OnTheTown: A brewery located in an abbey in the Marble City was the perfect place to launch the programme for this year's Smithwick's Cat Laughs Comedy Festival. Some of the youngest comedians in Ireland gathered in the cellar bar of St Francis's Abbey Brewery in Kilkenny for the event this week.
The flavour of all good comedy, said Eddie Bannon, the festival's artistic director, is that "you feel they are going to say something". It is and has been, he said, about "people wanting to go up and explaining what they feel".
Carol Tobin, one of this year's Comedy Cats (chosen from the Irish comedy circuit), loves her time on stage.
"It's a great buzz," she said. "Those 20 minutes or so are so precious . . . I just talk about my weird life and my big family from Kerry."
Fellow Comedy Cat John Lynn, who is also a stage actor, explained that, while on stage, "I tell stories". It's very different from acting, he explained, "where you are using somebody's else's words". In comedy, "I talk about being at school, about stuff that's happening to me".
Paul Tylak, who will star in the festival's fast-paced improvisational segments, said his approach to comedy had to do with picking out "what I think is funny in a character, based on people I've met and I know . . . and then I can exaggerate it".
The best comedians are "those who have a point of view", according to Richard Cook, chair of the festival's board and its co- founder 12 years ago with Lynn Cahill and Michael McCarthy.
Among those who came to enjoy the launch were comedians Charlie Kranz, Tara Flynn and Colm O'Regan; Paul Fahy, artistic director of Galway Arts Festival; Marie Fitzpatrick, Kilkenny city mayor; Maurice Shortall, chair of Kilkenny County Council; and Geraldine Tierney, the new chief executive officer of the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
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Energy going round in circles
Heads were in a spin at the Abbey Theatre following a performance by the Shen Wei dance company from New York. According to this Chinese choreographer, whose US-based company performed The Rite of Spring and Folding, in eastern cultures, unlike the west, "everything has to be circular. Everything repeats, [and so] the energy continues".
"Bravo!" shouted audience member Pavel Hon, from the Czech Republic. "I think this is first class. It's about energy," he added.
Others at the Shen Wei event, which is part of the International Dance Festival Ireland (IDFI), included Gerry Godley, of the Improvised Music Company; set and costume designer Joe Vanek; artist Bernadette Madden; psychologist Jean Browne; and former dancer Gabi Christ. John Scott, whose company, Irish Modern Dance Theatre, celebrates its 15th birthday this week with the screening of its dance film, Buail, on RTÉ1, was also at the festival.
"We are trying to give the audiences a variety of tasty bites," said Catherine Nunes, artistic director of the dance festival, which continues until Sunday, May 7th.
Others at the Abbey included actor and singer Marie Doyle Kennedy; Ester O Brolchain, assistant artistic director of the College of Dance, based in Monkstown, Co Dublin, and her cousin, architectural painter Isoilde Dillon; and Austrian choreographer Willie Dorner, who is taking part in the festival.
The most eagerly awaited performance for Marina Rafter, executive director of the IDFI, was the collaboration between sean-nós dancer Seosamh Ó Neachtain and French Guianan dancer Tamango, which will take place in Crawdaddy over three nights from next Friday.
The festival, which has brought a range of international companies to Dublin to perform, is "culturally significant because it crosses language barriers", said dance artist Ella Clarke.
"It's a feast," said Paul Johnson, the dancer and choreographer who is registrar of Aosdána and artists' services manager with the Arts Council.
International Dance Festival Ireland continues at various Dublin venues until Sun, May 7. For more information, see www.dancefestivalireland.ie or telephone 01-6790524
A satirical farewell to Dublin
Anne Haverty, whose sixth book, The Free and Easy, was launched in Dublin this week, is off to Paris shortly to take up residence as writer at the Centre Culturel Irlandais.
She was joined at the launch by many friends, fellow writers and artists and her husband, writer Anthony Cronin.
The Free and Easy, she said, "is a play on being free as a nation and also about being free of all the old constraints - religion, conventions, traditions. It's looking at a world in which those are absent and maybe they are being revived in a theme-park way".
"It's a portrait of a city, a satire of the Celtic Tiger," said Rebecca Carter, editorial director at Chatto & Windus.
Haverty, who grew up in Thurles, Co Tipperary, was joined at the launch by artist Michael Kane, architect Shelley McNamara, writers Philip Casey and Christine Dwyer Hickey, solicitor Pádraic Ferry of the Ranelagh Arts Festival, and poets Tony Curtis and Dennis O'Driscoll, the latter of whom is also a native of Thurles.
Painters Louis Le Brocquy, who is currently celebrating his 90th year with a series of exhibitions in Dublin, London, Limerick's Hunt Museum and Paris this year, and Anne Madden were also at the reception. A documentary about Madden, produced by U2's Larry Mullen and directed by Bill Hughes, is due for release on RTÉ later this year, while a large painting, Wind Figure, will be hung in Dublin City Hall's Rotunda Room in June.
Other writers who came to salute Haverty were Ronan Sheehan, James Ryan, Michael O'Siadhail, Antoinette Quinn and Evelyn Conlon.
The Free and Easy, by Anne Haverty, is published by Chatto & Windus
Eerie echoes of the Rising
The Victorian east wing of Kilmainham Gaol was a cold, cold place when a new play by Donal O'Kelly had its opening performance there this week. Blankets, which were provided, could not stop some of us shivering in our seats as we watched the drama unfold at the doors of the tiny prison cells where some of the 1916 martyrs spent their last nights before being shot.
Operation Easter "brought back all that we learned at school", said Liam Halligan, of Storytellers Theatre Company, which is currently touring with the play, Crock of Gold. "The fact that it's in the space where it all really happened made it eerie."
"There's such a blend of cynicism in us that it's very hard to imagine what it might have been like to feel that passion," said playwright and actor Eithne McGuinness, whose great-grandfather was Thomas McDonagh, one of the 1916 leaders.
By the end, when it was night outside, the key historic figures - including James Connolly (played by Arthur Riordan), Tom Clarke (played by the playwright, Donal O'Kelly), Joseph Plunkett (played by Ruaidhrí Conroy, Patrick Pearse (played by Luke Griffin) and Eoin Mac Neill (played by Tom Murphy) - had been taken out and shot. Only the women, including Grace Gifford, Lillie Connolly, Mrs Pearse and Kathleen Clarke, as played by Mary Murray, remained.
Apart from being "the obvious symbol of Irish nationalism", Kilmainham Gaol "can also be used as a backdrop for a much wider exploration of issues of bondage and freedom", said its curator, Pat Cooke.
Robert Ballagh, who designed the play's set for this unusual venue (which is a listed building), mentioned some of the challenges posed by a structure dating back to 1796.
"You are not allowed screw anything or nail anything or hammer anything into the walls," he said.
Among those who attended opening night were composers Trevor Knight and Roger Doyle, whose CD of solo piano pieces, Baby Grand, was launched in Amsterdam recently; theatre commentators and consultants Tony Ó Dálaigh and Phelim Donlon; and Clare McGrath, a commissioner with the Office of Public Works.
Operation Easter, by Donal O'Kelly, continues at Kilmainham Gaol until Sat, May 20