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Irish Examiner
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The Beacon review: West Cork-set play hit by stormy seas at the Everyman
The Beacon, Everyman Theatre, Cork ★★★☆☆ There's no mistaking where we are with The Beacon, a bank of large video screens on the Everyman Theatre stage projecting images of a roiling ocean, and a smoke machine sending a veil of sea mist across the auditorium. It's a bold and stylish opening to this play by Dublin writer Nancy Harris, originally commissioned by Druid Theatre. The action takes place on an island off West Cork near the distinctive landmark of the title, where Beiv (Geraldine Hughes), a well-known artist, has taken up residence in her former summer home. It's not only the seas that are stormy; Beiv's son Colm (Leonard Buckley) is visiting from the US with his new wife Bonnie (Ayoola Smart) and the tensions in the parental relationship rise immediately to the surface. The mysterious death of Beiv's husband at sea has reared its head again, thanks to a prying podcaster, and to complicate matters, also present is Donal (Ross O'Donnellan) a surrogate son who has a tangled history with actual son Colm. Ross O'Donnellan and Leonard Buckley in a scene from The Beacon at the Everyman in Cork. Picture: Miki Barlok Harris is an accomplished writer with an impressive CV but she has thrown the kitchen sink at this script. Artistic selfishness, feminism, sexuality, repression, parental neglect, toxic masculinity, mental health, the prurience of true-crime podcasts, the summer home gentrification of coastal locations — there are so many topics and themes fighting for attention that none of it communicates any clear meaning, leaving the entire play struggling to find the right tone. The murder mystery sub-plot is devoid of any suspense and pacing of scenes is erratic, with Beiv not present for much of the second half, and a jarringly superfluous appearance by podcaster Ray, gamely played by Stephen O'Leary. Dialogue is stilted at times, and while O'Donnellan tries his best with the Cork accent, the modulation is distractingly awry. In contrast, Ayoola Smart, who grew up in West Cork, pulls off a very convincing American accent, complete with annoying Valley Girl intonation. The Killing Eve and Cocaine Bear star has real stage presence, the play coming alive in her sparky scenes with Bonnie. There are striking touches in the direction and staging, including the silhouetted reveals during scene changes, lighting design and the plaintive and portentous soundscape. Overall, however, the production flounders, not helped by a convoluted and downbeat ending. The Beacon is at the Everyman, Cork, until July 19
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Beacon by Nancy Harris review: West Cork murder mystery becomes a beautifully explored family conversation
The Beacon Everyman, Cork ★★★★☆ In this Everyman revival of a play that's billed as a west Cork family murder mystery but is at heart concerned with contemporary modes of speech, and even of thought, the playwright Nancy Harris spikes the narrative with sly and decisive wit. Hers is delightfully clever writing. In providing not one but several conflicting mysteries, the clues in The Beacon – commissioned by Druid in 2019 and here getting its Cork premiere – come almost as asides, with the result that the audience has to remain attentive as well as receptive. Much of this appeal lies with the play's portrait of an artist working as if in retreat among an island community where the coastal beacon is a metaphor for a family splintering into jagged pieces. The matriarch of this domestic drama, although she would deride the title, is the famous feminist painter Beiv, master of fashionable modern art and of the put-down, whose cryptic comments quench every attempt at virtue-signalling. READ MORE The Beacon: Ross O'Donnellan and Leonard Buckley as Donal and Colm in Nancy Harris's play. Photograph: Miki Barlok The laughs come laced with acidity, but Geraldine Hughes invests Beiv with something likable, if not admirable, and establishes a characteristic that drives all the following complex familial revelations. These emerge with the honeymoon visit of Beiv's son, Colm, and his wife, Bonnie, and with Colm's disapproval of changes to the cottage he remembers from childhood years shared with his father, Michael. These changes are early signals to more than they seem. While Bonnie's relentless instinct for appeasement ignites Beiv's declaration that an artist needs only isolation and silence, Colm is in search of an explanation for his father's death at sea. What he needs is a cause that would implicate and condemn his mother. [ Nancy Harris: 'There's something about other people's weddings that tell us where we're at in our lives' Opens in new window ] What Colm is not seeking is anything more than the casual friendship he formed in his youth with Donal, an islander. To Donal that relationship was vital. In a scene of memorable distress he discovers now that it has been misinterpreted. More than this, through the interaction here between Leonard Buckley's obsessive Colm and Ross O'Donnellan's lucid Donal, the play loops back to its interrogation of visual art. What people see in a painting is not always what is there. What they don't see is what might be there, the pentimento, the painting under the painting. This is an adroit recapitulation of the plot's underlying intrigue. While Beiv thinks that Colm's aggression is the result of sending him to a private school, and Ayoola Smart's Bonnie defends her amiability by her plan to become a Jungian psychologist, the submerged questioning rises to the inevitable collision of truth, half-truths and suspicion. Nancy Harris tells Róisín Ingle about her RTÉ drama The Dry Listen | 47:23 Beiv herself has renounced motherhood as well as society and rebuts Colm's speculations with a barbed honesty. To his accusation that she always loved painting more than she loved him, she replies that painting was more satisfying. We believe her. While Stephen O'Leary does his irrepressible best as Ray, a podcast journalist, his is a sudden interruption in a delicate sequence nearing finality. Sara Joyce, as director, might have queried also the embracing set of heaving seas, black as liquid liquorice under clouded skies by Ciarán Bagnall were it not for Bagnall's own expressive lighting design. There is also the issue of Fiona Sheil's portentous aural effects, all sound and fury, signifying nothing much. In such a well-wrought play these seem unnecessary, but they do not detract from the general impression of a conversation beautifully explored. The Beacon is at the Everyman Theatre , Cork, until Saturday, July 19th
Irish Examiner
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
'The audience will know all the references': Nancy Harris on her West Cork-set play
BAFTA-nominated playwright and screenwriter Nancy Harris, whose play The Beacon is coming to the Everyman, says that she loves a good mystery story. Fascinated by the West Cork podcast which explored the story of the murdered French woman, Sophie Toscan du Plantier, near Schull, London-based Harris, who spent a lot of time in Baltimore growing up, says she has always been taken by stories of local people living under a cloud of suspicion. 'Ian Bailey [suspected of the killing of the French film-maker] was just one person who was very prominent. There are other stories of local legends who may have murdered their wives,' says Harris. Harris, who was born in Dublin to Cork-born journalists, Anne and Eoghan Harris, admits to being nervous about the Cork premiere of her play. 'The audience will know all the places and references. I feel kind of like a traitor in the midst of Cork for having been born in Dublin. We spent huge amounts of time in Cork. "Last week, after a meeting, I went for a walk through Cork city and out to Bishopstown where my grandparents lived. I found myself outside their house (which had been sold on) where I hadn't been since my grandmother's wake. I felt really emotional.' Describing herself as 'a little bit rebellious,' Harris didn't want to follow in her parents' footsteps. 'So I went to college to study drama and classical civilisation and do anything other than write. But I really couldn't do anything else other than write. I found my way back to it at the end of my university degree. I wrote a play but I didn't know how I did it. So I spent a few years figuring out whether I could do it again. "I realised the thing I loved the most was playwrighting and that all my life, I had been coming to it. I had an amazing classics teacher at school and thought I wanted to be like her. Drama and the classics, with Greek tragedy included, feed into each other.' Geraldine Hughes stars as Beiv in The Beacon, at the Everyman. Picture: Miki Barlok Harris, who started her career at Soho Theatre writing 20-minute plays with a group of five other writers, is currently working on the third series of The Dry. This funny Irish TV comedy-drama is written solely by Harris. It deals with alcoholism in a dysfunctional family. 'It's a big serious subject. I'm someone who loves comedy. The comedy in The Dry is really essential because I wouldn't want to sit down and be depressed watching it. Myself and Paddy Breathnach, who's a brilliant director, work hard to make sure there's light and shade all the time.' While her dark play, originally commissioned by Druid in 2019, has a mysterious death at the heart of it, it's also a family drama with deep dysfunction. There's humour there too. The central character, Beiv, is a celebrated feminist artist whom Harris likens to British artist Tracey Emin, given the 'sexually explicit' nature of her work. 'Beiv has always lived a very transgressive life. Her ex-husband died in mysterious circumstances ten years ago and his body was never found. Colm, her estranged son, has returned from San Francisco with his new wife, Bonnie, looking for answers.' But he must confront secrets from his own past. Ross O Donnellan, Leonard Buckley, and Ayoola Smart feature in The Beacon. Picture: Miki Barlok Beiv is renovating a house on an island off West Cork, where her ex-husband was from. Even though they were separated, they remained friends. It's believed that Beiv was with her ex the night he went missing. While bonded to each other, the relationship between the pair was 'tumultuous'. With Beiv on the island is Colm's old friend, Donal. There are basically four people in the cottage over the course of a week during which ghosts from the past surface. While Harris says a career as a playwright and screenwriter is full of ups and downs with 'no direct line of ascent,' it is also thrilling. 'I don't know what the next thing is. If you're somebody who wants certainty, it's probably not the best career.' But Harris certainly seems to have cracked it. The Beacon is at the Everyman from Friday, July 4 to July 19.
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Princess Diana's kinder Britain
Edward White has pulled off an unusual experiment in his biography of Diana, Princess of Wales – the life of one of the most famous women in history captured entirely in long shot. There are times when his resourceful use of contemporary Everyman diaries and interviews with insightful nobodies provides valuable historical insights, and others when it's a bit like reading a profile of Lawrence of Arabia from the point of view of the sand. Only occasionally does the real Diana, the practised superstar I lunched with in New York six weeks before she died, break out of the suffocation of mass perceptions and cultural analysis. One such moment is a killingly self-revealing story I didn't know (and as a Diana biographer myself it always quickens my pulse to find a nugget that escaped me). According to Alastair Campbell, in 1995 Diana advised an as-yet unelected Tony Blair 'to touch people in pictures' and be sure to be photographed with 'down and outs'. 'Children with no hair,' she told Blair coolly, 'were especially effective in curating a reputation for compassion.' A mask-off moment hard to forget. The future PM was, White tells us, 'rapt by her shrewdness and savvy'. But not enough to want to give her the formal ambassadorial role she craved when he got into Downing Street. By then, tabloid coverage of her multiple affairs and her association with the son of the tawdry Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had been caught up in an MP bribery scandal, were too much of a political risk. However, when I met with her in New York in June 1997, the princess clearly was still hankering to be the British government's freelance Queen of Hearts. Her huge, limpid blue eyes filled with artful sincerity when she told me across the lunch that she felt she could be 'an enormous help' to bringing peace to Northern Ireland. Was she delusional? It's not surprising that by the end of her life, Diana had become high on her own supply. But in her presence, it was impossible not to be seduced. No photographs do justice to the combination of that blonde radiance and conferred charisma. In her stockinged feet Diana was five foot 11 inches, and when she crossed the Four Seasons restaurant to our table wearing three-inch Manolo heels and a peppermint green Saint Laurent suit, with a short skirt that gave full rein to her limitless legs, she electrified a dining room used to the appearance of high-wattage celebrities. White's book dives deeply into how Diana was mythologised by the media and the British people and, as her marital unhappiness seeped out and exploded, became a proxy for random sublimated pain that in turn confirmed her own sense of magical power. A sex worker at the time, whose observations White comes across in an oral history of prostitution project, considered Diana's life filled with parallels to her own. 'She had the same sort of shite [as me] when she was a kid. You know, didn't do particularly well at school… She said 'up yours' to so much hierarchy'. So muses the sex worker about a woman who was born into one of Britain's oldest aristocratic families and set her cap at an early age to marrying the future king. It's one of the most misunderstood aspects of Diana's story – especially during the Megxit coverage – that Diana, like Harry and Meghan, longed to escape from the cage of monarchy. But Diana's problem was not with being royal. She knew she was brilliant at that. (In her divorce demands, continuing to live at Kensington Palace was a non-negotiable.) It was being married to a man who was in love with someone else and was hopelessly jealous of his wife's popularity. Even after the royal divorce was final and she was supposedly thrilled to be free, Diana told me how much she regretted losing Charles, and wistfully spoke of how they could have been 'such a great team'. I tend to agree – had she married him at 30, rather than at 20. Dianaworld needs more helpings of such emotional content, but White's surround-sound approach amplifies how Diana was both shaped by the aristocratic culture of the Britain she was born into and how much she had changed that culture by the time she died. I was fascinated, for instance, by his parsing of Diana's early childhood trauma due to her parents' divorce. An underlying theme of his book is the abiding question of how external contemporary events unwittingly affect the behaviour of, or are absorbed by, the people who live through them. In the case of Diana's mother, Frances, her decision to leave Earl Spencer for the wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd occurred in 1967, when Diana was six, around the same time as British divorce numbers were surging. There was an explosive BBC documentary titled Whicker's World: The Stresses of Divorce: one episode features the celebrity model Sandra Paul, who bolted on her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home, a cousin of Diana's father. (It's incredible television even today, well worth the bad-quality YouTube rendering.) Alan Whicker's interviews with the couple are more intimate and fascinatingly invasive than anything in modern confessional talk shows or reality TV, mostly because it's rare to see candour like this expressed in such cut-glass accents. The distressed, ethereal beauty Sandra explains how she could no longer tolerate Robin's selfishness and Robin, with his quivering cigarette and clipped Noël Coward delivery, tells us he how he just cannot, cannot live with this humiliation and the 'leering little clerks in solicitors' offices' who arranged his divorce. 'I had to be ruthless in order to be free,' Sandra tells Whicker. 'It's the kind of statement,' says White, that, 'could have come from Diana's lips 30 years later.' In a book in which it's mostly hard to discern what the author really thinks of his subject, it's clear that White is unimpressed by many of the hyperbolic myths around Diana. He deflates the now-accepted view that she transformed attitudes to Aids and ushered in a new era of British emotionalism. There is no doubt that the princess's famous visit to patients in the Aids ward of the Middlesex Hospital in 1987 was the hand shake (without gloves) that went round the globe. But he considers Harry's declaration – and that of many others – that his mother 'changed the world' with her embrace of Aids patients is predictably overwrought. He suggests it's more likely that a long-running Aids storyline about the character Mark Fowler on the massively popular TV soap EastEnders was far more influential in changing cultural attitudes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Similarly, Diana's public admission to suffering from eating disorders was not as pioneering in White's telling as it seems in sainted myth. Revelation of her bulimia in Andrew Morton's 1992 bombshell book came over a decade after Susie Orbach's bestselling Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which explored the often-concealed dysfunctional relationship women have with food and body image, and led to a wave of obsessive women's magazine coverage of the topic. Where we must credit Diana is her impeccable flair for capturing the zeitgeist, an ability to identify all the right things to care about and talk about at just the right moment which burned her into the nation's psyche. White may be correct that EastEnders played a more significant role in easing British attitudes to Aids, but Diana's global fame and royal mystique elevated its acceptance, and even made it into a fashionable fundraising cause. Charles and Diana on their honeymoon, in the grounds of Balmoral Castle, August 1981. Photo by Central Press/White doesn't have a fully baked new theory about the explosive grief of Diana Week, those seven days of histrionic mourning that rocked the streets of London in the wake of the princess's death. Some of the Mass Observation diary entries and interviews he turned up likened the Dianaists of 1997 to 'spellbound Nazis in 1930s Berlin'. Both mourners and 'those who felt differently', White observes, 'frequently framed their criticism of the other lot as the appearance of something not truly British. For decades, the Queen's aloofness, inscrutability and restraint had been hailed as the epitome of a distinctively British attitude to life. Now those same qualities were reviled as horribly out of touch with modern Britain.' At a minimum, Diana Week was the moment when a national dam broke and repudiated the harsh-faced politics of the Thatcher era and the Major government still attempting to hang on to them. The collective emotion was in perfect sync – as, even in death, Diana always was – with the coming of New Labour and Tony Blair who used the word 'compassion' seven times at the Labour Party conference a month after the funeral. White suggests the notion that the outpouring presaged the inklings of a rise in populism that 'had usually existed only on the fringe'. Like Boris Johnson, who at the time mocked the Diana frenzy as 'a Latin American carnival of grief', and Donald Trump, whose motto was always 'I alone can fix [the country]', Diana 'cast herself as a people's tribune who refused to be silenced by a bullying elitist establishment, just as those two men do'. Diana as a harbinger of Brexit? The irony of that thought is that the chaos of the post-referendum years has only strengthened a monarchy beloved more for its sangfroid than its sentiment. If Prince Harry is Diana's emotional heir, his efforts to reproduce her confessional connection to the British people have been rejected in favour of the stoic elder brother and his wife, who give the least away. One of Diana's greatest gifts, White suggests, was 'creating an atmosphere of intimacy where none existed'. And yet her personification of a kinder, more caring world blazes still. Tina Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and the author of 'The Diana Chronicles'. Her weekly newsletter Fresh Hell is on Substack Dianaworld: An Obsession Edward White Allen Lane, 400pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?] Related
Time Out
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Canal-side cinema is coming back to London this summer – and it's totally free
Summer is here – honestly – and with it comes a host of outdoor cinema options for anyone who fancies taking in a movie al fresco. On the menu is rooftop cinema, riverside flicks, brutalist blockbusters, Marsh-side movies, even Canary Wharf kino. Now, adding to the mix is Everyman's popular pop-up on the Regent's Canal at King's on the Canal will be back on the Granary Square canal-side steps, rain or shine, between June 30 and August 17. On the programme are films, live events, Wimbledon action and DJ sets to enjoy with a snack and a glass in hand, including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Grease, Parent Trap, Top Gun: Maverick, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Encanto. Here's the programme in full. To add a splash of aesthetic vibrancy to the experience this year, Everyman has called on designer and 'architect of joy' Yinka Ilori to create a screen design that echoes 'the fantastical landscapes' explored in Disney movies. Which should make the setting even more Instagrammable. Walk-ins are welcome, but be sure to arrive early to secure a spot.
