On The Town: It's just one celebration after another for Harold Pinter, who won the Nobel literature prize on Thursday. Earlier in the week, actors involved in the Gate Theatre's Pinter75 festival gathered at Dublin's Unicorn restaurant to toast the playwright's 75th birthday and to sing his praises.
"It's very important in these days of affluence, ease and lack of real politics that Harold Pinter is still shouting from the mountain tops," said actor Jeremy Irons, who participated in The Pinter Landscape, a weekend of readings of plays, poetry and prose by Pinter. The writer played an important role in helping him break into the theatre business, Irons added. "I owe him a lot."
Pinter "redefined theatre for a whole generation and there is no playwright in the English language not influenced by him", said Alan Stanford, who directed The Pinter Landscape.
Actors Donna Dent and Janie Dee, who were both in Old Times, which closed at the Gate last weekend, spoke of the experience of being in a Pinter play. They said it "makes you address issues within yourself", whether you liked it or not.
Actor Stephen Brennan said Pinter "changed the world of drama". Pinter "is one of the great provocateurs of our time" and his drama "demands a response", he said.
Director of the Gate Theatre Michael Colgan said he was proud of the Gate's strong association with Pinter. To get great actors you need to have great words, and no one is better than Pinter at providing them, he said.
Among the other actors at the party were Stephen Rea, Cathy Belton, Derek Jacobi, Risteárd Cooper and Michael Gambon.
Betrayal, by Harold Pinter, directed by Robin Lefèvre and starring Cathy Belton, Risteárd Cooper, Nick Dunning and Gary Murphy, runs at the Gate Theatre until Nov 19
Hurling in the plaudits
There was a capacity crowd at Doheny and Nesbitts pub in Dublin this week to mark the launch of sportswriter Denis Walsh's book, Hurling: The Revolution Years.
Fellow journalists, sports fans, family and friends stood on the sideline as hurling legend Babs Keating got the ball rolling.
Earlier that evening the worst-kept hurling secret of late had been officially made public when Keating was announced as Tipperary manager for a two-year term.
"This is the best hurling book I've ever read," said Keating, getting straight to the point.
Commenting on some juicy behind-the-scenes interviews in the book, Keating promised that readers who think they know the real deal behind some of hurling's biggest stories only know one-tenth of the truth and will be put straight by Walsh's book.
Walsh is the "foremost hurling writer of this generation and arguably any generation", said Walsh's fellow Sunday Times journalist, Alan English.
"I'm delighted that such a profound era of hurling has been so wonderfully captured by Denis. It rattles along at a good pace. He has some great stories from lots of retired players and managers who let their guard down.
"It's full of stories we thought we knew, but we find out we only knew the half of it," English added.
The book sums up a really important decade in hurling, said Michael McLoughlin, of Penguin Ireland.
Also at the publication party were Walsh's wife, Paula, and his parents, Jack and Breda Walsh.
Hurling: The Revolution Years, by Denis Walsh, is published by Penguin Ireland