E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

SPOILER WARNING: Almost the last line of the play - in a shocking shit-fan whirlwind - gives it away - "what will we do"? Far from being merely a stereotypically Irish problem play in the shadow of the gunman, or the ploughman and the stars, Jez Butterworth's bizarre post-modern masterplay directed by Bond helmer Sam Mendes , is all about stories, and how they are told - often very badly. This is a play of half-remembered poems, dementia-fuelled fairy stories, and lies and demi-lies, all spoken in the name of attempting to find a strand of sense and narrative in the melee of time and history - we are reminded that even Darius interrupted war to let the harvest come in, so potent was the symbolism of that ritual. There is the harvest story, and the boys' stories, and the story of Jesus on the cross, and the stories of love at the GPO... all the stories in the play end badly, or are told badly. Of course, it is also about feast and famine, sowing what you reap...

I saw Jerusalem last night at the Apollo Theatre in London, just as it returns to London after its triumphant Broadway reincarnation, where lead Mark Rylance won the Tony for Best Actor, and where it was nominated for Best Play ( War Horse won by a nose).  The sense of excitement in the audience was palpable - Keira Knightly was in the row ahead of me, cuddling up to a handsome young man - it was that sort of vibe.  I came to the play without any sense of how good it was meant to be.  I was in fact a bit put off by the subject - a drunken Romany squatter - and thought it might be an angry State of England Play.  Instead, the last ten minutes are the most purely dramatic and moving I have ever experienced in the theatre, and I have seen hundreds of plays since I was a kid, in New York, Toronto, London, and Stratford-upon-Avon. Butting up against an extremely raw, ugly and authentic sense of a broken Britain of promiscuous, foul-mouthed, drug-addled youth, and an...

Eyewear offers an excerpt from a new verse play by Ben Mazer.   Note that typos etc are intentional. A City of Angels   Act Three, Scene One.   One month later. A barn outside of town. Tom Cross and Sam Cross drinking. TOM. What movie do you say you want to go to tonight. I don't I want to stay in and kill Briggs. I meant Cross. I mean Crick. I'm Cross. Yes Cross. Specifically what kills the critics is the surfeit of success. It is not being looked at, it is looking over. I must kill a Cross. Crick. There I go again. This is not the half, not the double. Not the halve. No language no speak. To kill a Cross or Crick, for a Cross, a Cross. And another Cross before you look. It is no trick of a Cross to kill a Crick. SAM. Yes, but how do you propose to kill him? Would it be a simple way? TOM. Shall I give you a sample. SAM. Do You be Cross. TOM. I'll shoe you know punctuation I am not taking liberties or libertines for that manner SAM. A Cross. A Crick. No I see Nothin ...

Is there a more contradictory play than 4.48 Pyschosis by Sarah Kane ? Firstly, the text isn't shaped remotely like a play - but infamously, like a poem (and sometimes curiously-placed numbers) without characters, or any other description - no clues for set or action. Secondly, the text's consciousness seems not to be suffering from psychosis at all (that is, schizoid or psychotic breakdown) but despair or depression. Thirdly, the play ends on a positive note ("please open the curtains") but is usually played as a descent into darkness, not dawn (which temporally it is); it is always, of course, darkest before the dawn. And no "play" is darker - it seems to build over the edge defined by Plath , extending the tropes of Holocaust, to child sex abuse and the killing fields, by way of Foucault -like observations on the sinister implications of doctors and mental patients. Kane's own suicide confirmed her, at the start of the new millennium, as either over-...

Sad news. The great Scottish-born, Canadian actor who made the Stratford Festival in Ontario a world-class place for the Bard, has died. I remember seeing him several times in productions, in my teens, when my Uncle Jack took me to plays there.

Sad news. Karl Malden has died. As Mitch in the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire , and the priest in On The Waterfront , he was a key 50s character actor closely aligned to the method acting system, and its greatest figure, Marlon Brando . I love Streetcar , and consider it the best American play of the last century, after Long Day's Journey Into Night . He also starred in Fear Strikes Out, that weird 50s baseball film with Tony Perkins that remains one of my guilty pleasures. Malden was also great, in the 70s, in The Streets of San Francisco .

Jack Swift was a Montreal lawyer and art collector, who died over Christmas, in the Eastern Townships, at the age of 72. He was also my father's brother, and my closest family friend. He was more than an uncle, but also my mentor, introducing me to many of the key interests of my life so far: Ireland, literature, theatre, music, film, and the genius of queer culture. Below is the eulogy I wrote for his funeral, edited a little, as some of the comments are too personal for a blog. ... Those who knew Jack Swift will know that, in his dying, the world has lost an extraordinary figure. We are so often informed by the media that X or Y is charismatic or larger than life that we sometimes forget to test such claims against our own experience. John A. A. Swift was truly larger than life - the sort of brilliant, compelling enthusiast, bon vivant and interlocutor who instantly dominated - no other word will do - almost any situation he found himself in. In his modes of personal and public ...

Eyewear went to see Never So Good , the new play on at the National Theatre, by Howard Brenton , which details the resisted rise of Harold Macmillan , of "the winds of change" and Profumo fame. It was great entertainment, and smart, thoughtful writing as well, despite the startling pyrotechnics that blasted my eardrums (I grow old). The British do good history plays - and this one, with elements from Shakespeare 's Julius Caesar , Coward' s Cavalcade , and Brecht 's - well, anything by Brecht - ends up feeling like good, solid Shaw : witty men and women hold forth on the issues of the day, as each decade is depicted shifting by new pop songs, and the latest dance craze ("dance to the music of time"). Macmillan is movingly portrayed by the great Jeremy Irons , and his youthful "echo" - the suitably Yeatsian double (Macmillan published Yeats , among other poets) by Pip Carter . Political junkies will love the backroom boys, the deals, the power...

The work of German director Thomas Ostermeier has long been on the radar of Eyewear - no other European theatre company seems so au courant , and yet thrillingly-engaged with the classical, as his. Hedda Gabler (seen at the Barbican last night, and reviewed in rather lukewarm fashion for instance here by the British press) was simply a pleasure, for 120 minutes or so. The production highlights the way that film can be looped back to bleed mood and texture to theatre, and generate a hyper-real, if cinematic, event. Gabbler, as superbly played by Ms. Schüttler , is a sly, restless, bored boyish coquette with great legs, stylish sailor outfit, and a deranged sense of being and nothingness. Ibsen , the master builder who created her in 1890 (that is, 118 years ago) must be credited with outdoing Freud , let alone Film Noir (thus, out-Tarantinoing Tarantino ), in conceiving of the Ur-femme fatale. Girl Plays With Guns, Girl Points Gun At Man, Girl Gives Gun To Man, Girl Blows Her Brains ...

The Barbican was last night bursting with writers, film-makers and actors (such as the couple Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal ) drawn to the intriguing spectacle that is Blasted , as interpreted by Germany's most infamous, if not preeminent, theatre company Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin , under the direction of wunderkind Thomas Ostermeier . Eyewear was not hugely impressed by one of Ostermeier's productions shown in Budapest several years ago - a typical instance of Ordeal Theatre - blaring industrial noise, a shaven-headed man in a wheelchair shoving rotting sausage into the faces of the bourgeois audience, and a real writhing snake, all set in a pit; sometimes it seems that in Europe to be a respected auteur one just has to do angry, sexual, loud and nihilistic. Which leads to Sarah Kane . Kane is the Cobain Slash Plath of contemporary British Slash European drama. Famous by 23 for Blasted , which was pilloried in the philistine UK press as being essentially...

I attended a production of Titus Andronicus Saturday evening, at " Shakespeare's Globe Theatre " - that is to say, the hyper-real simulacrum of the original, dreamed into being by visionary American Sam Wanamaker and built in the late 90s. This had me fooled. The reconstruction, which is artistically and architecturally faithful, is (perhaps in a Disneyland way) exactly how one expects it to be. It was the first balmy night of the London summer, and the bank of the Thames was thronged with drunks and lovers. Sometimes these were the same people. Have I ever had a better time at a Shakespeare play? Maybe once, when I was fourteen, in Ontario, or so, when Brian Bedford played a brilliant Richard II. But I doubt it. The bawdy, ultra-violent production, directed by Lucy Bailey , takes full advantage of the groundlings as a crowd to swell a scene. Also, the use of carts, as used in medieval mystery plays, pulling the players through the audience, in the round, to declaim an...

Last night Eyewear attended the Old Vic's new production (directed by Trevor Nunn ) of Richard II , with Kevin Spacey as Richard, and Ben Miles as the usurper. It was extraordinary. The modern-dress setting was perhaps too busy with the usual tropes of cameras and cell phones as imagos of a post-modern world, but the stark crisis between godly tradition and naked power was well presented even in contemporary fashion (the play partly being about fashion of course). Kevin Spacey has never been better, and lent Richard a few extra layers of pathos and eloquence, as well as suavity and cattiness, beyond the usual ones of self-pity and preening vanity stripped bare like a winter tree. Ben Miles was a revelation - a bold modernizer out to capture his country like some former-day Cameron or Fox (or Blair). The play itself, delivered with such passion and seriousness, is newly-minted as one of Shakespeare's greatest and most profound essays on being and identity itself - the soul b...

I have just seen the final night of the Open Air Theatre Regent's Park performance of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which was very good, and made more delightful by the surroundings, complete with summer Christmas lights in the rustling trees. The only distractions were random planes and preposterusly inappropriate fireworks in the third act, but that is half the fun of such stages - they are vunerable to the world. The play itself, often thought to be complex to the point of (willful?) absurdity, under the nuanced direction of Rachel Kavanaugh , revealed itself to be a profound unveiling of layers of reconciliation - all things pardoned. The young, good cast yielded several star turns, among them a lithe, swarthy, over-determinedly strutting Malkovichian Iachimo, played by Simon Day , and an exuberant, under-sized and comical Cloten, from James Loye . The play, seen by some as a footnote, strikes me as one of the greatest from the master - and, as one of his last - a profound red...