Latest news with #BernardShaw
Extra.ie
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Iconic Dublin pub holding annual crisp festival
Crisp lovers unite — a Dublin pub is hosting a three-day festival in honour of the crunchy snacks next month. The Eatyard Crisp Festival 2025 takes place at The Bernard Shaw from Friday, August 29 until Sunday, August 31. The 'weekend devoted to crisps' will feature plenty of games and music as well as every kind of crisp organisers can get their hands on. Crisp lovers unite — a Dublin pub is hosting a three-day festival in honour of the crunchy goodness next month. Pic: Getty Images Some of the intriguing games which will take place over the weekend include the Hot Chip Challenge; Nice Burger & Janet Crisp Specials as well as blind tastings. Other exciting elements for attendees to look forward to are Crisp Sambo DIY kits, DJs and the Crisp Fest Tuck Shop. As well as some great crisps and deals, people will get the chance to get their hands on some crisp hampers. The Bernard Shaw say the big weekend is 'dedicated to crisps of all shapes, sizes and flavours' promising to have the 'biggest range of crisps you've ever seen in a pub' along with games, DIY activities and music. Social media users took to the comments of the TikTok post sharing details of the weekend, with one begging: 'Get bear in the big blue house crisps and I'll be there.' Another added: 'If I don't get an Electric Picnic ticket this is where I'll be.' Other exciting elements for attendees to look forward to are Crisp Sambo DIY kits, DJs and the Crisp Fest Tuck Shop. Pic: Getty Images A third commented: 'OMG my type of festival I'm addicted to crisps.' The festival is a ticketed event with ticket prices at €10 (plus €1 booking fee) for each day, which includes entry, any pint and any packet of crisps. Tickets can be purchased here. The Bernard Shaw is located in Drumcondra, Dublin 9 and features the stunning Eatyard Food Market. If a festival dedicated to crisps isn't your thing, they also have a Wine & Cheese festival taking place earlier in the month from August 2. As well as tasting different cheeses and learning all things wine, attendees will get the chance to try regular menu items dipped in multiple layers of cheese.
The Hindu
07-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Letters to The Editor — July 8, 2025
Plight of the poor Are we a police state? In Tamil Nadu, the brutality unleashed by the police on Ajith Kumar, who was finished off on mere suspicion of being linked to an incident of some jewels missing, defies all imagination. He was just a poor man working as a security guard in a temple. The poor are undoubtedly worse off in this so-called welfare state. The brutal custodial death evokes a deep poignancy of the rights of the poor in India. One is reminded of Bernard Shaw's quote, 'The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty....' One also remembers Somnath Chatterjee, a Marxist and a leading lawyer, saying 'there is no respite for the poor in India'. It is not enough that the Ministers console the family which has been shattered. N.G.R. Prasad, Chennai Musk vs Trump or more? Elon Musk has caused more than a ripple in American politics. Yet, one must ask whether his political move is a fight for ideals or personal vendetta. We wait to see whether it will reshape politics or fizzle out as a fleeting tempest. R.K Jain, Barwani, Madhya Pradesh
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The young Oscar Wilde's Russian revolutionary drama reveals a playwright divided
Who wrote the following: 'When private property is abolished, there will be no necessity for crime'? In one of his plays the same writer has a female revolutionary cry: 'How easy is it for a king to kill his people by thousands but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe.' If I reveal that the writer was a London-based Irishman, most people would assume it was Bernard Shaw. In fact, it was Oscar Wilde and, while the first quote comes from his essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the last is from his play Vera; or, The Nihilists which is to get a rare professional production at the Brockley Jack Studio theatre, south-east London, in September. The play itself is virtually unknown even to Wildean devotees. It was written in 1879 and loosely based on the story of a 22-year-old Russian revolutionary who had attempted to shoot the St Petersburg chief of police. Wilde's version is set in Moscow but his heroine, Vera Sabouroff, has a similar political ardour and leads a band of nihilists who plan to assassinate the tsar. That is only the starting-point for a robustly noisy melodrama that was intended for London production in 1881. But the actual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March of that year and the fact that the Prince of Wales was married to the sister of the new tsarina killed it stone dead. When it was eventually produced in New York in 1883, it was greeted with sneery disdain and, aside from the odd amateur revival, has lain buried ever since. Yet, for all its obvious faults, the play has several points of interest and one is what it reveals about Wilde's own divided nature. We tend to think of that division in terms of his sexuality but there is a comparable split between his radical and aesthetic selves. The two achieve a perfect reconciliation in The Importance of Being Earnest which offers a running commentary on class, money, marriage, morals and the state of society while being an exquisite comic creation. But in an early work like Vera there is a deep, unhealed division between the earnest and the epigrammatic. The play is packed with diatribes against despotism and full of rhetorical hymns to liberty: at one point Vera apostrophises the concept as: 'O mighty mother of eternal time, thy robe is purple with the blood of those who have died for thee.' But the play's most intriguing character is Prince Paul, the Russian prime minister, tsarist apologist and devious word-spinner. He talks throughout in chiselled phrases such as 'Experience, the name men give to their mistakes,' and suggests that there is a link between making a good salad and being a brilliant diplomat: the art in both cases is 'to know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar'. He is the prototype of Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray and all those languid aristocrats who pepper Wilde's society dramas with their potted witticisms. On the one hand, Wilde celebrates revolutionary ardour: on the other, a dandified cynic who claims 'life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it'. But this conflict between ethics and aesthetics is not peculiar to Wilde. In 1885, Henry James pursued a similar bifurcation, admittedly with far more subtlety, in his novel The Princess Casamassima. Its hero, Hyacinth Robinson, is the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat and a French working-woman and his life is as divided as his name suggests. Through his meeting with the titular princess, he acquires a taste for the trappings of privilege. But he also has a passion for social justice that leads him to join a band of political conspirators very like those in Vera and to accept the duty of assassination. James had no great sympathy for Wilde, and in 1895 shamefully refused to sign a petition calling for mitigation of his prison sentence. Yet the two writers had more in common than one suspects and in The Princess Casamassima you find a strange echo of the dilemma posed by Vera: how do you reconcile the desire to change the world with a delight in its culture; or, to put it more simply, how do you achieve a perfect balance between socialism and style? Vera; or, The Nihilists is at Brockley Jack Studio theatre, London, 16-27 September.
Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Mrs Warren's Profession: Imelda Staunton and her daughter make a winning double act
This classy, period-dressed production of one of Bernard Shaw's best-known plays brings Imelda Staunton back to the West End as Mrs Warren, a woman of means who harbours the societally unacceptable secret that her wealth derives from prostitution (formerly her own, now that of others in 'hotels' she manages in Europe). What's not to like? Well, at the risk of sounding like an ingrate, I'd say Dominic Cooke's briskly efficient, interval-free revival courts seeming a bit anodyne, especially given the PR promise that Cooke and co are bringing this once contentious, long-banned 1894 work 'crashing into the 21st century' (they don't). That said, few should pass up the opportunity to see Staunton on stage. Even laying aside the fact that she has been the Queen in The Crown, she qualifies as revered acting royalty. A musicals doyenne of late (witness her Olivier-winning turn in Hello, Dolly!), without breaking into song she can still rivet attention with just a glance or a twitch of the shoulders. An added draw is that her daughter, Bessie Carter, has been cast as Mrs W's vivacious, anti-sentimental and recalcitrant offspring Vivie. Though physically dissimilar, Carter (a star of Bridgerton) carries her mater's thespian DNA in her sparkle and subtlety – a smirk, a bemused look, and you're hooked. (Others may spot affinities with her father Jim, Downton's Mr Carson; a game you can play all night.) The big scenes between mother and daughter are quietly tremendous, and crackle with a genuine sense of a familial bond without becoming cosy. When Kitty spells out just what a wretched life she narrowly escaped by going on the game, you see the scales fall from Vivie's eyes and sympathy flower. Staunton gives her character a nicely brittle air, combining defiance and defensiveness, with a residual cockney accent – an obstacle to full respectability which she perforce craves instead for her girl. When that status is spurned, for trading on the exploitation of other women – Vivie resolving to forge her own proto-feminist path of toil – you glimpse how crushed, wounded and lonely Mrs Warren is and the comfortless and possibly childless world Vivie's noble resolve may result in. Despite being of its time, their showdown conveys the age-old tussle between parent and child and crystalises the ethical wrench between improving one's lot and not hurting others. Topical in a way – what hidden agonies fund well-heeled or Western lifestyles today? – but elsewhere a tepidity sets in. The mute, scene-shifting contributions of a female chorus in undergarments, sporting accusatory looks to mournful music, feel reductively decorative and aren't enough to save Chloe Lamford's sparse, black-walled set from visual insufficiency. The male actors handle their polished but sometimes still dusty side of the dialogue with stiff dependability – among them Robert Glenister as a creepily predatory elder businessman, and Kevin Doyle as a comically twitchy, archetypally compromised vicar, with a past of his own. Shaw, the old radical, would be glad to see how his work has endured – but wouldn't he also want it showing a bit more fire in its belly?
