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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Frank Grimes obituary
When he burst on to the stage of the new Abbey theatre in Dublin in 1967, Frank Grimes, who has died aged 78, was acclaimed as the finest young actor of his generation. That first impact was made as a 19-year-old in a revival of Frank O'Connor's The Invincibles, a controversial piece about the assassination of the chief secretary of Ireland, and his deputy, in 1882. But it was as the young Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy (1967) that Grimes hit the big time. Behan's rollicking autobiographical novel was adapted by Frank McMahon, with Niall Toibín as the older Behan relating the story of the renegade roisterer on a bare stage. It was a smash hit in Dublin, Paris and then on Broadway in 1970, where Tomás Mac Anna's production won the Tony award and Grimes was voted most promising actor by 20 New York critics. In a sense, his subsequent stage career, mainly in London in the 1980s, was something of a deflation, though he invariably cleaned up the best reviews in plays by David Storey and Chekhov, and, in 1984, as a mercurial Christy Mahon in JM Synge's Playboy of the Western World on the Edinburgh fringe – all of these directed by Lindsay Anderson, who was Grimes's mentor when he first moved to London in the 70s. Latterly, Grimes was best known in the UK for his role as the unpredictable Barry Connor on ITV's Coronation Street. Between 2008 and 2015, Grimes appeared in 55 episodes of the soap, with his wife, Helen, played in the first season by Sorcha Cusack and in later episodes by Dearbhla Molloy. He also appeared in episodes of Casualty, The Bill, Doctors and Mrs Brown's Boys. Grimes's best performance on television, however, came in RTÉ's Strumpet City (1980, shown on ITV in the UK), adapted by Hugh Leonard from James Plunkett's novel, in which he played a beautifully modulated, mild-mannered Catholic curate in a chaotic Dublin under British rule before the first world war. The wonderful cast included Donal McCann, Cyril Cusack, David Kelly and Peter O'Toole. Born in Dublin, the youngest and seventh child of Evelyn (nee Manscier) and Joseph Grimes, a Dublin train driver, Frank was educated at St Declan's secondary school by the Christian Brothers, where he excelled at basketball, algebra and geometry. He trained at the Abbey and, after his success there, moved to London. He began his collaboration with Anderson and Storey in two plays at the Royal Court, The Farm (1973), as the feckless only son returning to an outraged family gathering with news of his impending marriage to a divorced, middle-aged woman; and as an art student in Life Class (1974), with Alan Bates as the art teacher and Rosemary Martin the model. Both of Grimes's performances were luminous, truthful and technically adroit. He played the young Seán O'Casey for RTÉ in The Rebel (1973), a documentary drama by John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, and made his only appearance at the Royal Shakespeare Company in O'Casey's masterpiece, Juno and the Paycock; Trevor Nunn's 1980 revival at the Aldwych featured a mostly Irish cast headed by Judi Dench and Norman Rodway as Juno and Captain Boyle. Grimes's Hamlet in 1981, directed by Anderson, was the first Shakespeare at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, since 1957, but it seemed tame and tight-lipped after Jonathan Pryce's electrifying Royal Court version in the previous year. He was back on track, though, in Anderson's all-star cast in The Cherry Orchard at the Haymarket in 1983 (Joan Plowright as Ranevskaya, Leslie Phillips as Gaev), stuttering out Trofimov's revolutionary rhetoric before apologetically concluding that, when the day dawns, he would be there – 'or … I shall show others the way'. In 1987 at the Old Vic, in Anderson's revival of a 1928 American comedy, Holiday, by Philip Barry, with Malcolm McDowell and his then wife Mary Steenburgen alongside, Grimes was another memorably reluctant rabble-rouser, drunkenly excoriating the American rich, said Michael Billington, with 'a felt-tipped dagger'. Two years later, at the National Theatre, he was a friendless academic in psychological meltdown as Colin Pasmore in The March on Russia, Storey's own adaptation of his 1972 novel Pasmore. Another minefield of a domestic drama, it was directed by Anderson in the manner of one of his and Storey's earlier family reunion collaborations, In Celebration (1969). In an impeccably acted production, Grimes was both participant and observer at the celebratory rites of a family at odds, if not war. Grimes played supporting roles in several notable films, including Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far (1977), and in Anderson's The Whales of August (1987), starring Bette Davis and Lillian Gish as two elderly sisters on the Maine coast. He also appeared in Britannia Hospital (1982), the third of Anderson's blistering 'Mick Travis' trilogy. Grimes wrote several plays. Anderson directed his first, The Fishing Trip, at the Croydon Warehouse in 1991 and, before the director died in 1994, was helping him prepare his own one-man show, The He and the She of It, expressing a lifelong obsession with, and devotion to, James Joyce. Grimes married the actor Michele Lohan in 1968, and they had two sons, David and Andrew. After he and Michele divorced, he married the actor and art teacher Ginnette Clarke in 1984. Frank and Ginnette lived in New York from 1982 to 1987, after which they settled in Barnes, west London. His son David died in 2011. Grimes is survived by Ginnette and their daughter, Tilly, by Andrew, and by seven grandchildren, Emily, Hedy, Martha, Reuben, Toby, Monti and Oskar, and two siblings, Eva and Laura. Frank (Francis Patrick) Grimes, born 9 March 1947; died 1 August 2025
Irish Post
07-06-2025
- General
- Irish Post
Last orders for Irish pubs?
WHAT'S happening to the pub? Over the last twenty years more than 2,000 pubs have closed. Here in Ireland. A country so synonymous with pub culture that we exported the very idea of an 'Irish' pub across the globe. And these bare statistics are a very real thing. From where I'm writing this right now a two-minute drive in opposite directions would once have taken me to a choice of three rural pubs. There's now one. Pubs in Ireland are closing and that is a big change in the very nature of Irish life. Of course, health advisers might see this as a good thing but that seems to confuse the pub simply with alcohol. The pub is more than that. The pub is a mirror of society. Now it might seem ridiculous to say that but I've always been a fan of the pub and I've always seen it as more than the pint in your hand. To paraphrase Brendan Behan, I like the pub because I like people. Or in my case I particularly like listening to people talking and in the pub that talk is often of the most fantastical nature. Of course, the pints feature but if it was just about that we'd only have off licences, wouldn't we? And if the pub wasn't some kind of mirror of Irish society why do we try so hard to sell tourists the pub as an essential experience? As to why the pubs are closing, well, there must be, in all honesty, many reasons as these things tend to be complicated. Two seem to jump out to me though. One is just a personal experience. In the closest town to where I am, a small rural town, there was a pub that I loved to frequent. It had a long counter and a fireplace and was a great place for a pint. When I was last in there the television that was on for sporting events had now become two screens continually on with the noise turned down. There was a radio playing loudly and it had gone from being a great place for a pint to a place that was an assault on the senses. Now, perhaps, I'm suddenly an old man with old man's complaints but it seemed the pub had decided it needed modernising and so was introducing things like televisions just in case there was someone who didn't have one at home and thought a treat would be to watch two. While listening to the radio. This Americanisation of our shared spaces, our public houses, actually destroys what the pub is supposed to be. So why would you go there — to watch the telly? To watch the news or a soap opera or a ticker tape sports news channel? Would you not just stay at home in a much more comfortable seat to do that? And is that perhaps what people are doing? If the pub is not really the pub anymore then why go to it? But it's possible it's something much more socially profound. There has been a lot of talk that we are all much more socially isolated than we ever were. A report in 2022 claimed Ireland was the loneliest country in Europe. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre conducted the first EU-wide survey on loneliness, which found that over 20% of respondents in Ireland reported feeling lonely most or all of the time—significantly higher than the EU average of 13%. It seems unlikely those figures have changed much in the intervening years. This statistic is astonishing in a country that prides itself on its friendliness and the art of having the craic. We might appear on the surface more connected than ever, with many people constantly updating every aspect of their lives to people on social media, and we certainly seem to be one of the most photographed populations there has ever been. B ut are we lonely as well? Bertie Ahern was talking about this nearly twenty years ago. The idea that with all our advancements and all our communications that we were, in fact, getting more distant from each other. Many people have talked about this in relation to the pub. How the pub is a meeting place, a gathering centre in a community, how it is about much more than the drink. That it is one of the few places that is a refuge for isolated people. So, if the pubs are closing is it because we are no longer meeting up, no longer gathering together. Have we given up? Surrendered to our loneliness. Are we at home now, in Cork or Kerry or Donegal, in front of our outsized televisions, sipping a glass of wine, looking at photographs of other people's nights out. Is it that the pub we would have gone to is closed or that the pub isn't really the pub anymore? Does anyone know? I think I'll go for a pint. See More: Ireland, Irish Pub
Irish Times
04-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Does owning a barge restaurant float your boat? La Peniche on Grand Canal in Dublin 4 guiding at €350,000
The Riasc, trading as La Peniche, is a familiar floating landmark at the fourth lock of the Grand Canal on Mespil Road in Dublin 4 . Moored on the south bank of the canal, the lipstick-red vessel commands a prime location, with footfall from office workers at the European headquarters of both LinkedIn and Irish-founded fintech Stripe at Iput's newly developed Wilton Park across the water. This corner of the city has been a cultural hub since poet Patrick Kavanagh and novelist and playwright Brendan Behan traded insults, in between sipping pints of stout and balls of malt. A bronze of Kavanagh sits on his favourite park bench here, where he drew inspiration for the poem entitled Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin. The Riasc barge is a familiar landmark on the Grand Canal. Photograph: Alan Betson The Dutch barge, whose mooring location is protected, was designed by Captain Sam Field Corbett, a businessman who owns 12 craft and who got his sea legs sailing the waterway with his father on a 60-footer on trips west to the Shannon as a child. READ MORE 'I had it built at a shipyard in the UK,' he explains. It was 1998. Dublin was beginning to boom. His sister Clodagh was coming home from San Francisco and wanted to open a cafe. He suggested she set up business on the barge. She was soon turning out about 130 meals a day from its compact galley, which Field Corbett estimates measures about 12sq m (130sq ft). The physical space the chef has to work in amounts to about 26sq ft, less than 2.5sq m. About a decade later he set up La Peniche, partnering with Eric Tydgadt of Belgian restaurant La Mer Zou, which at the time was located on St Stephen's Green. 'I build and design the boats and work closely with the operators. I don't run the businesses but have a shareholding in each,' says Field Corbett. The barge sets sail from Mespil Road up the canal to below Ranelagh bridge, offering diners a moving tableau of vistas as guests work their way through their courses. The Riasc sailing west on the Grand Canal The barge in one of the canal's locks The business operates successfully; Field Corbett says turnover was about €400,380 in 2024 and €360,000 in 2023. A cafe element is currently occupied and trading under a tenant who pays €26,000 per annum. The lease has expired, but the tenant has expressed willingness to renew under agreeable terms. Field Corbett studied at Cork Maritime College and trained aboard the MV Cill Airne, a 1960s vessel that he now owns; moored on the river Liffey at North Wall Quay, it operates as a boat bar and bistro. Another of his fleet is the canal-boat restaurant Cadhla , a 1922 Guinness brewery barge. He feels there is scope to develop the daytime business of the MV Riasc: 'It could become a co-working space or a coffee shop.' There is high footfall and a thriving lunchtime market in the immediate area. 'People are looking for experiences, for something different,' says selling agent Dave McCarthy of Drinks Advisor Ltd, which is seeking offers in excess of €350,000. 'The barge is very Instragrammable.' The vessel extends to about 148sq m (1,600sq ft). The saloon-like diningroom on its lower deck can accommodate up to 40 people. Its furniture comprises built-in seating with drop-leaf tables and affixed lamps. The tables can be moved to accommodate different-sized parties and then resecured in place. About the same number of diners can be seated under a canvas awning on the upper deck. La Peniche: The lower deck can accommodate about 40 diners. Photograph: Alan Betson The boat operates under all necessary safety, food hygiene and waterways regulations and is moored via a long-standing arrangement which will transfer to the new owner, subject to approval. After 26 years in business, Field Corbett is weighing anchor and setting sail in a new direction. Ever an adventurous spirit, he is expanding his business, in which escape rooms are installed on vessels of varying sizes in Dublin's docklands and on the quays in Galway, where he bought a dock in 2009. His Sea Stay Galway enterprise, meanwhile, rents out boats as tourist accommodation.
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A small country with an epic history for book lovers
Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told. It's also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline 'Feed Your Head – READ'. There's Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that's without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness' sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker. Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College's Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells. Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library's oldest tomes. These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books. Even without them, it's still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space. Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A small country with an epic history for book lovers
Ireland is a country in love with words, both written and spoken, its denizens rightly famous for the craic, that indefinable melange of music and laughter and the joy taken in a simple chat or a tale well-told. It's also there on the walls as we make our way through the crowds to the rambunctious streets of Temple Bar on our first night in Dublin – in a mural with the headline 'Feed Your Head – READ'. There's Brendan Behan cheek-by-jowl with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett. A panel nearby reveals that Ireland has produced four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And that's without mention of W.B. Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and the great James Joyce, whose masterful Ulysses spawned Bloomsday (June 16 every year), one of the biggest literary festivals in the world. This is the land, for goodness' sake, of John Banville, Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Roddy Doyle, Sally Rooney and Bram Stoker. Which makes our first day in Dublin, before we head south-west for Kilkenny and beyond, such a pleasure; because our first stop is Trinity College's Old Library, which houses the famous Long Room and the Book of Kells. Unarguably one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Long Room is 65 metres of burnished wooden bookshelves, normally filled from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling with 200,000 of the library's oldest tomes. These, however, have been temporarily removed as part of the Old Library Development Project, which aims to improve fire and environmental protections in the library and clean, document and electronically tag the books. Even without them, it's still an alarmingly impressive space. And taking things up a notch since November 2023 is the presence of Gaia, a remarkable illuminated globe that, using detailed NASA imagery of the Earth's surface, shows our planet as it is viewed from space. Sitting about two-thirds of the way along the Long Room, this large but miniature Earth by artist Luke Jerram is suspended in the air, a bright blue ball contrasting beautifully with the polished old oak beams of the library. It is mesmerising, eminently Instagramable, and it will be a crying shame when it is taken down in September 2026 (so get your skates on).
