Skip to main content

To the Lighthouse review – fierce and comic thoughts spoken out loud

Cork Midsummer festival online
Virginia Woolf’s novel, centring on an Edwardian marriage and the rupture of war, is richly adapted and beautifully staged with a strong ensemble cast

Shadow and light alternate in Marina Carr’s rich new adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, filmed in Cork’s Everyman theatre in a co-production with Hatch Theatre Company. In this group portrayal of an Edwardian marriage and the rupture of the first world war, Carr finds a theatrical style to match Woolf’s technique of depicting the internal flow of thoughts and emotions, plunging beneath the surface of things.

In director Annabelle Comyn’s beautifully orchestrated production, dialogue is interwoven with private thoughts and reactions, all spoken aloud. The result is often comic, sometimes ferocious. At the centre of the torrent of words is the gracious, much-admired Mrs Ramsay (Derbhle Crotty) spending summer in the Hebrides with her husband, children and friends. Mr Ramsay (Declan Conlon) constantly seeks her reassurance that his scholarly brilliance has not faded. His latest book is “a work of genius”, she says, followed by: “God, you’re exhausting”. For her, this bolstering is what a wife must do in marriage, a prospect rejected by the young artist, Lily (Aoife Duffin), who is also tired of being told that women cannot paint or write, a point underscored heavily.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35UJkCv

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs