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Zara Devlin

DruidO’Casey: Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy

October 16, 2023

Director Garry Hynes (a co-founder of the Druid) heightens the portent of this bellicose rhetoric, as well as O'Casey's mockery of it, by having a fractious collection of barroom denizens stop their arguing to silently imbibe the outside speechifying with upturned faces (hauntingly lit by James F. Ingalls). As for a verbal rebuke, a biting one comes courtesy of Rosie Redmond (Anna Healy), a prostitute, who pragmatically declares she won't "fight for freedom that wouldn't be worth winnin' in a raffle!" With O'Casey, female wisdom, unfortunately, is never heeded, which inevitably has dire consequences for female sanity and female safety. [more]

Sing Street

December 27, 2019

By stripping the story of local color—even the projections show little but an anonymous seascape—the creative team does ill by "Sing Street. " Take away the Irish accents, the 1980’s songs and a quick reference to The Famine, and this story of alienated teens could have taken place in Boise, Idaho, or Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Let’s face it, the let’s-put-together-a-band-to-solve-our-problems was even a common theme in MGM films of the forties! (The original "Sing Street" movie, of course, was filmed in Dublin and was filled to the brim with local color and the grimness of economic distress.) [more]