Monday
Adam Buck (1759-1833): A Regency Artist from Cork
Crawford Art Gallery, Emmet Place, Cork
crawfordartgallery.ie
The Crawford has teamed up with Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and curator Peter Darvall to feature the first show of work by Cork-born Regency artist Adam Buck (detail from The Artist’s Wife, right) in his native city. Known for his watercolour portraits, which take in the trappings of Regency life, “his portraits of people of the period in neo-classical settings illustrate perfectly the cultural milieu depicted in the novels of Jane Austen”.
Tuesday
Foxes
The Limelight, Belfast 7pm £14.50
limelightbelfast.com
Louisa Allen might be from the same management company as Pop Idol, but there are only a few hints her debut album All I Need that point to compromise. References include Adele (Allen can belt them out) and Florence Welch (Allen can yelp them out), but you get the feeling she is also very much her own person.
Fat White Family
Whelan's Dublin 8pm €19
whelanslive.com
From the music (a raucous, seedy amalgam of alternative indie, psych, country and funk) to the interviews, this UK band rarely bother with pleasantries. They return to Ireland to deliver tracks from their album Songs for our Mothers. How long will it take for the band to implode? We’ll give them a year, tops.
Wednesday
The Other Half
Sugar Club, Dublin 8pm €20
thesugarclub.com
We’ve seen Irish writer John Connolly do this kind of thing - the blending of spoken word and music - and very enjoyable it is, too. Here, we have UK crime writer Mark Billingham deliver an original story over a soundtrack of evocative country music performed by My Darling Clementine duo, Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish. One for the connoisseurs.
This Lime Tree Bower
Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Ends Feb 27 8.15pm €15
projectartscentre.ie
Conor McPherson was just 24 when he wrote This Lime Tree Bower, his monologue play from 1995. Now that the piece has almost reached that age itself, a new generation stage his Dublin-based story of corruption, crime, brotherhood and moral relativism, told from three interweaving perspectives. Joe is a naïve school student who falls in with a bad seed. Ray is a reprobate philosophy lecturer, prone to womanising and debauchery. Frank, Joe’s older brother, decides to settle a score with the man who humiliated his father. How their stories connect and develop is the intrigue and verve of McPherson’s writing, a simple story well told. Eoghan Carrick directs Peter Daly, Stephen Jones and David Fennelly.
Thursday
Imitation of Life
Two films by Amie Siegel. Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin
templebargallery.com
A welcome chance to see two related films by the highly regarded Chicago-born artist Amie Siegel, an aficionado of the tracking shot. The Architects tracks continuously through architecture studios in New York City surveying the production of “global architecture”. Quarry follows marble from its source in a Vermont quarry to a luxury apartment development in Manhattan, illuminating the relationships between art, labour and value along the way. Megs Morley curates.
Cormac O'Brien Quartet feat. Kit Downes & Stan Sulzmann/Paul Dunlea Septet
Triskel Christchurch, Tobin St, Cork 8pm €15/€12
triskelartscentre.ie
Pianist Phil Ware’s Music Network residency at the Triskel is yielding some impressive and unusual results including, this time, a concert that doesn’t feature the pianist at all. Instead, Ware has creditably handed over the keys to Triskel’s new Steinway to an excellent UK/Irish collaboration led by bassist Cormac O’Brien featuring rising English pianist Kit Downes and much-respected London saxophonist Stan Sulzman. With support from Cork’s own Paul Dunlea and his septet.
Juno and the Paycock
Gate Theatre, Dublin. Ends Apr 16 7.30pm (Sat mat 2.30pm) Mon & Mats €25; Tues-Thurs €32; Fri-Sat €35
gate-theatre.ie
Fortunes are won and lost in the blink of an eye in Sean O’Casey’s 1924 play, where a drunken charlatan poses as an aristocrat, the high principles of a Civil War yield to grubby consequences and even the wealth of language is routinely plundered. Touching on the vicious events of only two years before it premiered, O’Casey’s play is a tragi-comedy so provocative that it’s a wonder it never provoked a riot. A play that interrupts a giddy singsong with the sudden stab of seriousness, its sternest criticism is reserved for those who ignore the world around them. That makes it a canny choice for this centenary year, and director Mark O’Rowe has recruited a stellar cast – including Derbhle Crotty, Declan Conlon, Marty Rea and Caoimhe O’Malley – to blow away the cobwebs of nostalgia.
