Latest news with #DesKennedy
Irish Examiner
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
A different casting call for Cork's famed Everyman as theatre recruits executive director
One of Ireland's leading producing theatres, the Everyman in Cork, has begun a different kind of casting call as it seeks to recruit a new executive director who will also work as co-CEO. The new executive director will work in close partnership with the famed theatre's artistic director Des Kennedy. The executive director will provide strategic and operational leadership, ensuring the theatre's financial sustainability, legal compliance, and commercial vitality. As joint chief executives, both roles report directly to the theatre's board and will share responsibility for delivering The Everyman's artistic vision and social impact. 'We are so proud to have just completed our first Everyman Made season and we are thrilled to be looking ahead to our next exciting chapter on MacCurtain Street,' said artistic director Mr Kennedy, who took on his role earlier this year. 'Since moving to Cork, 10 months ago, I have had the privilege of working with the most passionate and dedicated team of staff, artists, and theatre-makers. We look forward to welcoming a new executive director to join, and co-lead, this team, as we continue to make world class theatre, made by The Everyman, for Cork, and beyond." The 650-seater Everyman Theatre is a Victorian architecture jewel on Cork's MacCurtain Street, which opened at the end of the 19th century. The theatre is in the middle of a hectic summer season, with the Barn Theatre's production of the award-winning play Stones in His Pockets running until August 10. Later in the month, two Irish personalities better known in different arenas will grace the stage, with Imelda May starring there in Mother Of All The Behans from August 12 to August 16, while broadcaster and TV persoanlity Laura Whitmore will star in The Girl on the Train at The Everyman from August 19 to 23.
Irish Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Making History Friel review: Everyman production throws a lot at Brian Friel's clunky play
Making History Everyman, Cork ★★★☆☆ There has been no underestimating the attraction of recognisable topography since the melodramas of the 18th century. Richard Brinsley Sheridan sent urbanites roaming Bath's historic terraces and London's theatre district. Dion Boucicault had noble Irishmen diving into Muckross Lake and meeting amid monastery ruins in Glendalough. When, during the Everyman's new production, a group of 16th-century clansmen at their Tyrone base baulk at the decision of Spanish reinforcements to land in Cork, their cluelessness induces laughter in the auditorium. 'I think I heard some mention of Kinsale,' one strategist says. 'Never heard of it,' comes the reply. Everyman: Des Kennedy's production of Making History, by Brian Friel. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski The running gag of Ulstermen struggling with the geography of the south – 'The Ballyhoura Mountains ... they're in Co Cork, aren't they?' – in Making History is an astute observation by the theatre's new artistic director, Des Kennedy, but a bigger swing is being played here: can something be made of Brian Friel's 1988 play, a difficult artefact, conceived during the Troubles, that deflates romantic myths around the Flight of the Earls? [ 'People forget that Brian Friel was a radical' Opens in new window ] This version of Gaelic Ireland isn't what you'd expect. Inside a grand diningroom, a logistics-orientated secretary tries to tick through a list of social commitments – 'The invitation came the day you left. I said you'd be there' – while a smartly dressed Hugh O'Neill, Irish lord and eventual leader of a confederacy against the English crown, prefers the purity of living in the present – 'This jacket. I should have got it in maroon.' READ MORE In this zingy back-and-forth, nicely judged by Stephen O'Leary and Aaron McCusker, Friel's play seems to present these important historical figures as a screwball-comedy duo. Into the mix arrives Archbishop Lombard (mostly a cipher for the play's exposition and ideas, delivered as well as can be by Ray Scannell), who announces that Spain is interested in joining their battle against England. O'Neill's head isn't exactly in the game; to everyone's horror he has just eloped with a Protestant. Everyman: Des Kennedy's production of Making History, by Brian Friel. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski Locating the disorganised leaders of the Irish rebellion in a drawingroom comedy is the play's radical idea, but it is soon derailed by Friel's insistent metacommentary on how things are remembered – an instinct that often leads to long-winded revelations solicited without tension. Did you know O'Neill still has affections for the English politician who raised him? Or that he once fought against his fellow Gaels? Kennedy's production fights hard to share Friel's vision of history as a conspiracy, with debris from the Battle of Kinsale removed by figures wearing hazmat suits in Catherine Fay's costuming. After fatiguing war reports, the play finds some grit in a relocation to Rome, where an older O'Neill argues with Lombard about how to record the Nine Years' War in a manuscript (Denis Conway and Peter Gowan, making the best of an intellectual debate). 'People think they just want to know the facts, but what they really want is a story,' Lombard says. On that count, Making History isn't one for the books. Making History is at the Everyman , Cork, until Saturday, April 26th
