When the ravages of Alzheimer’s leave an elderly woman marooned in painful memories of October 1950, her grandchild comes up with a creative strategy.
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Irish stew
A brilliant revival of an Irish classic exposes the play’s fundamental flaws, argues MARY CONWAY
BIBLICAL: Padraig Lynch in Birthright
[Craig Fuller]
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Birthright
Finborough Theatre, London
THE Finborough Theatre, under the inspirational leadership of artistic director Neil McPherson, has for over 40 years belied its tiny fringe setting by producing world-class plays. One speciality has been the unearthing of forgotten treasures from an earlier time.
The current show, Birthright, is one such discovery. Written in 1910 by the Irish playwright TC Murray, it immerses us in the grim reality of a farming family whose lives seem cruelly circumscribed by the rules and traditions of their own rural Irish society.
Murray holds a key place in the history of the Abbey Theatre Dublin, his name often breathed alongside the mighty Yeats, Shaw, Synge and O’Casey.
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MARY CONWAY applauds the timely revival of Miller’s study of people fatally deformed by the economics of survival
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Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play