The two Greats: drinking and typing. Credit to “theweeping typewriter

TWO EVENTS IN THE OLD VIC hear ye hear ye!

List of titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Theese look good if you are live in London or the UK

KING LEAR – A Rehearsed Reading with Joss Ackland

Sunday 29 September 2013 3pm

I am a man, More sinn’d against than sinning

Now at the age of “fourscore and upward”, veteran actor Joss Ackland takes on the Everest of Shakespearean roles in a unprecedented play reading of King Lear. Directed by Jonathan Miller and supported by an all-star cast, Joss will be returning to his theatrical roots 60 years after joining The Old Vic Company.

Cast cast includes:

Joss Ackland	King Lear
Greta Scaachi	Regan
Honeysuckle Weeks	Cordelia
Tony Robinson	Fool
Michael York	Duke of Albany
John Nettles	Duke of Cornwall
Barry Rutter	Earl of Kent
Tony Britton	Earl of Gloucester
Lee Ingleby	Edgar
Shaun Dooley	Edmund
Jos Vantyler	Oswald
Jack Tarlton	King of France/ Servant/ Captain
Paul Dodds	Duke of Burgundy/ Servant/ Herald
Robert Young	Old Man/ Knight/ Gentleman
Vernon Dobtcheff	Curan/ Gentleman/ Doctor

Directed by Jonathan Miller

In Ancient Britain an aged King Lear weary of the burden of his position decides to divide his realm between his three daughters. When his trust is abused and the rashness of his decision is realised his outraged sense of powerlessness and emasculation sets him on a chaotic course towards madness and death.

In Support of the Motor Neurone Disease Association.

Running time approx 2 hours 30 including interval

This event has been kindly supported by JM Finn & Co.

and drum roll please James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave from the stage adaption of Driving Miss  Daisy both in the West End and on Broadway and will reunite on The Old Vic stage.

This picture should speak volumes about whats to come ! but anyways

7 September – 30 November

‘Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps’

James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave play warring lovers Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s timeless comedy Much Ado About Nothing, directed byMark Rylance.

While young lovers Claudio and Hero have their forthcoming nuptials threatened by the resentful scheming of a Prince, marriage seems out of the question for reluctant lovers Beatrice and Benedick in this witty comedy about the never ending search for perfect love.

James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave recently starred in Driving Miss Daisy both in the West End and on Broadway and will reunite on The Old Vic stage to play these iconic roles for the first time.

Mark Rylance was Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe for 10 years, during this time he directed and performed in numerous productions. His recent acting credits include Richard III and Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s Globe and West End) and the critically acclaimed Jerusalem.

Take a look at images from Much Ado About Nothing rehearsals here.

The cast in alphabetical order:

Tim Barlow	Verges	Director Mark Rylance Designer Ultz Lighting Mimi Jordan Sherin Music Clare van Kampen Sound Emma Laxton Movement Siân Williams Casting  Siobhan Bracke
Penelope Beaumont	Ursula
Kingsley Ben-Adir	Borachio
Katherine Carlton	Beryl
Beth Cooke	Hero
Alan David	Antonio & Watch
Michael Elwyn	Leonato
Lloyd Everitt	Claudio
James Garnon	Don Pedro
Melody Grove	Margaret
James Earl Jones	Benedick
Trevor Laird	Conrade
Leroy Osei-Bonsu	Messenger
Vanessa Redgrave	Beatrice
Mark Ross	Sexton
Peter Wight	Dogberry & Friar Francis
Danny Lee Wynter	Don John

With:

Tyler Hunter, Henry Markham Hare & Samuel Stembridge-King playing Hugh Oatcake.
Samuel Allum, Charlie Beazley-Clarke & Gene Gurie playing George Seacoal.

Mark Rylance in Conversation – 18 September 2013 5.30pm

Renowned actor and director, Mark Rylance, will be giving an in-depth talk on Wednesday 18 September about directing Much Ado About Nothing at The Old Vic.Tickets £5.

Q&A with members of the company – 3 October 2013

A post-show discussion with members of the company giving audience members the opportunity to ask questions about the production and discover some of the secrets hidden behind the scenes.

The event is free to attend, but priority booking is given to members of The Old Vic Club and Friends before tickets are made generally available. For full details of the membership and our programme of events please visit our Support Us pages.

Please note – you must have a ticket to the performance to attend the Q & A session post show.

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Irishcentral.com and World Irish.com to merge

Two of the largest Irish diaspora sites, Irishcentral.com and World Irish.com, have announced that they are to merge.

The new entity, which will be known as Irish Central.com, will have offices in New York and Dublin.

The merger will take effect from 15 September.

“We are delighted to join with John McColgan and the team at World Irish,” Irishcentral.com founder Niall O’Dowd said.

Mr McColgan will be a director of and advisor to the new merged entity.

***

IrishCentral.com and WorldIrish.com, the two largest Irish diaspora sites have today announced a decision to merge.

The new entity which will continue as IrishCentral.com will have offices in New York and Dublin.

The combined entity will have over 2 million unique visitors monthly making it by far the biggest Irish diaspora website. The merger will take full effect from September 15.

“We are delighted to join with John McColgan and the team at WorldIrish,” IrishCentral founder Niall O’Dowd said. “We believe the potential to create a super site worldwide for the Irish is very real.”

John McColgan, founder of WorldIrish.com, will be a director of and advisor to the new merged entity.

“John has proven through Riverdance and WorldIrish that he has a deep and important understanding of the Irish Diaspora and he has never been afraid to put voice to that vision. We look forward to working with his vision at IrishCentral,” Niall added.

Noting that the Irish Post in Britain also recently bought in to Irish America Magazine and Irish Voice newspaper, sister publications of Irish Central, Mr O’Dowd stated: “Clearly there is enormous potential in this area to create a super site for the 70 million Irish worldwide in U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, Asia and Ireland.”

John McColgan said: “This is a truly exciting opportunity for WorldIrish to grow and develop under the IrishCentral.com brand.

“In a relatively short period WorldIrish.com has established a successful platform and this merger is a logical development to achieve greater global traction for the Irish diaspora,” he added.

Saints Row IV still number one in UK top 10 – Games charts 31 August

You Should…

Rikipedia

I’ve been thinking for quite a while of doing a very occasional series of posts here on stuff you should do. Places you should visit, TV you should watch, books you should read, food you should eat.

The only thing stopping me these days is the quality of other people’s blog posts in the same vein and my increasingly short attention span when I’m sitting at my desk during the day (that damned “work” gets in the way!)

Just be aware – I’m not a professional reviewer, this is just about pointing to things I think are great and that I think are very much worth your time…

So, to begin:

You should… try The Marker Hotel, just opposite the Bord Gais Energy Theatre in Dublin.

Went in for dinner on Saturday night and met the head chef Gareth (always strange meeting someone in real life that you know…

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Rest in peace Seamus Heaney :(

Photo Credit: RTE Player

It is with great sadness that I have let it be known that -Seamus Heaney,Nobel laureate,poet, translator,  and playwright has passed away at the age of 74.The Nobel literature laureate recently suffered from ill health, and was reported to have collapsed earlier this week.

Tributes are pouring in for the 74-year-old, who leaves behind his wife Marie and three children. President Michael D Higgins has led tributes to his friend and fellow poet Seamus Heaney. The pair have been friends for decades and Mr Higgins and his wife Sabina attended the Nobel Prize winning ceremony in Oslo in 1995. Mr Higgins said the greeted the news this morning with the “greatest sadness”.Mr Higgins, himself a published poet, described Heaney as warm, humourous, caring and courteous. He praised Heaney’s “extraordinary depth and warmth of personality” and his “grace and generosity”. In a statement Mr Higgins said: “As tributes flow in from around the world, as people recall the extraordinary occasions of the readings and the lectures, we in Ireland will once again get a sense of the depth and range of the contribution of Seamus Heaney to our contemporary world. “The presence of Seamus was a warm one, full of humour, care and courtesy – a courtesy that enabled him to carry with such wry Northern Irish dignity so many well-deserved honours from all over the world. “His careful delving, translation and attention to the work of other poets in different languages and often in conditions of unfreedom, meant that he provided them with an audience of a global kind. And we in Ireland gained from his scholarship and the breath of his reference. “Generations of Irish people will have been familiar with Seamus’s poems. Scholars all over the world will have gained from the depth of the critical essays, and so many rights organisations will want to thank him for all the solidarity he gave to the struggles within the republic of conscience.

He was one of Ireland’s best known and best-loved poets, often compared to W.B. Yeats.Beautiful post Catherine Cronin  lecturer in Information Technology at NUI Galway here 

Heaney had been awarded numerous prizes and received many honours for his work, most notably winning the Nobel prize for literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”. The writer and lecturer also received the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread prizes (1996 and 1999). He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996.

Many of his works deal with Ireland, particularly the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where he was born. As an Irish Catholic from Derry he came under pressure to takes sides but expressed a reservation to become a spokesperson for the 25 years of violence.

Born April 13, 1939, the oldest of nine children, Heaney first lived at Mossbawn between Castledawson and Toomebridge, Derry in Northern Ireland. In 1953, his family moved to Bellaghy, a few miles away. In 1957, Heaney traveled to Belfast to study English Language and Literature at Queen’s University Belfast. After lecturing for some time at Queen’s University and also at the University of California, Berkeley, he decided to move to Dublin and worked as a teacher at Carysfort College.He lived in Dublin until his death.

Photo Credit: Michael Collins Adventures on Facebook

sadness I am sad today because  Seamus Heaney’ is one of my favorite poets.He had a way with words and a style that could not match any other poet.His great friend Brian Friel will miss him terribly. Heaney’s fellow poet Eavan Boland professor of creative writing at Stanford  said that he was an ”an extraordinarily good poet”  and said that his death is “a tremendous, tremendous loss.” On the day that this blog was established, the tropical nature of my firist post wasHeaney and Longley read in Galway at this year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature.I really wanted to go to that public reading so alas i had blog about it from afar as it was sold out. I regret it today on hearing the shocking news today but in hindsite there was nothing i could have done it was booked out for months. Seamus Heaney 1939 – 2013 RIP Seamus Heaney in June at the Kennedy homecoming for JFK50. (Pic: Laura Hutton/ Photocall)

A screenshoot of 1st post

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Volvo Ocean Race, NUI Galway and online learning

catherinecronin

The Volvo Ocean Race is in town! As I write this, the boats are due into Galway (the finishing point of the race) after midnight tonight. The last time “the Volvo” was in Galway in 2009, an estimated 10,000 people crowded into Galway city to greet the boats arriving — at 3:00 in the morning — and enjoyed sunshine and a festival atmosphere for the next 10 days. Such is the spirit of Galway. [03/07/12 Update: huge crowds attended the race finish in Galway in the early hours of this morning.]

The event is about much more than the race. For the 2012 Volvo Ocean Race event, Galway has been transformed. We have a Race Village and a Global Village where you can find food stalls, musical entertainment, comedy, sports and adventure activities, crafts and fashion, as well as science, technology and education events. There is a great programme of

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McGuinness Returns

We haven’t seen an original play by Frank McGuinness in Ireland since 2002 according to Patrick Lonergan

So it’s great to see the Abbey staging his new play The Hanging Gardens – . It reunites McGuinness with his long-time collaborator Patrick Mason, whose version of Observe the Sons of Ulster that made Mason’s tenure as Abbey Artistic Director so important. 

And it’s a great cast also. Marty Rea gave the best performance I saw l in DruidMurphy 2012  and he’s joined by Niall Buggy his fellow DruidMurphy 2012 cast mate 

Eamon Dunphy’s autobiography The Rocky Road.

 

penguin is delighted to announce the acquisition of Eamon Dunphy’s autobiography The Rocky Road. The book was acquired from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency and will be published in October 2013.
For more than thirty years, no commentator on Irish sport, politics and culture has been the object of so much love, hatred and fascination as Eamon Dunphy. Now, for the first time, Dunphy tells the remarkable story of his life.
Eamon Dunphy said, “I’m delighted that Penguin is publishing a book that I’ve spent a long time working on.”
Tony Lacey, Publishing Director, Penguin said, “Eamon’s autobiography has been long-awaited, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. The Rocky Road moves seamlessly between the private and the public, with extraordinary stories from the worlds of football, politics and journalism, describing a life that has been anything but prosaic.”
Michael McLoughlin, MD, Penguin Ireland, said “Since Eamon’s return to Ireland after his retirement from football nearly thirty years ago he has been a feature of Irish life. It is a privilege to be given the honour of publishing this wonderful autobiography.”
For media enquiries, please contact Cormac Kinsella, Repforce Publicity, on 01-6349924
or email cormac.kinsella@gmail.com
For serialisation, please contact Michael McLoughlin, Penguin Ireland
on 01-6617695 or email michael.mcloughlin@penguin.ie
Penguin Random House is the world’s first truly global trade book publisher. It was formed on July 1, 2013, upon the completion of an agreement between Bertelsmann and Pearson to merge their respective trade publishing companies, Random House and Penguin, with the parent companies, owning 53% and 47% respectively. Penguin Random House comprises the adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction print and digital trade book publishing businesses of Penguin and Random House in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India, Penguin’s trade publishing activity in Asia, and South Africa; as well as Dorling Kindersley worldwide; and Random House’s companies in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile. Penguin Random House employs more than 10,000 people globally across almost 250 editorially and creatively independent imprints and publishing houses that collectively publish more than 15,000 new titles annually. Its publishing lists include more than 70 Nobel Prize laureates and hundreds of the world’s most widely read authors.

IRISH CHIEFS’ PRIZE IN HISTORY 2014

IRISH CHIEFS’ PRIZE IN HISTORY 2014

The Council of Irish Chiefs and Chieftains in association with the History Department of Trinity College, Dublin and History/Ireland magazine is offering a prize of € 500 for the winning entrant in an essay competition on Gaelic Ireland.

Entry is open to all persons over 18 years who are NOT on the academic staff of a history department in any third-level institution.

Essay must be on any selected topic within the following areas: – the history of Gaelic Ireland (date-range 400 to 1690 A.D), Irish kingship, lordship, land-holding, genealogy, family history etc. It should be approximately 2,000 words in length and accompanied by full footnote references to sources used, with a bibliography at the end (footnotes and bibliography will not be counted as part of the word-length). It may be written in English or Irish.

Entries, with candidate’s name, address and contact details should be posted to:
‘Irish Chiefs’ Prize’
c/o History Department,
School of Histories and Humanities,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2, Republic of Ireland

or e-mailed as an attached MS-Word file to: mksimms@tcd.ie by 1st May 2014

The prize will only be awarded for an entry deemed to be of publishable standard. Subject to editorial approval, a version of the paper should appear in a subsequent issue of History/Ireland. Both the winner and other entrants whose papers are deemed of publishable standard may be invited to contribute their work to a projected volume of essays on Gaelic Ireland, which is a central goal of the Chiefs’ and Chieftains’ competition.

Further Details

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