In a world where a blog is created every second does the world really need another blog? Well, it's got one. An irregular set of postings, weaving an intricate pattern around a diverse set of subjects. Comment on culture, technology, politics and the occasional rant about life. Alan ... in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Instead the film remains true to the book from which it is adapted, the culmination of journalist and author Florence Aubenas’ six months working and observing the economic crisis through the lives of cleaners in the port of Caen.
Between Two Worlds could really be retitled “Betraying Two Worlds”.
The film’s protagonist Marianne Winckler is quickly recognised by job centre worker who continues to place her in jobs withing the cleaning industry, turning a blind eye to her investigative subterfuge.
We hear internal monologues as Winckler runs over how she will describe situations in her manuscript. Her intention is to expose the low paid, exploited, gig economy underclass to a French society and political system that ignores what it cannot see.
But will she make a difference? Will she end up writing ‘poverty porn’? Will she damage those who innocently take her under their wing and teach how to clean toilets and freshen up ferry cabins (four minutes per cabin to change the bedlinen, scrub and clean).
The betrayal ultimately overshadows the dodgy practices and ill-rewarded work that the author intended to spotlight. The film’s lesson is that the ethics of undercover investigations cannot be ignored. Observing from the inside inevitably exploits those who are being observed. The film awkwardly acknowledges that once the ruse is discovered and the book is published, Winckler’s friendship with the resilient and big-hearted women she spent months living and working with is now one of choice and not necessity. She may wish to be friends for life, but her old colleagues are as trapped in their realm of poverty as Winckler is trapped in her own more privileged yet not untroubled world.
Binoche’s performance as a mature divorced ingénue is matched by the non-professional cast around her, women who have done the jobs they’re acting out on screen.
The exploitation of workers by those hiring the cleaners deserves top-billing but the author telling their story holds the reins of power. The English title for the film works, and that failure is perhaps inevitable given director Emmanuel Carrère’s decision to retain the framing of the original book. That said, it’s still an intriguing film to watch and mull over as you leave the theatre. But I doubt it will make your eyes weep and your heart grieve in the same way Ken Loach could manage.
Between Two Worlds is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until 2 June.
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Top Gun Maverick catches up with Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, now a US Navy test pilot who is still willing to push boundaries. A complex mission to neutralise a target in a “rogue nation” requires him to head back to the elite naval academy and train up a younger generation of pilots to fly low, fly fast and get home alive.
But there is also a modern military storyline that is mostly believable – though could the same missiles that knocked out an airstrip not have targeted the pesky surface to air missiles that every worried could threaten the mission’s safe return? – and acres of flight footage from the cockpits of real jets. Attending a preview screening in the Cineworld Belfast IMAX theatre, chiselled faces and stubbly cheeks filled the enormous screen, and the subwoofers rattled the cinema as the F-18 jets’ afterburners roared.
Enough of the music from the original creeps into the sequel to evoke memories, though don’t expect every 1980’s hit to be there. I don’t think Berlin will be getting any more royalties: instead, Lady Gaga’s Hold My Hand will be spinning its way up the playlists, though is unlikely to become such a cultural classic.
*Late 1980s, on TV on the evening of Boxing Day or New Year’s Eve, packed into the wee room at ‘Auntie’ Mona’s in Jordanstown, away from the chatting adults in the living room. Also the venue for my first taste of Grease and all kinds of other movies.
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“There are some women who choose to overlook their natural maternal instincts in favour of academia, but the fact of the matter is that women cannot dispense with the physical limitations of their sex. A woman who expends her energy exercising her brain does so at the expense of her vital organs, leaving them unfit for motherhood.”
Elevating the quality of the script is the injection of complexity: not all women share the same views on female education, not all staff at Girton agree on the strategies being employed. And there’s a clash between those wanting to rationally argue for graduation rights and the Suffragette movement, potential allies but seen by some as being far too extreme.
The Lyric Drama Studio’s spring production is always a highlight, showcasing emerging talent and able to stage a play with a larger than usual cast and less need for the doubling of roles. Blue Stockings brings twenty performers into the Naughton Studio space, with seating on three sides of Stuart Marshall’s well realised college courtyard set. Moody lighting (Mary Tumelty) and atmospheric sound effects (Chris Warner) help move the audience through the blizzard of scenes in Swale’s script.
Melanie Lavery imbues astronomy student protagonist Tess Moffat with a bold spirit, intellectual vitality, wit and rage. Cycling around the cramped courtyard is also quite an achievement. Real-life head of Girton College Elizabeth Welsh is ably brought to life by Mary Gyles, steering a stealthy line of least possible offence towards her goal of women’s equality in the university system. Her heartless but strategic treatment of Maeve Sullivan (Sophie McGibbon), a poorer student whose scholarship is withdrawn when her family circumstances change, creates a pivotal moment in the plot that unfortunately removes one of the sparkier students.
Aaron Ferguson (playing undergraduate Lloyd) delivers a powerful second act speech about the history of male rule before switching from bluster to threat when challenged. Liam Rowan keeps the audience guessing whether suave Ralph Mayhew is as wonderful a catch for Tess as he first seems. Kealan McAllister brings out the integrity of Thomas Banks who lives with the consequences of tutoring at Girton as well as the male environs two miles down the road of Trinity College.
We might smirk when a man lists jobs unsuitable for women – running the country, being an engineer, and developing a vaccine for smallpox – but while the storyline is set nearly 125 years in the past, the issues endure today.
I interviewed Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell last year and edited her contribution to a radio programme. She had to fight to study science at school. A university list of staff once labelled her as ‘Mrs’ rather than ‘Dr’. Her supervisor was awarded a Nobel Prize rather than the student who spotted the pulsar (though research students’ low rank in the academic pecking order played into that decision). But the astrophysicist observes that there is still much room for improvement in the treatment of women and people from minority backgrounds in academia, and has invested her own recent significant prize money into bursaries to address the inequalities. While most scientists speaking out about their areas of expertise around COVID and vaccines have received challenge and abuse, the strength and vigour of online bullying towards some local female scientists has been appalling.
Women still only make up a third of the MPs in the House of Commons and MLAs in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Female MPs are criticised for wearing skirts and crossing their legs, while the campaign of Northern Ireland election candidates were attacked with fake porn.
Gender pay gaps still sustain. COVID lockdowns stalled women’s progression in industry. It was another 50 years before the women of Girton could graduate. Will it take another 50 years – or longer – before gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps are properly addressed?
The Lyric Drama Studio chose well with this year’s play. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of laughter, and very tight production values, with the cast entering the theatre from unusual directions, often carrying in tables and chairs to reset the stage under the cover of Warner’s booming string stab musical interludes (that wouldn’t be amiss on a current affairs TV show). Director Philip Crawford will be proud of what the cast, creative and production team have achieved in a short time. I doubt it’ll be the last time that many of the performers will be gracing the stage of the Lyric or elsewhere in the city.
Blue Stockings finishes its sold-out run this evening in the Lyric Theatre.
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The biopic follows sharp-tongued Siegfried Sassoon through his experience of war, a medical discharge, his criticism of conflict – “too many have died, too much has been destroyed” – and a succession of unsuitable and unsatisfactory male lovers before meeting his wife.
The excellent Jack Lowden hands over to a curmudgeonly Peter Capaldi as the film jumps rather unsatisfactorily up and down Sassoon’s timeline. An early scene shows Sassoon’s conversation to Catholicism: it feels like this craving for redemption could, or should, become a really significant moment in the story, but the script fails to satisfy.
The likely more talented Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson) of Dulce et Decorum Est school English poetry lesson fame crosses Sassoon’s path. Jeremy Irvine is gloriously out and selfish as Ivor Novello. Kate Phillips is the young Hester Gatty who captures his heart, or at least his desire for progeny, played in later scenes by Gemma Jones.
There’s a lot of agonising and inner turmoil. Sassoon is ill at ease with himself; less at ease with many of those around him; and even less with society at large. He sees his own life and his work’s lack of formal recognition as failure, while also bemoaning the catastrophe of conflict in his writing.
Well over two hours long, Benediction is at its best when it gives generous space for Sassoon’s words, often illustrating them with archive news footage as well as recreated scenes. The haunting sense of sadness and loneliness – not entirely novel feelings among poets – could have been a strength, but somehow the darkness ends up drowning the audience, and by the time the credits roll, while I’ve been educated about Sassoon, I really wish I’d spent two hours learning about Owen.
Benediction is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until Thursday 26 May.
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The mystery of who will be the second DUP MLA for Lagan Valley was solved this afternoon with the surprise announcement that former Belfast South MP and MLA Emma Little-Pengelly was being parachuted in to replace Sir Jeffrey Donaldson who had appeared on last Thursday’s ballot paper and topped the poll.
There’s also the mystery of the lost Whatsapp messages and the phone lost overboard that has reduced the evidence available in Rebekah Vardy’s libel case against Coleen Rooney in London’s High Court. Often referred to in tabloid newspapers as the “Wagatha Christie trial”, that one’s set to run for a while longer.
And then there’s Belvoir Players’ production of Agatha Christie’s 1958 play, The Unexpected Guest.
A crashed car on a foggy night brings Michael Starkwedder (Aidan Hughes) into the Warwick home, stumbling upon the dead body of Richard Warwick (a suitably stiff performance by Robbie Irwin) still sitting in his wheelchair. Written for the stage by Christie, the majority of the first act is a lengthy and somewhat confessional conversation between the stranger and Richard’s wife Laura (Sinead Fox-Hamilton) which also introduces provides handy pen pictures of the other household residents.
Among those not crying about the death of the gun-obsessed, insomniac, fond-of-a-drink, heavy-on-the-accelerator, child-killing monster, we meet the family matriarch (Beth McNair), the all-seeing housekeeper (Maggie Gorman), the all-remembering half-brother (Chris Pegg) who fears being placed in a care home, the light-sleeping nurse (Jonathan Brown), and a politician (Gareth McGimpsey) who is liberal by party and liberal by nature. As you’d expect, any one of them could have the motive and maybe even the opportunity to have pulled the trigger. By the start of the second act, the south Wales police have arrived in the shape of Inspector Thomas (Joseph Quinn) and Sergeant Cadwallader (Deirdre Johnson) bringing with them the early fingerprint analysis from the crime scene.
There’s no single investigator, no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot to hold up a figurative magnifying glass and hunt down the truth. Instead, Starkwedder and the police conduct parallel independent investigations. The ‘aha’ moment drew gasps and a few whispered swearwords from the audience.
Johnson has great fun with Sergeant Cadwallader’s mannerisms and confectionary priorities, while Pegg delivers the standout performance as the underestimated man-child whose stoked-up rage provides much drama and distraction as someone who is vulnerable becomes a victim in the third act leading up to the big reveal.
While some of the descriptions of disability clash with 21st century sensibilities, this is a text in which patriarchy is subverted and Christie gifts her women characters with an inner steeliness while allowing the men to become victims of loose stereotyping.
It’s a script that relies on words not action, so the audience have to work hard and listen to the barrage of clues and red herrings. Playing along is encouraged with the Cluedo-style pack handed to audience members when they arrive. There’s no room for actors to hide or fumble, and on the opening night it was clear that the cast had been drilled until they were very confident with their lines.
There’s just one location – the sitting room, complete with stuffed animals on the wall – and it’s as if Christie had written for a time such as Covid, minimising the number of people on stage at any one time, largely confining scenes to two or three people at a time.
While the satisfaction of being surprised – or smug – is fairly short-lived, The Unexpected Guest is a well-produced whodunit, and director Jessie McGreevy should take credit for the play being performed with confidence by a talented cast who looked like they’d been doing this night in night out for weeks rather than tonight being their first performance.
The Unexpected Guest finishes its run at Belvoir Studio Theatre on Saturday 14 May.
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“There are no secrets in this house” says her vacation mother figure Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), repeating it in case no one viewing An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) has noticed the red flag being hoisted up the plot flagpole. Cáit has swapped one farm holding for another, gained an attentive and tender maternal figure, but retained a somewhat distant male (Andrew Bennett). Yet Seán’s standoffishness thaws as he wrestles with the couple’s own demons and begins to enjoy his new capable and willing farm hand. Meanwhile, the gentle enigma of whether Cáit’s mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) engineered this summer retreat to rescue her daughter is hinted at, but like much in this film, does not need to be resolved for the film to make its impact.=
Adapted from Claire Keegan’s short story Foster, director Colm Bairéad gives the 1981 rural Irish tale space to breath. Much is said, but little is spoken … that is until a nosy parker of a neighbour stage manages an opportunity to interrogate young Cáit and lets a few skeletons spill out of the closet.
First as something of an urchin, then as a shy girl soaking in the love and attention, and finally as a young person who is now much more aware of what she’d like out of life, Catherine Clinch is brilliant in the role of Cáit. There’s a solid assurance in this screen début that allows Kate McCullough’s lingering shots to capture the visible evolution of the central character’s maturity.
Conversations between characters gently switch between Irish and English, which reminded me of the observation that some County Antrim farmers were said to speak broad Ulster Scots to people who came in the back door, but would revert to a posher English dialect when anyone rang the front doorbell. The use of language may have a deep significance to the meaning of the film, but if it has, it’s underdeveloped and sunk as deep as whatever lies at the bottom of the farm’s fresh water well that Cáit stares into.
At one level, An Cailín Ciúin is a study of neglect and of a state that is disinterested in the welfare of children. It’s also a story about solitude, loss and love. The cinematography emphasises looking from afar, peering through half-closed doors, characters vanishing from sight. While there are few surprises in the storytelling, the unhurried pace and the incredible performance from Clinch over the previous ninety minutes give the final scene an unexpected emotional charge.
An Cailín Ciúin is being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 13 until Thursday 19 May.
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No Citation is a voyage of imagination, a real musical ‘trip’ – in all senses of the word – as McCarthy reacts to the mirror held up to his life. Sitting behind a piano, playing while the audience take their seats and finish their conversations, a silver microphone waits to capture the central character’s husky tones. Soon it will be revealed whether we are McCarthy’s audience, or merely noisy customers in his jazz bar.
Nessa Does the Blues is an early introduction to the team’s talents. Later lyrics contain a mixture of re-creation and reflection, with some funny moments thrown in: “yes it was me who left the toilet seat up … who left the butterknife in the marmalade”.
Baby I’m a Fool simply, yet rather profoundly, wraps up McCarthy’s spell in limbo before the more up-beat When I Was Young.
No Citation is an unexpected and unpredictable tale, engaging and entertaining. Director Rhiann Jeffrey allows the show to experiment with form and style. It’s a treat, albeit one with some adult themes, a universal what-if, asking what happens if opportunity and self-indulgence collide, and whether when wrecks are abandoned at the side of the road, there can be a journey to recovered. Spend an hour in the musical company of Kyron, Maeve and Pádraig and enjoy their warm hug of jazz even while the unsettling story catches up with the gorgeous music, and you can make your own mind up at the Lyric Theatre until Sunday 8 May.
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If Wild Men’s somewhat delusional Martin (Rasmus Bjerg) is running away from himself, many of the other misfits he encounters on his adventure through the Norwegian countryside are also evading reality and playing some form of adult dress-up. There’s an old police chief (Bjørn Sundquist) in deep grief for his wife. A village that promises an authentic Viking experience … in exchange for a swipe of your credit card. A police dog whose leave allowance isn’t to be sniffed at. And Musa (Zaki Youssef), a criminal who stole from his former accomplices and is now relying on Martin for security and transport.
Martin’s wife (Sofie Gråbøl wearing a jumper The Killing would have rejected) is the most grounded – and the most underused – catching up with her gormless husband and giving him a piece of him mind. Though the stress of being responsible for two children and a fugitive rabbit could lead her to abscond if a ‘Wild Women’ sequel is ever made.
Directed and co-written by Thomas Daneskov, Wild Men is a mild tonic for these serious times. It’s never laugh out loud, but it does artfully balance the ludicrous and the absurd with a few moment of moderate terror. And don’t miss the start of the end credits for a pleasing conclusion to one of the plotlines.
Wild Men is being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre from 6 May until Thursday 12 May.
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Yet, this lack of conformity in Brian Friel’s play, first performed in 1980, perhaps exposes the beauty of the subtext that so strongly runs underneath the dialogue. The play’s form is nearly secondary to its concept.
Today, as in 1833 Baile Begg, language can be divisive, or at least used to divide. Cultures can be respected or undermined. The meaning of words and events can be changed of forgotten. The urge to colonise can be resisted or ignored. People asserting power over others can pivot from patronising to threatening in an instant. So it goes, to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s refrain.
I’ve often heard and read radio and newspaper commentary about the play and its original production by Field Day Theatre Company in Derry. But until yesterday, I’d never seen a production of Friel’s Translations. That may seem implausible, or embarrassing, but it’s not staged that often, and during the interval I was somewhat relieved to bump into a theatre producer who also admitted this was his first time seeing the play. Phew. I wasn’t alone.
One of the things I loved about visits to the Lyric Theatre as a child was the open stage. As you sat waiting for a performance to begin, the set – or at least the parts that were visible – were already starting a dialogue with the audience about their shape and form and who might inhabit the empty space. Joanna Parker’s slanted set in the Abbey/Lyric production immediately speaks out about the very landscape being unstable. Every piece of wooden furniture is wonky, while an enormous plumb bob hangs ominously over the school teacher’s desk.
The opening scene introduces the Irish-medium ‘hedge school’. And the audience are quickly aware that we’re hearing the characters’ Irish conversations in English, later hearing English conversations and delighting in the misunderstandings and deliberate misinterpretations between languages. Throw in some Latin and Greek and it’s like a 19th century Open University summer school with young and old brought together by their love, or need, for learning.
The two uniformed sappers bring a splash of striking colour to the stage. While Captain Lancey (Howard Teale) has the job of persuading the locals that there’s nothing to fear about the mapping exercise (before turning nasty), Aidan Moriarty has much more fun playing Lancey’s younger colleague Lieutenant Yolland who is falling in love with the local poteen, the Irish language, the stories behind the place names, and perhaps even one of the local women. Acting as translator and collaborator for the English mappers is Hugh’s younger son Owen (Leonard Buckley), an entrepreneur who knows and freely shares the significance of his home culture but no longer appreciates it, preferring the rich cash of his overlords.
Brigid represents rural superstition and is thick as thieves with Doalty and equally opaque about possible acts of resistance towards the English mappers. She’s played by Ruby Campbell, ably understudying an injured Holly Hannaway.
Making absolutely no attempt to wrap up the loose ends – What did happen to the Donnelly twins? Was Yolland found? Did Manus make it to Mayo? Did Sarah find her speech? – Friel instead leaves the audience to ponder his statements about identity, like “civilisations can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour that doesn't match the language of fact” and “words are signals, counters – they are not immortal”. Words can trap us despite their shifting meaning and our shifting sensibilities. And they can also make space for accommodation and new beginnings. Just ask local political leaders about that!
Caitríona McLaughlin’s direction makes good use of the skewed set and builds up a feeling that a catastrophe – agricultural, educational, or political – is just around the corner. The musical interludes between acts are apt, though it feels out of character for Sarah’s character to be singing when her speech is so slight. Translations is blessed on paper with a clever ending, but one that nearly defies direction. That the Saturday matinee audience didn’t know the performance had ended when Hugh’s voice faded along with the stage lights suggests that a radical reimagining of those lines isn’t out of the question for the next company brave enough to stage the play.
Translations continues at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast until Sunday 29 May. It transfers to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin over the summer from 13 June–13 August, before touring through Limerick (16–20 August), Galway (23–27 August) and Donegal (30 August–3 September).
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