ART
Teresa Gillespie: below explanation (clocks stop at 3pm and existence continues)
Wexford Arts Centre Jan 12- Feb 7
wexfordartscentre.ie
Winner of Wexford Arts Centre's annual emerging visual artist award, Teresa Gillespie makes sculpture and video works exploring "the tension between containment and continuity" in our daily lives. Here she looks to Jean-Paul Sartre's existential classic Nausea and film critic Vivian Sobchack's paper The Passion of the Material about the relationship between the sensate body and the intangible images that saturate our culture.
THEATRE
Macklin: Method and Madness
Viking Theatre, Clontarf, Dublin Jan 13-17 8pm €12
vikingtheatredublin.com
What can you say for sure about Charles Macklin, an 18th- century man whose origins are contested, whose age was uncertain, whose legacy is contained in plays, poetry and anecdotes, and whose life – as Gary Jermyn and Michael James Ford’s comic biography suggests – was a continuous performance? Well, for starters, Macklin was a consummate actor. The play, performed as a two-hander, framed as a wartime BBC broadcast, using Foley effects and ironic self- reference, tends to side with whatever version of the truth is taller. That he killed a fellow actor by driving a cane through the eye, I had heard. That he tried to sterilise the wound using the only stream of fluid he could naturally produce, I had not.
