but across 13 scenes of desperation, there's little momentum, the words failing to make the leap from page to stage. Tommy Tiernan in The Cave, by Kevin Barry, at the Abbey. Picture: Ros Kavanagh The titular cave is at the centre of our hilltop setting. It's given a blasted, post-apocalyptic look in Sinead Diskin's design, stretched like a huge, crumpled piece of paper behind Archie and Bopper. But the cultural references, and complaints about rural broadband rollout from our internet-obsessed pair, make it clear this is the present day. The cave is where the McCreas, a pair of miscreant eejits, have been sheltering, in the hope they can get their wreck of a van (parked stage right in a state of disassembled disrepair) going again. The brothers are soon joined by Judith Roddy as their sister, Helen, a local garda, who gives details to explain the brothers' present dire situation. By contrast, they are content to fill the void in their lives with past obsessions, memories of rain-swept peculiarly Irish family misery, in rehearsing eulogies for each other, or obsessing about a Mexican celeb whose Instagram portrays her perfect life with Con Costello. Judith Roddy, Tommy Tiernan and Aaron Monaghan in The Cave. Picture: Ros Kavanagh He's some kind of Sligo Chris O'Dowd, it seems, who's gotten away and made good, and is thus hated. If it's impossible not to think of Waiting for Godot when confronted by a pair of verbose tramps in a barren landscape, Tiernan's Archie is like an innocent, questioning Estragon. Monaghan's Bopper, meanwhile, has the authority of Vladimir within this dynamic. But the comparison ends there in his raw, irascible, pained portrayal. Caitriona McLaughlin directs us through the verbiage, leaning into the laughs but accentuating moments of poignancy too. It ends as darkly as you'd expect, after putting off the inevitable for too long. An epilogue from Helen adds a sense of what more structure and concision might have helped achieve. Until July 18. At Town Hall, Galway, July 22-26.
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Cave review: Tommy Tiernan is perfectly cast as a downtrodden barroom philosopher in Kevin Barry's bleakly funny play
The Cave Abbey Theatre, Dublin ★★★★☆ You are not going to get away with calling your play The Cave – particularly if your characters are actually confined in such a space – without audiences wondering about Plato's most famous allegory. The Greek wondered what we would know of the world if all we saw were shadows flickering on the wall of a rocky cavity. Archie and Bopper, depressed Irish siblings, have more than that. They have a smartphone. The former climbs a ladder and waves the device at the heavens in often-futile search for 'coverage'. Their particular interest is a celebrity named Elvira and her frustrating association with 'the Irish actor Con Costello' (a man they despise). Do they really learn any more about Elvira than they would if they saw only her shadow? The lying PR wonks who haunt Instagram were, after all, nowhere in Plato's story. Right? Kevin Barry 's bleakly funny new play for the Abbey is not about the internet. But no piece so concerned with our habitual flight from reality can ignore that engulfing phenomenon. The singular writer, as busy a dramatist as he is a novelist, came up with idea while pacing the Caves of Keash, near his home in Co Sligo. Joanna Parker's set design gives us a huge grey outcrop – like a giant crumpled tissue – fronted by a shallow opening from which emerge stolen tools, wheelchairs and drinks trolleys. READ MORE Archie, as played by Tommy Tiernan , is curious and vulnerable but not yet lost to despair. Bopper, given hunched reality by Aaron Monaghan , is a more troubled fellow. He yearns for a perfect moment in 1995. He fixates on the loss of his testicle. Archie worries he may do something silly. There is no escaping comparisons with the first act of Waiting for Godot. Like Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, the two men worry over matters of existential importance, but we get more sense here of the characters' place in wider society. After a few early confrontations, we learn that Helen ( Judith Roddy ), the poor garda tasked with warning them about antisocial behaviour, is their long-suffering sister. Halfway through it seems as if the apparently inseparable pair may actually get to live apart for a spell. One can scarcely imagine that of Beckett's duo. Directed with discipline and clarity by Caitríona McLaughlin , the three actors slip comfortably into well-fitting skins. Tiernan could hardly be better suited for a downtrodden barroom philosopher. Monaghan keeps the rage at an impressive simmer throughout. Roddy gives early hints that Helen may not be quite so reliably 'sensible' as she at first seems. Presented, a little like a Wes Anderson film, in 13 chapters – each titled in voiceover and overhead projection – The Cave is a little short on overarching structure, but it compensates with a nagging commitment to themes of psychological evasion. Too many of us, like Archie and Bopper, are perched at a metaphorical distance from the rest of society, finding ways to distracts ourselves from pain, responsibility and the inevitability of death. Maybe The Cave is a play about the internet. The Cave is at the Abbey Theatre , Dublin, until Friday, July 18th
Indian Express
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Tagore and Yeats: How a Nobel-winning friendship fell apart
At the turn of the 20th century, few non-European writers captured the Western literary imagination as powerfully as Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. For many, especially in Britain, he was a symbol of tranquility in the face of industrial exhaustion. Central to this mythmaking was William Butler Yeats – the towering 20th-century Irish poet and co-founder of Dublin's Abbey Theatre – who became Tagore's most celebrated Western champion. Yeats's role in introducing Gitanjali to the Anglophone world is by now a well-trodden narrative. His preface to the 1912 English edition of the collection of spiritual verses that Tagore had self-translated from Bengali was instrumental not only in launching the poet into the global literary spotlight, but also in helping promote it for the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year. Though Tagore translated the verses himself from Bengali to English, it was Yeats's endorsement that positioned him as a 'seer' in the eyes of the Western literary world. In 1913, Tagore, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The citation praised his 'profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.' Tagore met Yeats in June 1912 at the house of English painter and cultural intermediary William Rothenstein. Yeats, presented with the English manuscript of Gitanjali, was immediately moved: 'I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days,' he wrote in the introduction, 'reading it in railway trains, or on the tops of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.' As literary scholar Dr Ragini Mohite writes in her 2025 article, 'Yeats, Tagore, and the Nobel Prize in Literature: Imprimaturs in Modernist Cultural Conversations' (International Yeats Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2025), this introduction helped construct the image of Tagore as a saint-like figure, one who seemed to channel 'the Indian civilization itself.' For Yeats, Gitanjali was akin to scripture. He likened Tagore to the English poet William Blake, and imagined India not as an exotic Other, but as a mirror. As Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg professor Dr Carl O'Brien observes in his article 'Rabindranath Tagore's India and WB Yeats's Ireland' (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 2019), Yeats imagined Indian culture 'not because of its strangeness, but because it was like meeting our own image… our voice as in a dream.' Yeats's framing proved decisive. Mohite contends that the Nobel committee's internal report relied 'entirely on Yeats's introduction,' even admitting that 'no biographical information was included with the proposal.' In Yeats's words, Tagore was 'the first among our saints,' someone who rose above worldly strife. By the time Tagore won the Nobel in November 1913, accusations circulated that he had not written the translations alone. Some, like British journalist Valentine Chirol, cast aspersions on his English proficiency; others suggested Yeats was the true author. As Mohite observes, Tagore's own disappointment with such insinuations was clear: 'It is not possible for [Chirol] to relish the idea of Mohammedans sharing this honour with Hindus.' While Yeats undoubtedly assisted in shaping the English Gitanjali—making editorial suggestions and contributing to its arrangement— he did so alongside others, sometimes with mixed feelings about his lack of sole control over the proofs. Nonetheless, Tagore remained the work's author and translator, and the Nobel Prize, as Mohite suggests, became a lightning rod for praise and critique alike. The Gitanjali for which Tagore was honoured was not his 1910 Bengali collection, but a curated English compilation — only 53 of the 103 poems were from the original; the rest were taken from other works such as Kheya and Achalayatan, stripped of rhyme and metre, and arranged for a mystical tone. In 1913, Yeats helped stage Tagore's play The Post Office at the Abbey Theatre. He also introduced Tagore to American poet Ezra Pound and secured publication through the India Society and Macmillan. This elevation of Tagore as a mystic suited the moment but troubled critics. Pound warned early: 'If his entourage has presented him as a religious teacher rather than as an artist, it is much to be lamented.' Tagore himself grew wary of this spiritual branding. In his delayed Nobel lecture (1921), he focused on his newly founded Visva-Bharati University, saying: 'I have used the money for establishing… a university where Western students might come and meet their Eastern brethren.' He had begun converting symbolic recognition into real capital for India's educational sovereignty. Yeats would win his Nobel a decade later, in 1923, as the national poet of the newly independent Irish Free State. His Nobel lecture, 'The Irish Dramatic Movement', celebrated the role of literature in shaping Ireland's national consciousness. As he wrote to Edmund Gosse, 'Of course I know quite well that this honour is not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and of a nation.' Tagore, by contrast, was increasingly critical of nationalism. In his lectures (Nationalism, 1917), he argued that political chauvinism — whether Western or Eastern — ultimately imitated the violence of the Empire. His novel Gora (1909) goes further, challenging notions of religious and racial purity through a protagonist who discovers he is ethnically Irish but raised as a Brahmin Hindu. Yeats's nationalism, while not imperialist, was mythic. Rooted in Celtic revivalism, his plays and poetry built a romantic Irish self-image. While Tagore sought to dismantle cultural boundaries, Yeats idealised Ireland's past to inspire its future. Both poets looked to tradition, but Tagore's was dialogic and international; Yeats's, symbolic and insular. Their relationship soon grew strained. By 1935, Yeats wrote bitterly, 'Damn Tagore … Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English. We got out three good books … then he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation' (Yeats, Letters, p. 834). This position contrasts starkly with his tribute just four years earlier in The Golden Book of Tagore (1931), where Yeats wrote, 'I am still your most loyal student and admirer.' This disillusionment, scholars say, stemmed not just from aesthetic disagreement, but from ideological divergence. Tagore, unlike Yeats, rejected nationalism as the foundation of identity. As O'Brien contends, Tagore denounced the violent mimicry of European imperialism in his lectures, notably in 'Nationalism' (1917) and 'The Spirit of Japan' (1916). 'By this device the people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a large portion of the world,' he wrote, decrying both European hypocrisy and Asian complicity in adopting imperialist values. The literary crossing between Yeats and Tagore was a moment of rare poetic diplomacy. But it was also a cautionary tale. Recognition, especially in colonial settings, often demands translation, linguistic and cultural. In becoming the 'Indian saint', Tagore's political agency and artistic precision were partially erased. Yet, as Tagore reminded us, 'We cannot borrow other people's history. If we stifle our own, we are committing suicide.' Over a century later, their relationship remains a study in mutual admiration, ideological divergence, and the politics of literary framing. Yeats and Tagore remain twinned in Nobel memory, not as perfect collaborators, but as witnesses to a moment when East and West briefly, and uneasily, shared a page. Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at or You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More
Belfast Telegraph
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Belfast Telegraph
‘Lisa McGee completely captured an era, a humour that is so specific, so original to the north'
From the screen to the stage, Judith Roddy is set for her National Theatre of Ireland debut, as she tells Aine Toner From today, Derry actor Judith Roddy will be on stage with Tommy Tiernan and Aaron Monaghan in Kevin Barry's dark comedy The Cave. Directed by Co-Director of the Abbey Theatre, Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin, this marks her debut at the National Theatre of Ireland in which she plays the local sergeant, who meets Archie and Bopper McRae in a dead zone in the mountains of south county Sligo, and becomes increasingly entangled in their lives.
