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Extra.ie
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Brendan Gleeson to star in The Weir for his first theatre performance in 10 years
Brendan Gleeson is set to return to the stage for the first time in a decade in a production of The Weir at the 3Olympia. The play, written and for the first time directed by Conor McPherson, will run from August 8 to September 6. It will then appear in London's Harold Pinter theatre from September 12 to December 6, marking Gleeson's West End debut. 'The last time I appeared on stage was 10 years ago, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where I started my career,' Gleeson said. 'I can't wait to be back there, and then to play in the West End for the first time, at the beautiful Pinter Theatre.' Though perhaps better known for his career in film, with roles in The Banshees of Inisherin , In Bruges and more, the Irish actor began his acting work in theatre. Gleeson last appeared on the theatre stage in 2015, performing alongside his sons Domhnall and Brian in The Walworth Farce , also at the 3Olympia. McPherson's The Weir was written in 1997, set in a rural Irish pub as the regulars share stories with a newly arrived woman from Dublin. It won an Olivier Award for the best new play following its premiere. 'I can hardly believe it's been 30 years since I wrote The Weir and about 30 years since I first met the wonderful Brendan Gleeson,' McPherson said. 'It's an absolute honour to bring this play to life again with one of the greatest titans of Irish acting.' Tickets for the 3Olympia run go on sale Saturday, May 3.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Safe House' Review: Singing a Song of Loneliness
Wearing a meadow-green T-shirt that proclaims her an Irish Princess, Grace dances with a white stuffed bunny that is her confidant. The music is Tchaikovsky's 'Sleeping Beauty' waltz, and it's a clue to how Grace's life plays out — not the ballet's storybook ending, just the tragic parts. In this snippet of a scene near the top of Enda Walsh's new play 'Safe House,' which opened on Thursday at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, the music gets speedier, more intense, all sense of comfort vanishing. Control, too, but that's hardly a constant for Grace, a homeless young woman with a mind blurred by alcohol. Like Sleeping Beauty after the curse kicks in, she is exiled from a life that looked secure enough from the outside but was treacherous from the start. Fair warning, though: Woven through with songs by Anna Mullarkey that are sung by Kate Gilmore as Grace, Walsh's Abbey Theater production feels more like a live performance of a concept album than a play. In his plumbing of trauma and abuse — think 'The Walworth Farce' or 'Medicine,' his most recent play at St. Ann's — he can have a way of reaching right into your viscera. Not here, unfortunately. In 'Safe House,' it is 1996 in rural Galway, and Grace is scrabbling together an existence on the margins. Guzzling box wine, trading her body for money, she plays grim bits of her sepia past on repeat in her head; for us, these are projections upstage or scraps of audio. Long gone though she is from the home she grew up in, which for her was a place of harm, she has not severed every family tie. On the other end of a phone, we hear her father pick up. 'I can hear you breathing,' he says, in Irish. 'Where are you, Grace?' Telling her story in loops of bruised memories and shards of implication, the show is precisely framed and layered, pleasing to the eye and ear: video and voice-over, confetti and fog. The music sounds like loneliness and hope. There's a hint of '90s indie pop, too, with shades of Dolores O'Riordan — or maybe it's just defiance — in Gilmore's voice. (Set and costume design are by Katie Davenport, lighting by Adam Silverman, video by Jack Phelan, sound by Helen Atkinson.) But the whole of 'Safe House' feels distant, and that isn't Gilmore's doing. There's no losing ourselves in the play, no entering Grace's story, because she isn't even a symbol, really, but rather an abstraction: a girl who grew up on princess myths and notions of female grace, who dreamed of a kinder, more love-filled life, who still seeks a place of safety. We're in her head, sort of, but minus all the context she has for these daggers of recollection. In video, we see young Grace in a Cinderella dress and tiara, and we hear her aunt call her 'the princess.' We gather that Grace's mother beat her — a cruelty akin to the witch's in the 'Snow White' clip we glimpse on little box TVs. We watch grown-up Grace enact a deathlike Sleeping Beauty tableau that probably should make us shiver, yet is pleasing aesthetically. Walsh, a prolifically, experimentally form-shifting creator, writes in a program note of the play's deliberate obliqueness. Certainly that can be a vital element in a work of art, accommodating even opposing interpretations. But there is such a thing as being too oblique. This isn't the customary disorientation of a Walsh play, where you're thrust into a strange universe that asks you to puzzle it out. 'Medicine' was like that: chaotic and messy, loquacious and unhinged, but with a pulsing sense of the lost human being at its center. 'Safe House,' which would seem in form and subject matter a natural successor, is far neater, but so verbally pared back that it gives the audience too little to hold onto. It's frustrating, because so many ingredients of a deeper experience are in place, yet sans the alchemy. The penultimate stage image, which I won't spoil, is breathtakingly theatrical. It would leave us shattered if 'Safe House' worked as I think it means to. I was unscathed. I did wonder if the world's current turmoil had colored my receptiveness. But I wanted this play to consume me. I wanted the shattering. Maybe next time.
