Alan in Belfast

Derren Brown: Only Human – combining magic, misdirection and mentalism to great effect (Grand Opera House until Saturday 23 May)

2026-05-20T00:28:25.107+01:00

The audience are quickly integrated into the running of the Derren Brown: Only Human show. And we stay involved right to the finish. The underlying techniques that the skilled storyteller and hustler claims to be employing – never mind the ones that he’s actually using to obtain the wowing results – vary across the different beats of the production.

Everyone attending – and specifically reviewers – are asked not to reveal the details of the almost fully sold-out show. But it’s safe to say that there will be demonstrations of the full suite of mentalism (suggestion, perception, psychology and hypnosis), close magic and the manipulation of objects, misdirection, and large-scale illusion which may put a relatively simple trick at the heart of something so theatrical that it feels immense. There’s lots of live camera work to pick out people in the audience – sitting up in the Gods doesn’t preclude you being called down onto the stage or given a mic to share your input.

Brown is warm and affable. Volunteers – if anyone can truly show freewill in an environment that so carefully controls certain aspects of our experience – all seem very comfortable. Walking up Great Victoria Street after the show, I bumped into one of the early on-stage volunteers carrying his ‘prize’ and he was thrilled with his evening.

Learning to ask the right questions was the theme of local magician Caolan McBride’s impressive Unlocking Sherlock show last October. With a focus on how we relate to the future, the “Only Human” title is loosely referred to during Brown’s two-hour 40-minute show – plan your return travel arrangements accordingly as some of tonight’s audience members hadn’t correctly predicted their exit time! – he keeps returning to another question: “What do you want to be?”

The historical figure of Nostradamus provides a vehicle for a set of in-show predictions which build up and extend throughout the full duration of the performance. Overthinkers like me will spot clues and develop hunches about how some of the illusions might be achieved. But by the time we’ve reached the grand finale, the combination of what seem like huge coincidences and the arms-length nature of one of the final numerical tricks defy easy explanation, and any suggestion that the coherence of the show’s theme didn’t always land is mostly replaced with a sense of wonder that Brown and his expert team can keep the myriad of plates spinning to pull off such a series of big reveals.

(Overthinkers may later want to question the assumptions that are re-enforced at intervals throughout the show to unpick how some of the illusions are achieved. However, the people who’ll get the best sense of what’s truly going on will be the theatre’s ushers who will see the same elements of the show repeated – and probably adapted to go with the flow of audience responses – throughout the week. But they’ll also be keeping tight lipped about their observations! Most people seem happy to sit back, relax and soak it all in and be wowed.)

Derren Brown: Only Human continues at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 23 May before heading off to Plymouth, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and more … ending up in the Apollo Theatre in London’s West End for three and a half months from 10 October.

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Hen – fresh and feathery perspective on a familiar human crisis (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 22 May)

2026-05-18T16:13:31.949+01:00

Over the weekend, I had to watch To Kill A Mockingbird in preparation for the recording of an upcoming episode of Banterflix. Harper Lee’s novel wasn’t part of my GCSE English Literature experience: Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie was the book we had to study. Like the original 1960 book, the 1962 film adaptation examines racial injustice in the American South through the eyes of a child. The mixture of naïve and old-beyond-her-years observation feels fresher than any adult procedural storytelling could have managed.

Reacting to the constraints on his normal mode of filmmaking in his home country of Hungary, György Pálfi’s new film Hen uses the perspective of a chicken. Born and reared in a factory farm environment, the unnamed avian escapologist takes advantage of an opportunity to flee from a lorry transporting hens to the next, likely final, stage of their journey from egg to plate. It’s the first of many breakouts, as the leghorn hen travels to her new home where she ‘flies the coop’ to explore the surroundings of a family-owned restaurant on the Greek coast.

Business isn’t good and the owner’s daughter’s boyfriend decides to diversify their income with people smuggling. Despite the feathery perspective, Pálfi boldly makes the hen complicit in events that will shock but not surprise audiences.

The lead role is played by eight chickens: Anett, Enci, Enikő, Eszti, Eti, Feri, Nóra and Szandi. You can find out more about their jumping and running skills in a Guardian interview with Pálfi. The performance of the hens on screen are always real, never CGIed, though their human handler is magicked out of some footage.

What starts out as an almost flippant film about factory farming, switches to tell a somewhat familiar tale of human trafficking. A novel depiction, but hardly a new story? Yet the fresh perspective remains vivid in my mind days after the preview screening.

The tale of a hen determined to break free from her own captors, who stows away and witnesses terrible things along her journey. The parallels are subtle yet significant with the hopes and experiences of the people we briefly see being moved around ‘like animals’.

Hen is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 22 May.

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Guys and Dolls – agile gamblers with varying degrees of situationships are confronted with the error of their ways in this infectious musical (Belfast Operatic Company at Grand Opera House until Saturday 16 May)

2026-05-13T20:11:29.582+01:00

Nathan is running an nomadic crap game under the nose of the local cop and in spite of a warning from his long suffering fiancée of 14 years, nightclub dancer Adelaide. To raise enough money to secure a new venue, he bets master gambler Sky Masterson $1,000 that he can’t take a local Save-A-Soul Mission worker Sergeant Sarah on a same-day dinner date to Havana. The odds are stacked in his favour, but does anything ever run smoothly for Nathan?

Despite the appearance of a gun on stage, Guys and Dolls is a musical comedy that swerves all opportunities to become a heart-wrenching noir story of tragic loss. Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows’ book with lyrics and music by Frank Loesser is set in early 1950’s New York.

A gang of gamblers view all women as ‘dolls’. The women show their smarts and view the gambling, misogynistic guys with varying degrees of distain. Spoiler alert: Sarah’s spiritual battle with the gamblers in “this jungle of sin” ultimately leads the men through a pleasingly theologically sound process of examining their consciences, confession, redemption and ultimately restoration!

76 years after the show’s Broadway première, Belfast Operatic Company’s ambitious production swims in a sea of talent. The whole company look at home on the stage and ooze enthusiasm and a sense of joy. The chemistry between the potential love interest’s is natural. Dessie Havlin’s confident swagger and tenor voice as charismatic Sky are well matched by Naomi Smyth’s all-round performance as Sarah (and her terrifically trolleyed introduction to rum), with their gorgeous duet I’ve Never Been in Love Before a fabulous way to round off act one.

Greg Fox brings humour, exasperation and pleading to his portrayal of larger-than-life Nathan. Emiko Seawright swings the put-upon artiste Adelaide between hope and exasperation, with starry singing and dancing in A Bushel and a Peck and the playful Take Back your Mink. Adelaide’s only duet with fellow situationship victim Sarah, Marry the Man Today, beautifully blends the voices of Seawright and Smyth. Kudos to Conor Anderson who animates the character Nicely Nicely and ably leads the jubilant 11 o’clock number Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ The Boat. Salvation Army member and Belfast Operatic/St Agnes’ stalwart, Laura Kerr, plays the stern-until-she’s-flexible General Cartwright with gusto ... hopefully not based on anyone she’s met in church!

Guys and Dolls is a long show, running just shy of three hours including the interval, which seemed to catch out some first night audience members (who shuffled towards the theatre’s exits to catch last buses and trains before the second act was even close to finishing). Despite the run time that must have put pressure on rehearsals, director Kerry Rodgers delivers a well-drilled cast who felt like they’re mid-way through a month long run rather than the first of six shows.

The 20-strong orchestra in the pit under Colin Scott’s baton crank out toe-tapping tune after infectious tune, although the meaty second act entr’acte (blame the composer!) almost causes, rather than prevents, audience restlessness with a desire to quickly get back to the on-stage madness.

I can’t think of many amateur groups who could deliver the all-male Luck Be A Lady song and dance routine with such aplomb and nimble footwork. The dice-heavy set design and flamboyant costumes – the guys’ rainbow suits are a triumph of the second act – reinforce the frivolity of the plot. Tim Bell’s ambitious choreography impresses throughout, whether bringing the Hot Box dancers to life, or creating the visually pleasing Havana routine as Sky and Sarah mingle with the carousing street party. The vivid lighting design adds height and movement to scenes, though on opening night left some characters performing in the relative shadow.

Guys and Dolls continues its impressive run at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 16 May.

Photo credit: unknown

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Tea In A China Cup – getting out the good china from 1983 for a fresh brew (Lyric Theatre until Saturday 30 May)

2026-05-09T21:50:00.004+01:00

As part of the Lyric Theatre’s 75th anniversary programme, Christina Reid’s 1983 play Tea in a China Cup is being restaged. Back then she was the theatre’s playwright-in-residence (1983/4) and one of just four female playwrights to have their work produced by the Lyric during the 1980s. One of just four women playwrights in a decade!

Tea In A China Cup is a play about working-class Ulster Protestant women penned by a working-class Ulster Protestant woman who lived in Ardoyne. To borrow from one of the script’s recurring themes, it’s as if the play has been trapped in one of the wooden cabinets with glass shelves dotted around the walls of the Lyric Theatre’s public areas, like the ‘best’ china tea set that no one uses. And more than 40 years later, someone has had the nerve to open the door and lift out a cup and saucer.

This is a play full of sorrow that follows three generations of women in a family. History repeats itself with dangerous military service (across world wars and the Troubles), husbands with little respect for their wives, and a strong sense that the first rule of Protestant club is to never let yourself down in front of other people.

Everything is viewed through the eyes of Beth. When she’s not in the heart of a scene, Amy Molloy lurks to the side, either crouched down or peering down on the action from high up on the multi-storey set. Poverty has constrained Beth’s education along with her wider family’s social mobility. It’s easy to forget that the play is set in North Down rather than north Belfast. Perhaps true to her own Ardoyne environs, Reid writes in a best friend for Beth, Catholic girl Theresa (Louise Parker), who seems to have the best of everything, but who we will discover ultimately also lives under her own family’s omertà and suppresses her actual circumstances when back home from London.

Beth was apparently born asking ‘why?’ and as her character matures, Molloy finds new ways to question difference and physically react to the hypocrisy around her and the perennial absence of fulsome answers. Will she ever find relief from the burden of carrying around everyone else’s past lives? Again, an attitude that will have seemed more novel and x in 1983 than 2026.

The play’s narrative crashes together flashbacks like a script dropped on the floor with its pages picked up in a random order. In the present, Mum Sarah (a brilliant Mary Moulds) is facing the final months of her life with great fortitude. With effort she moves from her bed to a window to watch the bands go past on the Twelfth. Director Dan Gordon starred in the 1983 production. His decades-long work with bands brings the authentic sound of Mourne Young Defenders Flute Band into Chris Warner’s vivid soundscape. (The Lyric’s spatial audio system is put to good use throughout, though the sound of cars going past being placed above the audience’s heads felt jarring.)

Marie Jones has a twinkle in her eye playing Beth’s grandmother, with some great conspiratorial scenes shared with Great Aunt Maisie (Katie Tumelty). The remainder of the cast play family members, council workers and neighbours. Maria Connolly sets a flippant tone as a cemetery department clerk with a bouffant hairdo and a comedy-sized magnifying glass. She later garners more laughs as a costly fortune teller.

One generation’s loss during a world war is followed by the next’s loss of homes as the Troubles begin. Simon Sweeney sympathetically portrays two generations of young men heading away to army training – cherished figures with pride of place on the wall of the family home – with the first departure particularly touching. John Paul Connolly is the more trouble-than-he’s-worth grandfather, while Matthew Forsythe appears in a number of roles including a British Army officer struggling to protect homes under threat.

Ciarán Bagnall’s spinning and sliding set and lighting design cast vivid slabs of light through open doorways in dark building with the cast needing to take care to hit their mark precisely to keep their faces illuminated in the narrow beams. The homes on either side of the stage neatly rotate, revealing perilous ladders that that put your heart in your mouth as you watch cast members clamber up and down. (The forced perspective works well, though I almost expect Scrooge from the Lyric’s recent festive productions to step through at any moment.)

Death rituals and lousy sex education are familiar topics in modern theatre. Shame may still be a driving force in families, but is secrecy still as prevalent? Tea In A China Cup often feels like a play of its time. What producer today would entertain commissioning a play with such a large cast (nine)? Yet its restaging is a much-needed reminder that women are still under-represented in almost every aspect of Irish theatre (except costume design), but will contribute so much when not actively frozen out.

If she was allowed to break the fourth wall, Beth might ask why this play was chosen from the archives to be revamped and presented to fresh audiences? A women-led story on a Belfast stage is almost as unusual then as it is now: Cuckoo-Land is a recent exception. When first staged, the brazen and unfiltered anti-Catholic bigoted utterances of the main characters must have been shocking and almost fearless. But what about today? How much has changed? Those lines of dialogue – sometimes funny, sometimes almost too crass to be comfortable – are a reminder of how far society has come. Sectarianism is by no means dead, but it’s much diluted and has largely moved beyond simple beliefs that people from the ‘other side’ are lazy and don’t have good personal hygiene. Yet communities are still apt to be swayed by fear and difference over hope and cohesion.

Tea In A China Cup continues its run at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 30 May.

Photo Credit: Neil Harrison

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The Bodyguard – high production values but emotionally light adaptation of classic film (Grand Opera House until Saturday 9 May)

2026-05-06T01:28:00.000+01:00

The spirit of Whitney Houston is much less pronounced in this latest UK touring version of The Bodyguard musical (based on the 1992 film) directed by Thea Sharrock. There’s no attempt to recreate Houston’s legendary vocals, and instead the Houston’s back catalogue is explored and reimagined through the eyes and experience of fictional singer Rachel Marron.

Former Secret Service agent turned bodyguard Frank Farmer has been hired to protect Oscar-nominated power balladeer Rachel after she received a series of threats. His no nonsense hyper vigilant approach soon rubs Rachel and her entire entourage up the wrong way. Only her young son Fletcher is on Team Frank. But the tension melts away between Rachel and Frank after a risky club gig goes south and the pair bond over karaoke.

The Bodyguard breaks a lot of the normal rules of jukebox musical theatre. The build-up of tension trades on the fact that the audience are often kept well ahead of the characters. One scene late in the show is a case in point with some in the audience practically shouting to warn the cast about an emerging threat. In complete contrast, there are also moments when large bangs and flames startle the audience. (The appearance of a man wearing a balaclava feels like it’s going to be so much more sinister in Belfast than some English cities.)

Jukebox musicals also tend to rely on a central set that forms the backdrop for nearly every scene. The Bodyguard’s set designer Tim Hatley instead uses floor to ceiling curtains to (visually pleasingly) section off parts of the stage and create windows into rooms in Rachel’s mansion. Scene changes are achieved with elaborate yet elegant automation. The lighting design (Mark Henderson) slowly reveals its depth and tricks over the first ten minutes. Video projection (Duncan McLean) hints at production’s cinematic heritage and also helps immerse the audience in the second act build-up to the Academy Award ceremony.

Tonally, the regular appearance of big musical numbers drives the energy in so many scenes that moments of extended conversation feel neglected. The stage musical plays up older sister Nicki’s jealousy about Rachel’s success, but the revelation about her character turns out to be very different to the movie.

Greatest Love of All is the first song that properly showcases Sidone Smith’s voice (playing Rachel). During the sisters’ duets, Sasha Monique’s vocals (Nicki) tend to shine out ahead of Smith, and her performance of Saving All My Love For You is a low-key but standout moment in the first act.

It’s two and a half years since a previous production of The Bodyguard toured through Belfast (reviewed back in September 2023). This time around, Frank’s initially diabolical karaoke performance isn’t allowed to improve in the second verse of I Will Always Love You, and we never get to hear Adam Garcia properly sing (not even in the final extravagant curtain call).

Overall, The Bodyguard fails to capture the strident emotion of the film. A death after the interval evokes a strong sense of peril but strangely the characters don’t emote significant sadness. Smith/Rachel’s final rendition of I Will Always Love You recreates the musicality of the classic Houston’s version (of Dolly Parton’s song), with a tender a cappella beginning, building up to the powerful middle section and the iconic key changes. The remote cabin singalong of Jesus Loves Me is the first real moment that the normally vocal Belfast audience start to join in, accompanied by the unwelcome sound of text message notifications across the auditorium.

The Bodyguard continues its run at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 9 May.

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Trojans – epic yet contemporary themes explored with a choreography that creates an intimate connection with the audience (Luail at Island Arts Centre)

2026-05-04T14:09:00.001+01:00

The last time I saw work by Luail, their inaugural show occupied the full width of the Lyric’s main stage. Last week, the experience was much more intimate with Luail’s revival of Philip Connaughton’s Trojans asking the audience to share the stage with the talented ensemble for portions of the 70-minute performance.

A huge cube built from trussing occupied the main hall in Lisburn’s Island Arts Centre. Elevated screens requested (but insist they did not ‘order’) the audience to mill around. The dancers crawled out. Soon, we were encouraged to circulate and inspect the now upright and static performers before they began to move once more.

Inspired by Virgil’s The Aeneid, death is quickly introduced. Followed by themes of isolation, displacement, migration, war, and kowtowing to figures in power. Unspoken questions are raised about why no one intervenes or even offers comfort when someone falls. Fear? Self-preservation? Survival of the fittest?

Once the day-glo orange netting is removed from the row of seats on each side of the square stage, we rested … for a while. The netting hints at dangerous sea journeys and becoming trapped in other people’s fights. More audience movement was invited, as no one should ever get too comfortable or relaxed when they’re not in control of their destiny. Death returned at the end of the performance, and this time the audience had been sufficiently coached to join the cast and become part of the story as the screens asked: “Would you be willing to die for the greater good?”

Veteran (and iconic) dancer Joanna Banks strutted around the stage, embodying a quiet sense of absolute power and authority. Playing Juno – queen of the gods and hater of the Trojans – she was seated at ever-increasing heights above contradiction in structures created by Robyn Byrne, Jou-Hsin Chu, Clara Kerr, Sean Lammer, Tom O’Gorman, Hamza Pirimo, Rosie Stebbing and Meghan Stevens.

Like last May’s Chora, the company’s keen sense of space was once again on display, moving at frantic speed across the enclosed stage without clipping other performers. There was a strong sense of trust with backward falls into unseen arms, and a rather beautiful moment as one dancer climbed a hill of human bodies with theh path ahead not fully clear. Emily Ní Bhroin earth-coloured costumes grounded the performance. Luca Truffarelli’s video work triggered scene changes in the audience’s minds with sea, fire and a vista of destroyed buildings. Oberman Knocks’ electronic soundscape was intense: earplugs are handed out to everyone on entry, just in case.

The self-contained set dominated the otherwise naked volume of the Lisburn theatre hall. The production was big and bold, yet intense and intimate. Trojans once again demonstrates the skill of the full time Luail company members, this time up close and very personal, with the audience asked to look into the performers’ eyes. Virgil’s study of violence and conflict and Aeneas’ difficult migration journey still speaks loudly into today’s world, and Luail’s revival of Trojans demonstrates how dance as an artform can be intimate rather than distant, and engender emotion and reflect world affairs in a 10m x 10m stage and not just create a spectacle at a distance.

Trojans finished its tour (Dublin, Galway and Lisburn) on Thursday 30 April.

Photo credit: Luca Truffarelli

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Cuckoo-Land – rage, reason and realpolitik in this punk exploration of the NI Women’s Coalition (Kabosh and The MAC until 26 April)

2026-04-18T00:43:00.004+01:00

It was a pretty punk move to wheel an electoral trojan horse onto the ballot paper and contest the 1996 Northern Ireland Forum elections knowing that two seats were within realistic reach. Amid a sea of majority male candidates and male politicians, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition gathered up supporters, firmed up policy positions, and stood candidates across multiple constituencies, coming out of the election count as the nineth largest party, qualifying to have two candidates elected from their regional list under the provision to make sure minor parties were represented at the talks.

The women were accused by leading politicians – multiple times – of living in “cuckoo-land”. That insult is picked up as the name of Kabosh’s new musical play Cuckoo-Land which documents the forming and storming stages of the NI Women’s Coalition. Accompanied by the punchy sound and lyrics of punk songs written by Katie Richardson, playwright Vittoria Caffola stylishly introduces the audience to the some of the key players who reluctantly but assertively stepped into the political arena to make a difference.

Back in 2023, Owen McCafferty’s much-lauded play Agreement (with the script shaped by director Charlotte Westenra’s years of research) relegated the smaller parties in the 1998 talks process to a throwaway line. A few months later, The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary was staged on the same Lyric stage, a companion piece that examined the life and legacy of loyalist and PUP leader David Ervine.

Finally, in 2026, in the month of the 30th anniversary of its creation, the NIWC story is being told. And it’s a story of energy, passion and commitment. Women who felt that they were invisible in the mainstream parties and did something about it.

The characters deployed demonstrate the class and ideological divisions amongst the group far better than the media I remember being glued to at the tie. They’re not all from south Belfast. They’re not all in violent agreement. But they do all want to see radical changes in representation, consultation and delivery. Monica (McWilliams) is an academic and activist (played by Orla Gormley). Bronagh (Hinds) is the organised strategist: her spirit and approach is so well captured by Orla Mullan! Pearl (Sager) is an east Belfast protestant who brings the voice of victims to the table and can quickly seal deals while outside with smokers from other parties (Caroline Curran). May (Blood) drives everything from behind the drumkit (Allison Harding) as one person sagely commented after the show. Christine Nelson and Maeve Byrne complete the cast playing Avila (Kilmurray) and Anne (McCann).

They’re a mere cross section of the 70+ women who got involved and stood for election. The full set of individuals are honoured, their names read out in a neat roll call and projected on the set’s backdrop. Later, Fergus Wachala-Kelly’s cartoon graphics will project dinosaurs over the wall full of clipboards, and make little clenched fists appear in the clipboards as if they were individual screens or windows.

Mary Tumelty’s lighting design includes fixtures found at concerts. They underscore Cheylene Murphy’s thumping bass line and Jackie Rainey’s electric guitar. Richardson’s lyrics riff off dinosaur metaphors, finding power, and “not hiding my crazy”. The melodies are catchy: the words resonate with the characters’ dialogue.

Soon a list of shared principles has been fashioned, including affordable childcare … stated with a knowing nod to the audience to indicate that the work started by the NIWC has yet to be finished. There is recurring pressure to take a stand on the border issue: not taking a public stand is viewed by some potential allies as taking a stand. Staying neutral shrank the size Coalition’s working group but maximised their pool of potential voters. Later, in the days and hours leading up to Good Friday 1998, the pressure to horse-trade priorities to secure some concrete results challenges their principles and dearly held policies.

It’s not all serious. There’s a fun sequence about Monica’s unorthodox sourcing of a loudhailer, and Christina Reid gets more than her share of witty retorts. Director Paula McFetridge brings politicians from other parties – mostly men – onto the stage as oversized grey heads held up on sticks. Their verbatim dialogue is disparaging of the NIWC members and their aims. What starts out as a jokey way of depicting David Trimble, Seamus Mallon, Peter Robinson, Iris Robinson (who labels the NIWC as “part of the pan-nationalist front”), Jeffrey Donaldson, David McNarry and David Ervine (who would only later begin to challenge misogyny) turns serious when an extended exchange from the Forum is replayed, word for word, attacking and demeaning the participation of the Coalition.

As the 100-minute interval-less performance reaches its climax, the appearance of Mo Mowlan ups the level emotion on the stage, and then an unforced comment about violence against women and girls – one of the Coalition’s original priorities to tackle – rips right through the historical revelry into today’s reality.

The marriage of music and dialogue through the medium of punk turns out to be apt. Cuckoo-Land goes where other playwrights have steered clear. It’s a riot to watch, realistic in its depiction of how politics and perfection are poor bedfellows, and the infectious enjoyment of the cast and crew seep out into the appreciative audience.

Cuckoo-Land continues in The MAC until Sunday 26 April.

Photo credit: Carrie Davenport

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A Bomber’s Moon – bombs, babies and barbarianism in the name of God (Bright Umbrella at The Sanctuary Theatre until Saturday 2 May)

2026-04-16T15:06:00.007+01:00

It’s 1941. Sadie Murray – ‘Minty’ to her friends – is employed in the Ropeworks. Her boyfriend has a safe job working as RAF ground crew. But when he belated tells her that he’s signed up to fly, she isn’t sure when or whether she wants to see her Frank again. Soon the Belfast Blitz will change everything when Minty is caught in a raid and a frisky ‘Free State fireman’ enters the burning building to rescue her.

A Bomber’s Moon is a new play by Sam Robinson and Trevor Gill being staged in The Sanctuary Theatre at the bottom of the bottom of Castlereagh Street in the old Mountpottinger Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church.

Leah Williamson ably brings the central character of Minty to life. Twenty years old, Minty is a sweary chatterbox who tells stories with her eyes, a woman who is a good judge of character, unafraid to stand up to men when she’s scorned, yet has a complete blind spot for her mission hall preaching father. Williamson anchors the plot, thrillingly delivers some of the playwrights’ funniest lines, and skilfully uses variations in physicality to distinguish how Minty warms to the men in her life.

Andy Porter plays the complex character of Jamesy Murray. A firebrand, Catholicism-hating preacher by day suffering from WW1 shell shock, but a more sinister figure at night who keeps a firearm in a biscuit tin and skulks around the east Belfast streets exacting justice and leading men into violence. A deadly mix of pseudo-religious fanatical ideology. Porter allows Jamesy’s character to simmer for much of the play before exploding in the middle of the second act with a well-choreographed fight scene.

The Murray’s front room sits to one side of the stage (complete with porcelain dogs), opposite the air raid shelter which Minty and her fella enjoy escaping to. Glenn McGivern plays Frank Warnock, a young man who is confident about what he wants and pushes forward before thinking … deserving the many slaps Minty/Williamson doles out! McGivern later returns as another character to powerfully call time on Jamey’s rein of terror.

John Travers completes the cast, playing the aforementioned Drogheda fireman, Sean O’Connor, who brings a brief snatch of tranquillity to Minty’s chaotic life. Travers revels in balancing cheekiness with tripping over northern sensibilities and the vocabulary differences that divide the pair’s backgrounds.

Sue Lawley’s voice unexpected pops up as the voice of the radio news reader.

Sam Robinson has a knack of bringing social history to life. There’s a thrill seeing his work performed in the heart of the area he’s writing about, earthed to the streets and places he liberally mentions in the script, connecting people with the lives of previous generations. He avoids the trap – that other’s don’t always swerve – of sugar-coating the history. Robinson is unafraid to include unvarnished truths, bust some myths, and explore the wider context.

85 years on, Robinson and co-writer/director Gill tell a tale of destruction amid two overlapping conflicts, prejudice, discrimination, hypocrisy, gangsterism and the pain of latent love. The casting is superb, and the simple set more than adequate for the locations the story visits.

The first half is full of fun – Minty’s retelling of the tale of ‘the Ballykinler turd’ just one hilarious highlight – while the mood descends into a deep darkness after the interval. Robinson and Gill squeeze a lot into the story and some scenes could definitely be trimmed or even dropped, particularly in the baggy second act whose step-by-step narrative narrative dilutes the underlying drama and an audience’s ability to fill in missing gaps.

A Bomber’s Moon runs in The Sanctuary Theatre until Sunday 19 April (currently a few tickets remain for Saturday’s matinee), with three additional performances to meet demand now scheduled on Friday 1 and Saturday 2 May. If you pop along, watch out for the immersive bar beforehand as the front of house team take you back to the 1940s.

Photo credit: Melissa Gordon/Gorgeous Photography NI

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Anything Goes – nautical nuptials nixed by true love (St Agnes’ Choral Society in Grand Opera House until Saturday 18 April)

2026-04-15T12:03:00.000+01:00

With music and lyrics by Cole Porter and PG Woodhouse amongst the team writing the book, Anything Goes is a sea of madcap twists and witty dialogue. After months of rehearsals, the volunteer cast and backstage crew at St Agnes’ Choral Society are taking Grand Opera House audiences on a nautical adventure that makes a song and dance out of a set of stormy relationships.

Unbeknownst to his boss, Billy Crocker (Allen Gordon) stows away on board the SS America cruise liner in pursuit of a girl he encountered on a one-night stand. A string of new assumed identities and disguises dig an ever-deeper hole that threatens to drown him as he pours out his heart to on-board entertainer Reno Sweeney (Lorraine Jackson), cuts deals with gangsters Erma (Aoiffe White) and Moonface Martin (Martin McDowell), dodges Elisha J Whitney (Paul Maguire) and tries to win over the heart of an English Earl’s fiancée Hope Harcourt (Aideen Fox).

While most of the 1930’s racist sensibilities of the original musical have been papered over with much-needed character changes – really only the song The Gypsy in Me remains – the ensemble have great fun with the period costumes, dancing with mops, carrying around handbag-sized dog props, briefly breaking the fourth wall, and adorning the two-storey set with 50 cast members for the show’s biggest numbers.

Gordon’s smooth baritone voice melds well with Jackson’s mezzo in Billy and Reno’s solid duet You’re the Top. The sailor quartet – Rhys Devlin, Neal Mullan, Ben Davidson and James Hyde – show off their musical talent (almost barber shop) in There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair. (Their rich vocals pleasingly appear again later in the show during All Through The Night.) There are a couple of dance-heavy songs with scant lyrical relief on either side of the interval: Ann Marie Morgan’s energetic choreography is at its strongest in the elongated tap sequences in the song Anything Goes.

Jackson wears a different costume every time she walks on stage. This extravagance is well worth the extended wardrobe rail and busy quick changes as it builds up Reno’s sense of showmanship and pays off in the second act when Blow, Gabriel, Blow brings the house down with fabulous vocals and a very flashy ensemble dance routine. Musical director Adam Darcy gets a big brassy sound from the 12-piece band in the pit and the cast’s singing is consistently excellent, with Fox, Sweeney and Gordon never not thrilling to listen to.

Laura Kerr’s direction of this sea-bound fantasy leans into the farce. Some of the slapstick elements and the dialogue’s zingers will land better as the show’s timings tighten up during the short run. Two smutty innuendos that jar could helpfully be dropped. The story finishes strongly with a triple wedding, although a quick repeated verse of the finale after the somewhat flat curtain call could have left the audience walking out on a real high. (More modern musical scores always spoil audiences with once last medley.)

Over recent years, St Agnes’ Choral Society’s ambitions have seen them take on and conquer big musical beasts like Shrek, The Addams Family, Calamity Jane, and last year’s staggeringly good Come From Away (which matched or maybe even bettered the UK touring production). The best tunes of Anything Goes have survived longer and stronger in the cultural consciousness than the musical’s plot. But St Agnes’ have applied the same dedication and graft to bring the 92-year-old show to life.

Anything Goes continues in Grand Opera House until Saturday 18 April.

Photo credit: Nicola McKee

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Call to Adventure: The life and times of Francis Maginn – a tale of historical language injustice which still resonates today (c21 Theatre on tour)

2026-04-10T13:28:00.012+01:00

Paperwork and files from a building are being cleared. The boss is not impressed when he discovers a woman hoking through the kerbside skip recovering items. The papers and photographs relate to the work of Francis Maginn, a missionary and teacher who became deaf due to scarlet fever aged five. What starts out as an unfriendly tussle opens out into a conversation that opens his eyes and his ears to a fascinating piece of largely hidden history.

Call to Adventure: The life and times of Francis Maginn tells the story of a deaf man who fought for sign language to be recognised and valued in Britain and Ireland. Sign language was banned from schools at the 1880 Milan Congress in favour of – to use the now-outdated vocabulary of the time – “deaf and deaf mute people” using “pure oralism”. Maginn realises that “the suppression of sign teaches deceit” and doesn’t not make the valuable way of communicating go away.

The story follows Maginn as he bounces between Britain, Ireland, America and France. His experiences lead to lobbying and he proposes the creation of the British Deaf And Dumb Association … and is suitably appalled when a hearing man is appointed as the first chair. Along the way, Alexander Graham Bell’s work to promote oralism is critiqued: the inventor of the telephone’s mother was deaf and his wife lost her hearing as a child due to scarlet fever. Yet Bell feared that deaf people socialising together and marrying each other would breed a “deaf race”, something that would be less likely if communication was always spoken and never signed.

Directors Stephen Kelly and Lisa Kelly give the biographical story plenty of heart, and while some conversations necessarily require performers to face the audience so their signing is visible, the death of a close friend of Maginn’s is delivered by the cast as an emotionally impactful moment. Mark Revels-Barker’s set transforms the yellow skip from the opening scene into many different locations.

Supported by Paula Clarke and Eoghan Lamb who multi-role throughout the one-act play, Jamie Rea very ably plays Maginn, conveying the warmth and perseverance of the central character. The cast confidently switch between roles and languages.

Maginn believed that the deaf community should be “free to communicate not conform”. c21 Theatre’s production embodies those values with an ambitious performance that makes the telling of its story equally accessible for deaf and hearing audiences. There’s a beautiful balance to how the script by Charis McRoberts and Paula Clarke is brought to life. A mix of speech, signing (mostly by the characters, though Seamus Henry steps on stage at various points to interpret some speeches), voiceovers, projected subtitles and gestures make sure that everyone can follow what’s happening.

Call to Adventure is a timely history lesson and story of fighting injustice to share while the Northern Ireland Assembly is currently examining the Sign Language Bill. (The bill completed its consideration stage just before the Assembly broke for Easter.)

I attended the packed opening night performance in the Lyric Theatre and was back in the same venue watching a different show the following evening. It was heart-warming on both evenings to see the c21 Theatre audience spilling out into the theatre foyer and bar, with as many silent signed conversations happening as spoken ones.

Call to Adventure’s handling of language reminded me of two older theatre experiences (which were less accessible but still enjoyable). Aisling Ghéar’s production of Dave Duggan’s play Makaronik (reviewed) in the 2014 Belfast Festival was performed with three quarters of its dialogue in Irish, the rest in English and Empirish (a language made up by the playwright with its roots in Orwell’s Newspeak/1984 and pidgin English). Knowing Irish would have made the storytelling much richer, but the brief explanatory surtitles kept the story flowing. And back in 2018, I watched a Serbian play with Macedonia surtitles based on a Danish film with zero English in a North Macedonian international theatre festival. Not everything happening on the stage is about the words: otherwise it would just be visualised radio!

c21’s commitment to telling high quality stories that include a diverse range of characters through highly accessible performances is to be applauded. Audiences will watch opera performed in its original language. So why not plays that are signed? Hopefully their work along with a small number of other local theatre companies will boost the number of playwrights, actors, directors and creatives from the deaf community making work on Northern Ireland stages and beyond.

Call to Adventure: The life and times of Francis Maginn is currently touring through Courtyard Theatre, Newtownabbey (Friday 10 April), Market Place Theatre, Armagh (Thursday 30), Island Arts Centre, Lisburn (Friday 1 May) and Down Arts Centre (Saturday 2 May).

Photo credit: Neil Harrison Photography

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Midwinter Break – an overly gentle exploration of exile and trauma (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 20 March)

2026-03-18T12:53:00.048+00:00

A pregnant woman was caught up in gunfire during the Troubles in what she euphemistically refers to as “as accident” in Belfast. Her baby was saved, but the not-long-married couple quickly quit Northern Ireland for a safer life in Scotland. This cinematic adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Midwinter Break catches up Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciarán Hinds) in later life as they head off on a citybreak to Amsterdam and finally confront each other’s needs and coping mechanisms.

Midwinter Break becomes a film about unfulfilled promises that were made with the best of intentions . Stella continues to carry the physical and mental scars of her and her child’s escape from serious injury. (Julie Lamberton makes fleeting appearances as the young Stella.)

Her faith has been a cornerstone to coping with what happened. But this out-of-character weekend in Amsterdam quickly becomes a point of inflection in her life. Early on in the film, a Catholic priest aptly quotes from James 4 v14: “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Hinds’ Gerry is sullen and withdrawn. His veins are part blood, part whiskey. His signs of affection towards Stella can be replaced with gruff dismissals of her desires. When the pair repeat their refrain of “You and me” / “Me and you” it’s clear that they’re no longer referring to “us” but are really two separate travellers whose lives aren’t as entwined as they once were.

Hinds’ gets to deliver a monologue about Gerry’s backstory to a Derry barman in an Irish pub in Amsterdam. The words he is given to say are flat and unmoving. In sharp contrast, Manville’s equivalent scenes, exploring what’s going on in her head, are so much more stirring and Stella remains the real emotional focus of the story throughout. Although Hinds does get the funniest line in the film when he sums up the state of their relationship by uttering “Cake?!”

The film’s script maintains much of the novel’s familiar texture, but squeezes the essential plot and character journeys into 90 minutes. There’s a lot of atmosphere but the character development – particularly of Gerry – is a bit too subtle. The final scene also lacks the heft to be believable.

Midwinter Break unpacks some of the enduring trauma that people still carry from the Troubles, and also zeroes in on what triggers us to flee certain situations. The unravelling rapport between the two lead characters is well balanced by director Polly Findlay. It’s definitely a film to watch from a comfy seat in a cinema: the opening scenes are so gentle, you’d be tempted to switch channel or get up off the sofa to make a cup of tea if you were watching at home. Midwinter Break is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 20 March.

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Front & Centre / Dangerous Play / Poached (6-8 March in The Playhouse)

2026-03-08T00:45:00.006+00:00

Back in November 2015, the #WakingTheFeminists campaign erupted in the realisation of a dearth of women’s voices and female creatives in the ‘Waking the Nation’ programme launched by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

Academic research backed up the real-life experience of Irish theatremakers. In general, the more funding an organisation received, the lower the female presence in the work. Significant gender pay disparities were revealed.

Focussing on ten of the top (Irish) Arts Council-funded organisations that produced or presented theatre in Ireland, research found that between 2006 and 2015 women who make up a little over 50% of the Irish population were less visible in

42% of cast/actors
40% of set designers
37% of directors
34% of lighting designers
28% of authors/playwrights
9% of sound designers.

In contrast, 79% of costume designers were women.

There’s evidence that some progress was made in addressing the imbalances in the years that followed. The act of measuring or observing sometime can often changes behaviour: the Hawthorne effect.

In the five years that followed, there was more than a doubling of female representation of directors (20% to 46%) and writers (17% to 34%) at the Abbey Theatre. However, male actors continued to outnumber female actors cast in productions despite 57% of students at the Lir Academy being female (2016-2020).

The situation in Northern Ireland largely mirrors what was, and is still, happening south of the border. The inaugural Front & Centre symposium ran in Belfast in May 2025, hosted in QUB’s Brian Friel Theatre, shining a spotlight on new ways of collaborating and creating space for female and non-binary playwriting in Northern Ireland.

A series of panels and workshops explored statistics, drivers, barriers and opportunities, with rehearsed readings bringing work to life in different stages of development.

Front & Centre is back for a second year, this time based up in The Playhouse in Derry. I was there on Friday and heard Olwen Dawe’s analysis of the landscape that was quickly backed up with examples and reflections from Gemma Walker-Farren (one half of MakeyUppers) and Soso Ní Cheallaigh (who creates provocative disability-led work in English and Irish).

Statistics from Thrive (NI’s research and evaluate organisation for arts and heritage) pointed out big differences in how north-west communities consume their arts. In short: less often, but spending more when they do, and often as a whole family experience rather than solo or couple attendance.

Patterns of last-minute bookings (a practice that can lead to touring shows cancelling shows due to low sales) were said to be reflective of the precarity of people’s employment (uncertain rotas, needing to keep available for work, lower regional wages) that then cause precarity in the cultural sector.

Gemma reiterated that audiences were all around and the work – not necessarily labelled as ‘theatre’ – can find people where they live. Less traditional spaces can support all kinds of work. Soso pointed to the loyalty of disability audiences and the foolishness of relying on mainstreaming to adequately capture the need and demand for work in their sectors.

Going out needed to be guaranteed to be fun. Theatre might need to see itself as the pre-drinks for a long evening of entertainment. For many, being asked to sit in the dark and face one direction (towards a stage) for two or three hours cab be both ableist and alienating.

A fascinating discussion emerged about what a matriarchal model would look like in the cultural space. Answers included that it would be built for community, and be reciprocal in terms of how audiences, creatives and venues all benefitted. There was also mention of subscription models and the need to bundle multiple activities together: theatre could come with yoga classes and vice versa.

Friday’s programme finished with two rehearsed readings.

Dangerous Play is a new work by Amanda Verlaque charting the swell and wane of interest in women’s football. She looks through the eyes of two historical players (Lily Parr and Molly Seaton played by Maeve Connelly and Orla Mullen) whose performance and results deserve much greater reputation and recognition. They look on as a couple of today’s players (Nicky/Rachel Harley and Jodie/Leanne Devlin) try and catch the eye of a scout, falling into the trap of battling with each other and forgetting that they can never stop working as a team.

Unintentionally – unless Verlaque was being devilish! – some of the dialogue screams into the Front & Centre narrative as much as into the sporting story where obstacles need to be tackled despite little money and a lack of media interest.

“It’s hard to put up a fight when no one knows you’re there.”

“Limited resources mean hard choices”

The rehearsed reading finished with a Orla Mullan bursting into song, throwing a whole new light on Verlaque’s ambition for Dangerous Play that feels like it can comfortably sit as a contemporary companion that doesn’t compete with Tara Lynne O’Neill’s 2021 Rough Girls.

Poached by Alice Malseed and Catherine Rees was a read through of what felt like a pretty finished script. A prime ministerial figure steps up to announce plans to control conception as part of a new Population Limitation policy. A ‘child consideration’ process will vet mothers. Maud (read by Rees) doesn’t score well when the state inquisitors (read by Shannen McNeice and Malseed) pose their pointed questions. Other coworkers (including those read by Orla Graham and Vicky Allen) suggest ways of gaming the system.

The satire is rich yet beautifully understated. Women alone are judged for their suitability to conceive and bring up a child. Children have become a value-laden commodity in The Great Egg Race (without Heinz Wolff and his mad 1980’s contraptions). The state stretches its hands into career paths while holding eggs as ransom. Despite being a rehearsed reading, Vicky Allen’s eyes lit up as she morphed into a new evil cyber genius who might have a way to beat the system without scrambling the conception opportunities for the women of Northern Ireland.

Thanks to Karis Kelly for the opportunity to attend Friday’s Front & Centre. If my work schedule had been different this weekend, I’d have stayed in Derry to see Carley Magee’s Growing Pains on Saturday evening (20:30), and take in the always mind-blowing scratch performances (Sunday 14:30) and the extract reading of the hotly anticipated Hello Charlie by Caoimhe Farren (Sunday 19:30). Tickets available for the workshops and performances on The Playhouse website.

Some quick reflections …

With funding levels that are so far below England, Scotland, Wales and Republic of Ireland, every area of the sector has been living under sustained pressure for more than a decade. Producers can only take so many risks. Venues need bums on seats (and drinks bought in bars) to keep the lights on. Creative decisions are clearly compromised. The familiar is rehashed. The reliable is dusted off and needs to be a blazing success in order to cover any loss-leading work that is commissioned. No matter your gender, (dis)ability or sexuality, it’s hard to get new work developed and staged. That it took five years for the award-winning script Consumed by Lyric writer-in-residence Karis Kelly (and one of the driving forces behind Front & Centre) to make it onto a Belfast stage is staggering. And her experience is just one of many.

A drive up to Derry is always worthwhile. There’s a directness that imparts local wisdom in a way that lands and doesn’t skirt around sensibilities. The nuances of audiences in the north west also speak into my stomping ground around greater Belfast.

Taking theatre into unconventional venues is already quite common in west Belfast. I’ve learned the way up to The Roddy’s on the Glen Road, most recently to see Julie (which brings to life a piece of local history in a way that connects with so many in the local audience). But to hear this weekend that Gina Donnelly’s play Anthem for Dissatisfaction – which premiered up in The Roddy’s – is being the funded (on the back of being scouted at Edinburgh Fringe Festival) to tour internationally is amazing news. Vibrant work telling stories that are both universal but also deeply rooted in this place. Pray for the subtitler!

Staging The People’s Panto in the acoustically harsh and wingless-staged St Comgall’s community space is a technical challenge for the team at Brassneck. But the quality of Neil Keery’s scripts, the committed performances, direction that neatly works around the venue’s limitations, and the rock bottom £10 ticket price means it deserves to be packed out with every seat sold.

Talk of a subscription model for theatre isn’t totally without precedent. The Grand Opera House (Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum) and the Lyric Theatre (Ensemble/Players/Principals/Directors Circle) membership tiers swap up-front payment for 2-for-1 tickets, discounts and advance booking (GOH only). The stream of familiar faces I recognise when reviewing shows on opening nights suggests that the schemes are well supported.

Away from theatre, Queen’s Film Theatre’s membership scheme offers a number of free tickets, discounts and loyalty points). Omniplex Cinemas’ MyOmniPass a free ticket for every movie being screened in exchange for a monthly membership fee. Though due to the seemingly inevitable creeping process of enshittification – my interview with the term’s creator Cory Doctorow at last year’s Imagine! Festival can still be viewed online – a monthly price rise was soon followed by seats being restricted to the rows where you’d prefer not to sit.

The bundling of different leisure activities would work better if existing arts organisations didn’t already have distinct physical footprints. There’s a parallel universe in which the Lyric’s theatre and rehearsal spaces together with MAC’s gallery, social and event spaces were collocated with the Crescent Arts’ thriving programme of courses and workshops. Though there’s nothing to stop a golden ticket scheme being run across multiple commercial venues or multiple producers.

Outside of Belfast, councils own and operate the majority of the main traditional regional theatre spaces. (There are some significant exceptions.) This has merits (closeness to the funder) and demerits (risk-averse and can become very inflexible). Amateur dramatic societies continue to thrive in some areas. There are almost too many youth theatre programmes to count, each creating a niche for itself with passionate freelancers delivering training and encouragement week after week for little financial reward.

The opportunities for getting new work in front of an audience are very limited. Belfast Playwrights’ 10-Minute Play festival fills a gap left by the old Pick’n’Mix festival. The new writing rehearsed readings have vanished from recent Belfast International Arts Festival programmes. Dramaturgs and literary managers no longer seem to be employed by theatres. Accidental Theatre’s 24-hour scratch play events haven’t run for a while. Though check out Amadan Ensemble’s evening of Quickfire Plays on Saturday 28 March as part of Imagine! Festival. Update - And Tinderbox’s INCUBATE festival (with ten half-hour presentations of new work) is coming up in The MAC on 18 April.

Other than stand-up comedy, only a minority of small-to-medium sized work staged in Belfast seems to tour around the rest of Northern Ireland. The big productions about Derry don’t tour to Belfast. The exchange of work between Belfast, Derry and Dublin is shockingly small. (The poor public transport links between the cities also prevent popping up or down to another city to see a show and get home the same day despite the relatatively short distances involved.)

There’s no single silver bullet. And the sector’s structural challenges quickly distract (me) from Front & Centre desire to see an even playing field that makes space for a range of voices in front of and behind the scenes … no matter the traditional/untraditional venue or whether the artistic event is sold as theatre or a jolly good time.

But it does seem that trying to make work that is more accessible, more transportable, and faster to restage when opportunities arise will benefit some theatremakers and expand audiences.

Writing new work that reflects the existential issues of today/tomorrow (and situations from the past) can appeal to audiences. Seeing yourself or your ancestors on stage is powerful. Holding truth to power on a stage can be as effective as writing a consultation response to an Assembly committee or an Executive department. There should always be room for great entertainment. But what is funny and gripping can also contain a sense of questioning and challenge.

Structurally, Northern Ireland needs

a mix of differently sized (and differently heated) rehearsal spaces;
small-medium-large performance spaces, some based in bars and old churches, and some without the word theatre anywhere to be seen;
pathways to try out work in smaller venues and allow successful productions to switch to larger stages (while other shows may go back to the drawing board);
ways of finding accommodation to support touring productions;
organisations willing to commission new work with a financial cushion to live with the occasional failure;
a lot more opportunities for new work to be read, developed and rehearsed.

Front & Centre will hopefully return. It needs to. The structural challenges are not going to disappear without a sustained push. Other arts/cultural campaigns over the next year may be able to pick up on F&C’s statistics that can show low funding levels in NI are disadvantaging vital voices.

Listening to different regional voices also challenges easy thinking. Improving opportunities for the groups targeted by Front & Centre will benefit the whole sector. Representation of disabilities could switch from being a rare success in mainstream productions to something that happens as a matter of course. Stories from newcomer communities are largely missing from NI stages at the moment: being open to voices who are currently ignored will help everyone. Counting the number of people in categories will change the sector.

I want to find out what happens in the football match after Amanda Verlaque’s cliff hanger. I want to see how the satirical look at government poached eggs can be refined and sharpen further its great concepts. But I’d also love to see Vittoria Caffola’s Bloodlines (who could forget the tale of a vegetarian butcher needing an injection of high quality sperm into her ovaries and her lesbian sister studying genetics set against the 1911 Belfast Eugenics Society!) get a full production along with so many more rehearsed readings and excepts that have stuck in my mind over the years. And pray that someone puts Abbie Spallen on stage performing her play Strandline in a Northern Ireland theatre.

Consumed – soup is taken while intergenerational trauma comes back to bite four generations of women (Lyric Theatre until Sunday 8 March, then Park Theatre in London)

2026-02-28T00:48:00.001+00:00

Do we pass on trauma from the Troubles and even as far back as the Irish Famine from one generation to the next as easily as we learn to repeat the poor patterns of our parents’ behaviour? Consumed watches what happens when Jenny (Caoimhe Farren) and 14-year-old Muireann (Muireann Ní Fhaogáin) fly over from London to celebrate Great Granny’s 90th birthday. They find that matriarchal Eileen (Julia Dearden) hears more than her speaking-slowly-and-loudly-while-flapping-around daughter Gilly (Andrea Irvine) will acknowledge.

Between each generation of this family lies a series of secrets whose concealment has been rehearsed. Blame is always directed upwards and never towards the men in their lives. But it’s the very absence of men, together with the almost unfiltered connection between Great Granny Eileen’s mind and her mouth, that nags away at the veneer that pretends all is well, digging up deeper and deeper surprises from the present and the past. And that’s before Eileen dives down the rabbit hole of identity and delivers one of the biggest laughs of the evening (ahead of a couple of much more sobering revelations).

By extending the more common three generation family tree to four, playwright Karis Kelly cleverly allows the audience to glimpse a much broader view through the window of history. With three generations of women failing to own and address the trauma they are carrying, is the 14-year-old neurodivergent ‘English’ girl the best equipped of the four to draw a line in the sand and lead the family out of their dark exile?

Lily Arnold’s set uses a peculiar perspective to explode the kitchen while retaining a view of a hall cupboard and a rising staircase. An archway – so large it shouts out that it is a proscenium arch – suggests that great drama is afoot. Guy Hoare’s flickering lights on top of Beth Duke’s unnerving sound design drop heavy hints – a little too unsubtly for my liking – that proceedings will take a darker and more psychologically-raw and yet also physical twist before the conclusion when the family can no longer keep their secrets buried.

Dearden’s Eileen knows which side of the border she wants to live on. She’s sweary and direct, in sharp contrast with Irvine’s fussy Gilly who incessantly tidies the kitchen table while forgetting that there’s a steaming pot on the stove that may be beyond rescue. Farren plays Caoimhe as a woman who escaped Northern Ireland and her ‘melt’ of a mother (who believes hairy legs need must be covered) for London but has kept her Irish roots and many of its vices.

Muireann is believably penned as a young woman who is overwhelmed by issues of climate, agriculture, food and wellbeing. We watch her address her anxieties by pushing her chair further and further away from the rest of the family, one time escaping upstairs and another hiding under the table. And when the pressure can no longer be contained, Ní Fhaogáin (making her assured professional debut) allows Muireann’s valve to blow, exploding with articulate and passionate arguments that nearly always fall on the deaf ears of the rest of her family. If they could only listen to this troubled soul, they might learn to address their own demons.

Director Katie Posner keeps things moving over the 80-minute one-act performance. Soup is heated, spilt, and scoffed. Arguments give way to joy before old hurts return. The darkness of Kelly’s award-winning script – together with lashings of local idiom and sensibility – feed into waves of belly laughs with Belfast audiences finding no cow too sacred to become amusing. I can’t help wondering how many references (like the nuance of Ballyholme vs Bangor) will have flown over the heads of London, Sheffield, Coventry and Edinburgh audiences for whom the references are abstract rather than woven into the fabric of life?

The fact that Karis Kelly’s finely tuned script which won the Women’s Prize for Playwriting back in 2022 (while writer-in-residence at the Lyric) is only making it to a stage in Belfast in 2026 speaks of both the lack of opportunity to mount new work and the slow speed of staging work that does make it onto the production conveyor belt. Let’s hope it’s not so long before a second work will be staged.

Consumed continues its run in the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until 8 March before transferring to Park Theatre in London (18 March–18 April) in a remount presented by Paines Plough, Park Theatre and the Lyric Belfast.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith Photography

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Animal Farm – modern day protesters give their take on Orwell’s classic tale (Tinderbox Theatre at The MAC until 28 February)

2026-02-21T21:23:00.002+00:00

Four stellar performances anchor Tinderbox’s adaptation of Animal Farm. A group of women have been placed in a distressed holding cell that looks like it had long been abandoned until a large number of people were arrested at a protest and suddenly needed to be held, just part of a wider state crackdown. In an act of solidarity, they each declare “I am George Orwell” and from that point the four refuse to say anything other than recite sections of the famous book.

They work their way through the main beats of the story: the overthrow of the humans, the seven commandments of animalism, the plans for a windmill (brought to life with a precarious stack of chairs), moving back into the farmhouse, making deals with the humans, and turning on each other.

You need to suspend disbelief – though this is a Tinderbox production so that very much comes with the territory – that anyone, even fervent anti-totalitarian protesters, could quote huge chunks from Orwell’s allegory which celebrated its 80th publication birthday last summer. (Wearing a different hat, I produced an episode of BBC Radio Ulster’s Sunday Sequence devoted to the anniversary, and the interview with the director of the Orwell Foundation Jean Seaton, and the Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (whom Seaton says is a modern day Orwell) can still be heard if you’re on the UK side of the BBC’s geoblock wall.)

The protesters’ Animal Farm excerpts are interrupted by tannoy announcements from an unseen guard who warns that their behaviour is crime and will not be tolerated. In my head, the voice through the speaker on the wall was going to end up narrating a smaller contemporary story that would be neatly woven around the familiar Animal Farm tale. However, Tinderbox had their own ideas and the guard’s admonitions merely grow steadily more severe and increase the fervour of the women’s literary protest.

Tracey Lindsay’s set consists of a cell with metal-legged tables and chairs. The grimy concrete back wall (with its convenient white board) is raised up from the MAC’s floor. The gap beneath enables a rather effective special effect as the women’s behaviour finally tips the authorities to react with more than words.

The whole production could perhaps also be viewed through the lens of a fever dream, inspired by the increasingly totalitarian behaviour of some actual governments – and particularly some political leaders – as a vision of how people could fight back by holding a mirror of Orwell’s analysis up to state perpetrators who seem to be skidding towards repeating some very regrettable history.

No matter how you choose to analyse how Tinderbox have set the story, Orwell’s concepts are made to feel very contemporary. History is being rewritten. Former allies are being turned into enemies of the state. Power is being seen to corrupt. Fighting back is being crushed with violence and oppression. Old enemies are becoming strange bedfellows.

So much of the movement on stage and the use of props has clearly been devised during the rehearsal process. The simple chairs become attack dogs. Rosie McClelland’s costumes combined with the actors’ twisted bodies, stance and gait transform them into pigs, horses, a cat, and rather brilliantly, chickens.

Like Boxer, one of the book’s many characters that she plays, Clare McMahon is a workhorse who carries some of the crucial parts of the story, starting with Old Major’s idealistic speech that has to be so well anchored for the subsequent creeping rewriting of history to be effective. Clare also has the ignominy of playing the greatest number of characters that come to a grisly end.

Catriona McFeely is amazing throughout, with her animated hen one of the strongest and funniest moments of the play as she flicks through a range of emotions. Her physicality rarely pauses, bounces up on top of tables, transforming into a flirty cat, playing the pig Snowball as well as the farmer Mr Jones.

Susan Hoffman’s whiteboard marker-sniffing Squealer delivers believable missives to the other animals that misdirect them from the truth.

Jo Donnelly is no stranger to playing political tyrants, and her stare-eyed take on Napolean is fearsome, doubling down on those questioning the logic of what is happening, rewriting history with an iron fist, and letting others do his dirty work until he eventually gets blood on his hands.

In recent years, Tinderbox have excelled at putting a contemporary spin on classic tales. Shifting Rhino into the world of gaming and screens was genius. Switching Yerma from Spain to rural Ireland rooted the playwrights message in the local.

This adaptation of Animal Farm is a fine retelling of much of the tale and the production’s lens of protest certainly accentuates the contemporary resonances. Napoleon announcing that the windmill will be known as Napoleon’s Windmill has an eerie echo of arts centres and airports being named after presidents. The fact that it’s humans rather than cartoon animations playing the animals and speaking the pigs’ perfidious dialogue adds power to the message. But the fine animal characterisations and the energy on stage still seem to be lacking something that would more substantially glue the reciting protesters to their fulsome knowledge of Orwell’s text and the manner of their protest.

Animal Farm continues at The MAC until 28 February.

Photo credit: Carrie Davenport

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The Barber of Seville – a finger-picking and financially-wise Figaro engineers romance (Lyric Opera Ireland at Grand Opera House until Saturday 21 February)

2026-02-18T19:53:00.007+00:00

Figaro can fix your love life as well as spruce up your barnet. The barber helps a poor student Lindoro to enter the Seville home of a beautiful woman to woo her. (Nothing remotely suss about that!!) But her grumpy guardian Bartolo has plans to marry Rosina. Cue multiple disguises, cunning plans being rumbled, a true identity being revealed, and an opera-sized heart to end Gioachino Rossini’s comedy masterpiece (with libretto by Cesare Sterbini).

Lyric Opera Ireland’s director and designer Cav. Vivian J Coates has conjured up a modest but colourful production of The Barber of Seville which puts the characters at the heart of the performance without using flashy sets or gimmicks (other than a gorgeous cloud that floats down). After some curtain twitching fun during the very hummable overture, the opening scenes don’t really impose a sense that the show will be comic until Figaro properly bursts onto the stage bringing a warmth and a physical buffoonery that lights up the mischievous wordplay in Sterbini’s lyrics.

The paper programme instructs audience members to “please refrain from unwrapping sweets during the performance”. One gentleman near me with a noisy bag of even noisier individually wrapped sweets competed with the 29-piece orchestra (under the baton of Carmen Santoro) and the cast until being tapped on the shoulder. With neither the singers nor the majority of the orchestra being amplified, the volume levels are lower than you might expect, so distractions are particularly unwelcome. (At Tuesday evening’s performance a mobile phone rang out at the exact moment Fiorello was crooning about “No one is around to interrupt our singing”!)

Morgan Pearse’s finger-picking and financially-wise Figaro plays a mean guitar and is the stand-out presence on stage with a great set of gestures and a winning vitality. His baritone voice cuts through the technically complex Largo al factotum with its rapid-fire lyrics like a hot knife through butter.

With Rosina much talked about but little heard in the first act, it’s only after the interval that we get to hear more of Sarah Richmond’s rich and powerful mezzo soprano voice. Rossini’s women are underwritten and somewhat two-dimensional. So it’s immensely pleasing that soprano Sandra Oman delivers a star turn as Bartolo’s feather-dusting maid Berta who sums up the dysfunction that surrounds her household in the song Il vecchiotto cerca moglie.

Matteo Torcaso manages to look silly but sing very seriously with a big blob of shaving cream on Bartolo’s nose. The character (first introduced as) Lindoro is played by Randall Bills and becomes a man of many disguises whose tenor voice blends so well with Pearse and Richmond.

Wearing maroon berets, the male chorus are the very model of a tuneful paramilitary force, including local lads Dessie Havlin (a regular in the NI Opera chorus) and Harrison Gordon (who only a few years ago was starring in the Belvoir Players panto and a youth theatre production of Footloose).

At times Coates shows great playfulness, allowing lyrics like “quick let’s get going” to become a prolonged joke, getting Figaro to shave off a beard to the delight of the audience, and orchestrating a case of rapid onset Scarlet Fever. Coates has a fine sense of farce and is unafraid to use large props to ridicule a scene or create a very modern-looking (but not too anachronistic) Instagram moment for the finale. Some choreography is less surefooted with no one standing remotely close to the character singing the line “don’t touch me” in the first act.

Heavy, menacing marble columns are made to glide around the stage by the female chorus. Sometimes their reconfiguration adds to the tension in a scene; sometimes the movement becomes a distraction. Large TV monitors for the cast to see the conductor at the side of the stage (rather than their usual location mounted on the front of the grand circle) block sight lines for some of the audience in the stalls.

Sung in its original Italian, English surtitles are displayed above the centre of the stage. Tuesday evening’s performance finished after half past ten, so bear that in mind as some people had to leave early to catch the last bus or train home.

Operas have large casts and require sizeable orchestras. They’re bold, brash and make big statements. Nothing is too ostentatious or outlandish in the world of opera. Everything is magnified … including the costs to design, rehearse and stage. Working within these constraints, Lyric Opera Ireland’s The Barber of Seville is a pleasing no-nonsense production of a classic opera. The costumes are colourful but traditional. The story-telling stays true to classical expectations. The performances are strong, although the compact nature of the cast meant that the final anthem, Amor e fede eterna, si vegga in noi regnar, lacked a bit of oomph and would have benefitted from a greater crescendo.

The Barber of Seville continues its short run at the Grand Opera House on Wednesday 18, Friday 20 and Saturday 21 February. Alongside the annual production from NI Opera (down from two a year to one), it’s great to see a second company bringing opera to a Belfast stage.

Photo credit: Federica Ferrieri (top) & Neil Harrison Photography (all the others)

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The Human Voice – truth, lies, betrayal and a forlorn sense of hopelessness (Prime Cut Productions at Lyric Theatre until Saturday 28 February)

2026-02-14T14:32:00.002+00:00

A day later and I’m still haunted by just over an hour spent in the life of the woman at the heart of The Human Voice. She’s a professional working in a health and social care role, and instinctively walks through a therapeutic technique for the man at the end of a long phone call she wishes would never end. But there’s no one to offer similar help to address her own distressed state.

The untidy bedsit mirrors her state of mind. The dishevelled bed clothes speak of restlessness rather than passion. The record player that’s still spinning with the needle stuck in a grove feels emblematic of the woman’s condition. The packed bag at the door is a symbol of the imminent removal of the evidence of past joy. She looks out through a curtain and the audience can see real cars passing on Ridgeway Street (only the second time I’ve seen that window integrated into a production). There is a world outside, but she has trapped herself in a flat that is now empty of love and almost devoid of hope.

Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice) has been adapted by Darren Murphy and is set within a half mile radius of the Lyric Theatre. It’s a case study in muted theatre, with no room of showy hysterics. Ciaran Bagnall’s lighting states gently caress his blue walled set. Rosie McClelland’s costume design extends from painted toenails, through jogging bottoms, and up to a gorgeous mop of copper auburn hair. Conor Mitchell’s soundtrack uses pizzicato cello sequences that periodically touch the action before fading away. The woman’s reverie – she has a name but it’s only revealed towards the end – is only interrupted by her work phone (she’s insistent that she’s not on the rota to be on call) and her personal mobile (longing to speak again to her departing lover).

Seating banks surround three sides of the bedsit, the audience almost hugging the troubled figure who claims to be “a young-ish woman of independent means who follows her heart”. There is much talk of telling nothing but the truth, with some lies thrown in for good measure. Closure seems to be far out of reach.

After a pleasingly unexpected entrance, Nicky Harley pads rather than prowls around the flat. She steers her forlorn character between being somnolent, morose, agitated, resigned and defeated. Emma Jordan’s delicate direction is unhurried, and Murphy’s script drip feeds details about the situation we are watching unfold. Piecing together the elements of the puzzle – and I’m being careful not to reveal too much of the jigsaw in this review as that process is the almost the point of this piece of theatre – there are moments when I wonder whether the woman is experiencing a psychotic episode or something supernatural is at play.

Yet the pendulum of reality swings back towards a more painful certainty that she has been badly wronged and is struggling to come to terms with what is happening. The final scene sees the woman interrupted once more by her work phone and Harley’s changed tone and mood shifts, suggesting that this broken woman may still be ready and willing to help another person at risk.

Harley ably joins a long and hallowed list of incredible actors who have taken on the challenge of this role on stage and in film. She’s no stranger to monodramas, and lauded for her (tragi-)comedy roles. Like a previous collaboration with Jordan (The Beauty Queen of Leeann), Harley brings her A-game to a serious story dotted with a few episodes of gentle humour. While the plot is almost deliberately absent of big moments of drama, the intricate detail of this extended phone call carries the unravelling story of devastation and betrayal.

The Human Voice is a Prime Cut Production and is being staged at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 28 February.

Photo credit: Ciaran Bagnall, featuring Nicky Harley

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Expösed – a titan of fashion’s personal standing is seen to flag (Baby Lamb Productions at Accidental Theatre until Saturday 7 February and then London)

2026-02-06T23:13:00.000+00:00

Some of the freshest theatre comes from companies formed from young actors who’ve trained together and graduated from drama courses and colleges. It can be raw and rough around the edges, but it puts training into practice and is full of an urgency to create.

Founded by alumni from The Oxford School of Drama, Baby Lamb Productions has brought Expösed, its comedic take on The Emperor’s New Clothes to Belfast this weekend.

Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale is a well-known story about vanity trumping common sense and pride coming before well sign-posted humiliation. Baby Lamb whisks the audience’s imagination over the Berlin Fashion Week where Ze Emperor’s latest collection has bombed. New thinking is required to rescue the reputation of his underwhelming brand, and more importantly, boost his flagging personal standing. Out of the ‘ideas stream’ jumps a collaboration with the creators of Nücloth.

Jacob Baird’s delusional Emperor (whose private philosophy is based on his fondness for The Lion King) is clad in white from top to tie, mimicking the blank canvas of his mind. His court includes the uber-cool Johan (a very believable Nicholas Alexander) who turns to contemporary dance when words fail him, and commercially savvy Yanik (Ashok Gupta dressed in Steve Jobs’ uniform). Nisha Emich plays the competent, straight-talking but totally overlooked aide Maureen with great empathy. Two ‘French’ designers offer an exclusive deal to show off their cutting-edge fabric: confident snake oil saleswoman Bree (Hannah McLeod who also directs the show) and her bumbling sidekick Oche (Kiera Murray).

The original five-minute fairy tale is satisfyingly stretched out to create a 70 minute long show with lots of visual humour, clever dialogue, slow motion sequences, puns, carefully placed sound effects, a pumping and very cheesy soundtrack, and very knowing acknowledgements of the doubling of parts across the cast of six. The ensemble mostly makes sense of the mélange of comedy styles and techniques thrown at the elongated story. The mentions of fast fashion and body positivity are mainly there for the story’s punchline, but hint at threads that could have been more fully woven into the fabric of the script.

Given that the Emperor cannot comprehend that his servant Alexa isn’t a robot, it’s no surprise that the voice of reason at his side, Maureen, is almost invisible to him. Jacob Baird’s natural Belfast accent makes the Emperor’s moment of honesty speaking truth to his own soul rather profound for the home audience. The quick costumes changes are effective, and the final crocheted outfit is certainly worth the wait.

Leaving aside very established companies like the amazing Bruiser, the Northern Ireland theatre scene doesn’t have many indigenous outfits in its pipeline like Baby Lamb with a talented ensemble of young performers creating new work that is primarily comedic in nature (and not solely focused on Norn Iron or Troubles stories). So it was a joy to sit down and enjoy the craic as the six versatile visiting performers took on ten roles and jumped from one skit to another with this witty show. It’s a great showcase for their talent, and long may their ingenuity and energy feed their ability to stage fun theatre.

You can catch the final performance of Expösed in Accidental Theatre on Saturday 7 February before their UK tour whisks them away to Lion & Unicorn Theatre in London later this month.

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Maggie’s Menopause – another stage of life but no less eye-wateringly funny (Grand Opera House until Saturday 7 February and NI tour)

2026-02-05T22:52:00.001+00:00

Maggie Muff is older, but is she any wiser? The east Belfast woman’s escapades began in book form before Leesa Harker translated Maggie to stage with comic actor Caroline Curran bringing the titular character to life along with her entire colourful friendship group.

Back in 2022, I was somewhat bemused when I joined their adventures in Benidorm in episode 3: Maggie’s Fag Run. Last January, there was a fond and raucous recap of the first four tales. And this year, her story once again jumps forward to Maggie’s Menopause.

The ‘change’ means Maggie is now flushed and sweating profusely, though her vaginal dryness means her sex-life is all but a collection of fun (and not so fun) memories. Big Sally Ann continues to be the one driving much of the story. With a cry of ‘no surrender’, she’s on a one-woman crusade to find a ‘cure’ for the menopause. Old friend Sinead the Greener is having a hen-do and it’ll definitely involve strippers. Greta Grotbags hasn’t gone away. Curran’s physicality transforms and her gestures clarify each new character before we hear them speak. Husband Billy is there too, quietly lurking in his bedroom. (There’s space amongst the menopausal mirth to pause to usefully consider the impact it’s having on Billy … which also sets up a later plot point.)

Fervent fans no longer wear Maggie Muff-branded white knickers over the top of their jeans at performances. Paper fans might have sold well at a merch stall for this new run. The set revolves around two stretched out leopard print fans, providing Curran with a concealed entrance for the penile prop which gets one of the largest laughs of the night, almost stalling the action for 30 seconds as waves of merriment ripple around the auditorium a mere ten minutes into the show. Well-timed sound effects add greatly to the levity of key moments. Director Andrea Montgomery has the measure of the loyal audience and Curran is never behind the door in her committed delivery of lines that will raise the roof.

Even though Maggie’s going through a dry phase, there are plenty of throwbacks to historic hookups. Right from the start, the language is even more coarse, crude and sustained than the stage version of Trainspotting Live. But no one in the sold-out Grand Opera House audience seems remotely offended and finds the whole production eye-wateringly funny. While younger Maggie’s tales of BDSM and debauchery may have stirred up a sense of fantasy and escapism in the majority female audience, the power of this latest instalment is more about recognition. The show creates two hours were there is no need for embarrassment, no need to worry about sniggering at a joke that you could only share privately with a best friend, no need to worry that a man won’t understand. Harker, Montgomery and Curran create a safe space.

Various therapies are explored and at one point Maggie’s ‘muffalo’ begins to talk. (Even though it doesn’t really sound that like the figure being impersonated, neither in terms of accent nor the kind of suggestive comments he used to make, this recurring element of the show gets a lot of laughs.) There are fresh insights into vol-au-vents, bladder control, a ring of fire, and plenty of making whoopee. Despite Sally Ann’s best efforts, it’s not until she steers ‘Maggot’ down another more medical path that the show hits its fulcrum, the giggling is subdued, and Curran skilfully leads the audience into another side to Maggie’s inner world.

Fans of Harker’s grown-up wild-child are very much in love with the foul-mouthed character. The lyrics written by Johnny Cash’s (soon-to-be) second-wife June Carter come to mind: “The taste of love is sweet / When hearts like ours meet / I fell for you like a child / Oh, but the fire went wild”. There’s plenty more mileage in the Maggie franchise. Becoming a grandparent? Cancer treatment? Supporting a friend like Sally Ann with dementia? A nursing home romance to the annoyance of staff and family? I’d imagine that Maggie and her colourful muff will be back on stage before too long.

Just a handful of single tickets remain for the last two performances of Maggie’s Menopause at the Grand Opera House. Next week the show moves to Newtownabbey’s Theatre at the Mill (Monday 9 and Wednesday 11), Lisburn’s Island Arts Centre (Tuesday 10), Down Arts Centre (Thursday 12 and Friday 13) and Cookstown’s Burnavon Theatre (Saturday 14).

Photo credit: Melissa Gordon, Gorgeous Photography

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Melania – my takeaways from the elegant film that everyone is talking about but few have seen (currently playing in Cineworld and Odeon Belfast)

2026-02-03T08:00:00.019+00:00

The film Melania identifies as a documentary and covers the twenty days up to and including President Trump’s second inauguration. Melania’s husband only plays a minor role in the film which keeps her in frame and in focus throughout.

What did I takeaway from the film?

Melania gives good hugs and is happy to be blessed. She’s very comfortable with silence but can still do small talk.

She’s fond of being caught on camera doing the actions to YMCA. Her favourite song is Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean. It keeps popping up during the film. She can lip-sync to it, describing the singer as “very sweet, very nice”.

There isn’t a scene in this film in which she’s not wearing high heel shoes or boots with a large heel.

She rotates between the White House, the New York apartment, and the family home in Mar-a-Lago (where she has a whole drawer for sunglasses in the same way a rich male billionaire might have a drawer of expensive watches).

Melania seems totally unconcerned at the dissonance between her wealthy lifestyle and the threadbare wallets of less well-off US voters.

Barron Trump is very tall and is seen in this film to have been brought up with good manners. The moment at the end of the inauguration when he reaches over to shake hands with President Biden and Vice President Harris is included in the footage.

The underground car park in Trump Towers needs spruced up as it’s very dowdy compared to the glitz and mirrored glamour up above.

In a similar vein, screen 3 in the Odyssey Cineworld in Belfast is very dirty. The screen the film is projected onto, not the floor and seats which are pristine! Even worse that some of the distractingly filthy Lisburn Omniplex screens.

Secret Service agents look very uncomfortable wearing ill-fitting bow ties and better fitting tuxedos.

Melania’s modelling background is obvious in scenes where she patiently allows her designer Hervé Pierre and his team intimately poke and prod, pin and tuck to take account of Melania’s feedback on the cut of new fashion creations. At no point does is she seen critiquing the fit of her husband’s clothes.

FLOTUS is very hands on when it comes to style and design. Given the opportunity, she can chip in to improve her husband’s speeches (his reference to being “peacemaker and unifier” is her suggested flourish).

Her extraordinary and unending eye for detail means that it is unlikely to be an accident that this 104-minute Amazon Prime documentary of which she had editorial control (and was paid millions of dollars to take part in) keeps highlighting the value of people who have immigrated to the US (including herself – “my journey as an immigrant” – her fashion designer and her interior designer).

Given her presumed level of say in the shooting and editing, it feels of note that Elon Musk is prominent in the pre-inauguration dinner scenes (sitting directly opposite President Trump) and is the only person in the whole film to be seen with a woman sitting on his lap. There’s no attempt to rewrite history and downplay Musk’s role in DOGE.

And there’s a strong sense that love trumps hatred … in contrast with her husband’s actions as commander in chief.

Brett Ratner’s film would be improved if Melania’s narration was simply removed: the pictures would tell their own story. But the client might not have approved of that change. The scenes shot with old cameras on film stock are a constant nod to the First Lady’s father but the transitions are jarring and the footage is unnecessary. The verbose end credits outlining Melania’s contributions to the Trump administration lay it on far too thick.

Part music video, part pitch to be a lifestyle goddess, by the end of the so-called documentary, Melania is still an elegant enigma wrapped up in a very stylish overcoat with beautifully proportioned lapels. A huge question looms over the film. Why did the usually reclusive Melania (who contradicts reality by saying her role as FLOTUS will be “a very public life”) agree to be immortalised and showcased in a puff piece documentary?

It’s hard to believe that mere vanity would be a sufficient driver. The answer may be that her control of this largely propaganda piece means that she can differentiate her legacy from her husband’s. And the alleged multi-million paycheque for taking part could be a useful financial cushion if circumstances change, or a slush fund to invest in new post-White House opportunities as a high-end influencer.

For a Monday evening in a small screen, Cineworld will have been delighted with tonight’s attendance. It’s not a difficult film to watch, but it left me with more questions than answers.

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The Importance of Being Earnest – even more giddy, flirty and flighty than last year (Lyric Theatre until Sunday 22 February)

2026-02-03T00:18:00.000+00:00

The Lyric Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest has been revived and returned to its main stage over the weekend. The sense of satisfying exaggeration is maintained, perhaps dialled up to eleven, with the duplicitous men outshone by the brilliantly flirty, flighty and – ultimately – flexible women.

My June 2025 review stands true.

Jimmy Fay’s vision for the classic satire is vibrant and allows every department to go wild. Big statement bows are back in vogue, but the pink polka dot one atop Cecily’s head deserves have its own postcode. Gwendolen’s floating hat remains a masterpiece. Wet Leg’s Chaise Longue pumps out at the end: an anachronism, yet as utterly fitting as the unexpected musical interlude in the second act.

Christina Nelson brings a real sense of hysteria to her portrayal of Miss Prism. Not just a few, but a mountain of cucumber sandwiches are demolished by Algy (Conor O’Donnell). Neil Keery’s Lane is hasty back stage but slow and deliberate with his entrances and exits. Later, his Merriman benefits from being more demonstrably drôle and less poker-faced than 2025.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a joy to experience. It’s confident, supremely over the top, and playing in the Lyric Theatre until Sunday 22 February. Enjoy the wild ride from an ensemble cast who are firing on all cylinders.

Photo credit: Carrie Davenport

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Here & Now: The STEPS Musical – a gloriously silly production, a riot of colour, familiar tunes, and a jukebox story that engages as well as entertains (Grand Opera House until 31 January)

2026-01-29T17:31:00.001+00:00

The brash cyan and pink supermarket costumes in the opening scene of Here & Now: The STEPS Musical hint that the full STEPS sensibility is on show. The story follows a group of supermarket workers who veer between being unlucky in love and unsure in romance.

Caz’s marriage is wobbling right at the point adoption seems like a possibility. Vel’s relationship has been on the end-of-line shelf for so long it’s rotting. Robbie’s struggling to find more than a one-night stand. And Neeta’s too shy to tell Ben how she feels. An upcoming 50th birthday sets a deadline for everyone to sort themselves out for a perfect summer of love. Until an existential curveball is thrown and the staff at Better Best Bargains face a very uncertain future and multiple tragedies.

Part of the success of Here & Now is its full and knowing embrace of the jukebox format. Snippets of lyrics are liberally dropped into the dialogue. Shoehorning the techno-country number 5,6,7,8 into a STEPS musical feels like it should be a challenge, but Shaun Kitchener’s book and Rachel Kavanagh’s direction manage to totally integrate the honky-tonk banger into the cut-price supermarket story.

With more shock twists than a special episode of Coronation Street, at various points in the plot, there are almost handbrake turns as a character turns around, makes a surprising revelation and then launches into a song. In a lesser quality production, the show could lose its sure footing. But in Here & Now, there’s a solid confidence that pulls off the unexpected with a peculiar panache.

Lara Denning is bright and bubbly as the shop floor mother figure Caz with a particularly emotive rendition of Heartbeat and a gorgeous trio with the vocally capable Jacqui Debois (Vel) and Rosie Singha (Neeta) in Scared of the Dark. One of the standout voices is Blake Patrick Anderson (Robbie) who shares a heartfelt duet Story of a Heart with River Medway … playing a drag queen who later sings astride a fleet of washing machines with built in glitter balls, though the dancers’ ICE-emblazoned shirts take a new twist given events in the US. The store manager is probably the most cliched character, though Sally Ann Matthews’ dead pan delivery of the faux French phrases Patricia is très fond of never fails to get a laugh.

Some songs start in a low key that doesn’t suit the register of cast members’ voices, but after a few mandatory modulations, everything comes right again. Throw in a running gag about the pineapple of destiny, dynamically choreographed dance numbers, and a string of well-known and well-performed less familiar songs, and Here & Now is a great success.

While the on-stage performers are giving it their all, musical director Georgia Rawlins in the pit is also giving her all, conducting the cast in and out of their parts, and gamely donning a stetson for 5,6,7,8 before jettisoning it in a beat between songs. Manolo Polidario’s guitar finger picking often cuts through and deserves a mention along with Katy Trigger’s very solid bass line that drives the poppy beat.

Other than the megamix at the end, this is not a STEPS concert. But the storyline and the deliberately cheesy use of the band’s back catalogue creates something very pleasing. It’s a gloriously silly production, a riot of colour, with familiar tunes and a jukebox story that engages as well as entertains. Here & Now: The STEPS Musical continues at the Grand Opera House until Saturday 31 January.

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

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Nouvelle Vague – a satisfying dive into the world of early French New Wave cinema (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January)

2026-01-29T06:30:00.001+00:00

As the last of his coterie of pals to make the dive into directing, film critic Jean-Luc Godard believes that it’s long past time to bring his own vision of cinema to the silver screen. Over 106 minutes we watch Godard persuade and cajole producer Georges de Beauregard to take a chance on him and then witness the disorganised process of shooting his debut feature.

With only a short film under his belt, Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) seeks out advice from numerous established directors, allowing us to see a hint of the genesis of his style of using the first or second take, letting his actors find inspiration in the moment, not overly worrying about continuity, filming guerilla style with passers-by becoming unwitting extras, throwing in jump cuts and liberally crossing the line with camera angles that will never match up in the edit.

While Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) works as a standalone film, for the princely sum of £3.50 any number of streaming services will allow you to watch the 1960 classic À bout de souffle (Breathless) beforehand, or in my case very soon afterwards. It’s widely regarded as a treasure of the early French New Wave movement.

Godard’s vision – if it is even as developed as that – is sustained by the craft of his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), a war photographer with a flare for documentary-style shooting. Yet watch out for the fine details, like reflections in an actor’s sunglasses that bring a quality to the storytelling (and match scenes from the original film). The recreated scenes are a fine match for the original.

Aubry Dullin portrays actor Jean-Paul Belmondo who played the petty criminal and accidental cop killer Michel Poiccard in the original. Zoey Deutch stars as Jean Seberg, the actress who played Patricia Franchini, a student journalist selling copies of the New York Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris, and the romantic interest of Poiccard who he wants to join him in running away to start a new life.

Shot in moody black and white in Academy ratio to match the original film, Nouvelle Vague’s jazz soundtrack adds to the spontaneity of director Godard as he stumbles through an increasingly anarchic shooting schedule (“That’s all for today, I’m out of ideas!”) to assemble the parts necessary to make a film that has a few pages of treatment but no complete script.

Just as Marbeck captures the infuriating nature of the unphased director, Deutch depicts the exasperation of an actress bobbing about in a sea of chaos and reputational risk. Rising like a pillar of calm and preparation, assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) emerges as the man who creates some of the beautiful touches that make the original film shine.

One character asks the question that is on the tip of every audience member’s tongue: “Are you making up how to direct as you go along?”

It’s only when you watch the original film that it becomes apparent that the crucial choice of hand-held camera and lack of sound synchronisation freed Godard to rearrange scenes and dub the dialogue on afterwards to create a cogent narrative.

Modern day director Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is a fond look back at a pivotal moment in French cinema that changed so much and made it possible to break so many rules in the name of creating better art. It is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 January.

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No Other Choice – a redundant worker spirals down a chute of catastrophe in a bid to regain employment (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 23 January)

2026-01-22T08:00:00.001+00:00

When Man-su is fired from the Korean paper mill, the former award-winning “pulp man of the year” is sure he’ll be back in work within three months. Park Chan-wook’s latest feature No Other Choice documents Man-su spiralling down a chute of catastrophe.

Feeling humiliated (at being out of work, heading in to mortgage arrears, and his wife (Mi-ri played by Son Ye-jin) needing to go back to work), Man-su’s desperation leads to him taking ever darker and more violent action to eliminate potential competitors from a job he’s chasing.

This dark satire celebrates the weirdness of job interviews, the virtuosity of his neurodivergent cello-playing daughter, the ineptness of police detectives, and tripping people up on their own bad karma. Two dogs and an endless sequence of well-sculpted scenes will surely make this another classic example of Korean cinema.

The send-up of capitalism easily sustains its tenor over 139 minutes with the satisfying but unpredictable dispatch of colleagues in the paper industry. By the end, we’re aware that while Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been depleting the available workforce, mechanisation and robotics are less dramatically human head count required to do the work he once so ably managed.

No Other Choice will be screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 23 January.

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The Voice of Hind Rajab – an urgent reminder about a real-life tragedy that should not be forgotten (Queen’s Film Theatre until Wednesday 28 January)

2026-01-17T20:47:00.000+00:00

Omar, a call handler at the Red Crescent office in the West Bank, receives an emergency request from a car in northern Gaza. There are few survivors in a car full of family who were fleeing their home in an area that Israeli forces had ordered to be evacuating. Ultimately a five-year-old girl is kept on the line while another Red Crescent official tries to negotiate a safe rescue mission. Tempers flare. Risks mount.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatisation of the real-life incident that weaves original audio from the recorded calls (with mother’s consent) – and later in the film, video captured in the Red Crescent office during a rescue attempt – to heighten the authenticity.

Motaz Malhees picks up the with empathy that Omar is consumed by as he tries to comfort and help the child in peril. Hind first suggests that the others in her car – her aunt, uncle and cousins – are “asleep” before admitting that she knows that they are dead. As day turns to evening, the girl tells the Red Crescent operators that “It will be dark soon, I’m scared”. Those are the child’s real words.

Over time, we realise that a cumbersome protocol’s ‘guarantee’ of safe passage – organised through the International Red Cross in Geneva talking to an Israeli Ministry who in turn make arrangements with the troops on the ground – has too frequently turned into a dangerous game of ‘Chinese whispers’ which has resulted in the deliberate or accidental death of rescuers.

Omar’s distress and frustration with the “coward hiding behind his desk” who can’t order an ambulance to make the eight-minute trip to the car is matched by the agonisingly slow manner of coordinator Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) who carries the guilt of previous failed missions.

The film never shies away from the reality questions of why the military would attack a civilian vehicle leaving an area as instructed. Why would anyone fire more than three hundred bullets into a car? Who would have the firepower to annihilate an ambulance? The ethics of the Red Crescent having to get Israeli permission and protection to rescue someone who had been attached by the Israeli military are also explored.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of a number of cinematic tributes to a five-year-old girl who is emblematic of so many other undocumented children and adult deaths in Gaza. It is not an easy film to watch. But in a month that features cinematic treats like Hamnet, Marty Surprise, Saipan and Sentimental Value, this is an urgent reminder about a real-life tragedy that should not be forgotten.

(Eighteen hours before watching a preview of this film, I’d watched on social media as friends of Renee Good reacted to her being fatally shot by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Subsequent reporting suggests that bystanders were prevented from giving medical assistance to Renee. Senior political figures continue to deny and contradict what video evidence depicts. The Israel Defence Forces denied having troops within firing range of the car; satellite imagery, along with the actual attack on the car and ambulance, challenges that claim.)

The Voice of Hind Rajab honours and memorialises the last hours of a child in Gaza. It’s being screened at Queen’s Film Theatre until Wednesday 28 January.

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Sleeping Beauty – a community of talent brings this traditional tale to life on stage (Belvoir Players until Saturday 3 January)

2025-12-24T13:35:00.001+00:00

A new arrival in the court of Queen Marigold and King Cactus is cursed by the evil Witch Hazel. While good Fairy Lilac adapts the deadliest part of the spell, the now 16-year-old Princess Rose still ends up falling asleep for a hundred years before being woken up (not kissed!) by a prince.

Mark McClean and assistant Katie-Rose Spence have directed this year’s Belvoir Players’ pantomime Sleeping Beauty (written by Alan P Frayn) which follows a fairly traditional story arc, with Nurse Hattie and Muddles providing a lot of the comedy, and local posties Carrie and Fetch joining in with some clowning and setting up a topical joke at the expense of Evri.

It’s always a joy to visit Belvoir Studio Theatre at Christmas, and encouraging to see amateur dramatic society stalwarts joined on stage by new talent (young and old). Colourful cloth backdrops along with sound/light effects bring the action to life. Wilson Shields and his band create the pumping live soundtrack (albeit louder than the vocals in some songs) with covers of Stevie Wonder, Lewis Capaldi, Blondie, The Boo Radleys and Kylie Minogue. The audience are never far from the action, with lots of shouting and booing. Anyone sitting in the front rows can expect to be gently picked on. The children sitting in my row were rapt with everything going on.

Alongside the expected fart sound effects and use of a Super Soaker, there’s the inevitable 6-7 mention, a wee dig at Keir Starmer, and plenty of gentle double entendres that easily fly over the head of younger audience members. The dame pulls a suppository gag out of nowhere, and Muddles revels in an almost endless supply of cracker-worthy jokes.

What makes a show like Sleeping Beauty special is the strong sense of community. Two or three actors rotate through the main roles, with three forty-strong youth choruses flooding the tiny stage for some of scenes. Hats off to the chaperones backstage who keep the cast and venue safe. No two shows share the same cast. And the show must always go on, no matter what happens. With both Princess Rose actors indisposed this weekend, Rainbow Fairy Julia Hamilton stepped up with minimal notice and delivered Princess Rose’s dialogue, dance and songs with aplomb as if she was made for the role and had been rehearsing for weeks.

Belvoir Players may not be able to fly a plane over the heads of the audience or have indoor pyrotechnics announce the arrival of the villain on stage, but they can entertain the two hundred audience members packed into the theatre for each performance with solid singing, good direction, and a joyful spirit. Sleeping Beauty was a lovely way to finish my mammoth trek around eleven Belfast festive productions. Apologies to the other shows which offered a ticket to review that I had to decline, and best wishes to everyone who will be back on stage, or back of house, after Christmas Day!

Sleeping Beauty continues at Belvoir Studio Theatre until Saturday 3 January. Only a handful of seats remain at some of the remaining performances, with most completely sold out.

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