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Posts Tagged with Abbey Theatre
65 – Ghostly Visitations: If there’s something strange… On the Irish stage
Back in the carefree days when this blog was simply a way of letting my parents know that I was still alive, I attached the tag ‘ghostbusting in the Hollywood hills’ as a throwaway joke. There was even less time given to coming up with the title, by the way;…
62 – The Unseen Woman
Do you remember the woman that was ‘on the train but unseen’ in September 1937, as the Abbey Company departed for America? Did you catch a glimpse of her two well-behaved children, who disappeared from the platform when May Craig’s brood were still careering around causing mayhem? Did you see…
57 – Painting Pictures: Backstage at the Abbey Theatre
On a wet and miserable Wednesday afternoon in October, when the mayhem of the Dublin Theatre Festival was whirling around on the streets outside, I was one of a small group that hid out backstage at the Abbey Theatre. Led by RHA artist Mick O’Dea, we warmed ourselves on the…
56 – Appreciating The Costumed Sluts
“D’ye hear me, you costumed slut?” Michael demands of his wife Lorna in Cock A Doodle Dandy. Aoife Duffin took part in a reading of the O’Casey play in the Abbey some years ago. She repeats the phrase with relish during our conversation, “You costumed slut!” Shelah Richards was meant to…
55 – Painted Slugs: Pretty Creatures with a Tough Skin
‘It’s not an easy life,’ Aoife Duffin told me, sitting by the fire in the Library bar. ‘It’s … eh, tricky.’ Tricky. It’s a characteristic understatement from this actress, who had been adamant that she’d nothing interesting to share on Jessie Taite and the life of an Irish actress. I…
52 – Respectable Actresses & Disrespectful Women
How does a respectable girl end up on the stage? At the opening night of the gorgeous Maeve’s House in the Peacock last week, I got talking to some people about Irish women emigrating to New York and the cachet of being an Abbey actress in the 1930s. Was it…
51 – It Ain’t Necessarily So: Improbabilities and Beautiful Infinities
There have been enough digressions and diversions and tangents for a little while – Time to get back to Aideen on the hunt that never ends. I keep thinking about that maths problem with the two hares racing, where one gets a head start, and the space in between (in…
50 – Teresa Deevy’s Waterloo
As promised, the sequel to last week’s post on the Irish playwright… Teresa Deevy was a Waterford girl. When she turned forty she was still living at home, where she slept in the bed she’d had since childhood and sought solace in the waves at Tramore when she was having…