Patricia’s Blog
Laundry by Anu Productions has won The Irish Times best production award for 2011 Irish Theatre. The pity is that so few people got to experience this exceptional piece of drama as the audience entered the former Magdalene Laundry in Sean MacDermot Street, Dublin, in groups of just three people during the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. When I…
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I have belatedly been reading More Lives Than One by Gerard Hanberry from the Collins Press. It tells the fascinating story of Oscar Wilde, his ancestors and descendants, and the massive contradictions at the heart of the family. It is also an intriguing mapping of the Wilde west of Ireland lineage from Castlerea, Co Roscommon, through the Ballymagibbon estate at Cong, to Moytura House at…
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It bucketed rain in Dublin’s Sean MacDermott street on Saturday as we waited to be let in. Then we noticed a pair of eyes staring out at us through the grid as the door was unbolted. There was no time to shake the rain from the umbrella before being handed what smelled like a bucket of Jeyes Fluid by…
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It’s traumatic trying to select Edinburgh Fringe events and standing in the queue for the box office only makes matters worse as you’re bombarded with performers pushing their wares. But chatting in the queue can be helpful; it was great to hear so many people talk about Swimming with my Mother by Coisceim Dance Theatre ; but I’d…
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I was back on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork recently after an absence of over a decade. I had forgotten the shock of seeing the tall remnants of the nineteenth-century copper mine at Allihies astride the rocks and the Atlantic Ocean everywhere I looked. If my words were inadequate to describe the experience of the physical landscape…
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It looks like good weather for the holiday weekend in Ireland. Time for breaks and trips. I like to link text and place when travelling. As I’m heading off to County Mayo, I thought I would pull together – in a fairly random way – some of my favourite texts linked to some wonderful Mayo…
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Controversy has a way of revolving around words in Ireland in a strange way. Even when Barak Obama, President of the United States, visits we get caught up in a national debate about Enda Kenny’s welcoming speech in College Green, Dublin, and his use of Barak Obama’s very own words. But, An Taoiseach’s gift of words to…
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Mae Leonard’s new book of poetry makes me think of a patchwork quilt – places, family, history, tragedies and quirky events all woven into a wonderful and seamless whole. I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This has just been published by Doghouse Books and was launched at Limerick’s On the Nail Readings event where Mae read with…
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‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ This is how Graham Greene started his novel The End of the Affair – a book that was published sixty years ago, in 1951. The event was marked in…
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In a nice piece of symmetry Kathleen MacMahon’s novel, So This Is How It Ends, recently signed by Little Brown (UK) and Grand Central (US), will be published in 2012, the centenary of the birth of Mary Lavin, the author’s grandmother. ‘My memory of grandmother as a writer,’ Kathleen MacMahon said, ‘is of her in bed with…
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