'My style is more storytelling and energy, just madness more than anything'

Thu, Oct 12, 2017

FROM COMEDY sketches about life in the GAA to more serious issues about mental health, it is likely you will have come across the work of Rory O'Connor if you are a regular user of Facebook.

'We met at a circus in Cork and decided to do some stuff together'

Thu, Oct 05, 2017

AHEAD OF their Absolute Legends gig at the Vodafone Comedy Carnival in Galway, Cormac Mohally, one half of comedic duo Lords of Strut, spoke to the Galway Advertiser about how he and Cian Kinsella are saving dance, their time on Britain's Got Talent, and Simon Cowell.

Kill PHILL

Thu, Sep 28, 2017

BETWEEN STAND-UP and improv performances, dishing up exotic treats in Massimo, presenting a Flirt FM radio show, doing poetry readings on a bus, hosting art workshops and performing science-based comedy, the multitalented Phill Jupitis has an extremely busy Vodafone Comedy Carnival ahead of him.

'Comedy rushed in as religion rushed out'

Thu, Sep 21, 2017

AMONG THE array of comic talent converging on Galway for next month’s Vodafone Comedy Carnival is Katy Brand, award-winning writer and performer of TV sketch series Katy Brand’s Big Ass, among many other credits. In Galway she will perform her hit Edinburgh Festival show I Was a Teenage Christian, an honest, fascinating and funny exploration of her teenage immersion in evangelical Christianity.

On being King Of The Castle

Thu, Sep 14, 2017

SEAN MCGINLEY, a stalwart of Druid’s early days, makes a welcome return to the company for the first time in eleven years, when he takes the lead role in Eugene McCabe’s powerful drama, King Of The Castle.

You Could Be Us

Thu, Sep 07, 2017

A COMPANY called THEY run an online programme, streaming six nights a week. Subscribers gain access to Yule, Catherine, Billy, and Una, people their own age, who act out their intense, personal, miseries, so that, by comparison, the subscribers (known as ‘clickers’) will feel better about their own lives.

John Smith - 'I’m in a different place now as a guitar player'

Thu, Sep 07, 2017

JOHN SMITH plays a rumbling fingerstyle. Sometimes he uses a slide. Sometimes he plays the guitar on his lap. Sometimes he even detunes mid-song. His guitar work and honey-on-gravel vocals have brought crowds to pin-drop silence and rapturous applause.

Do you like good music? Sweet soul music

Thu, Aug 17, 2017

“QUALITY SOUL music and people having a damn good time” in a city with “a great history of soul events”. This is what DJ Paul Grant says can be expected when the Galway Bay Soul Weekender hits the city at the start of September.

'Nobody understands desperation as well as David Mamet'

Thu, Aug 10, 2017

WASHINGTON DC'S Keegan Theatre returns to Galway for the first time in two years, when it stages David Mamet’s darkly comic and shattering classic American Buffalo at the Town Hall Theatre.

‘Nothing was ever planned in The Undertones’

Thu, Aug 03, 2017

NEARLY 40 years after they announced their arrival with their classic debut single ‘Teenage Kicks’, The Undertones remain an exhilarating live act and next week sees the quintet breeze into the Roisín Dubh.

'I feel like an outsider in every culture'

Thu, Jul 27, 2017

ONE OF the main events at the Galway Fringe Festival this weekend is Emigrant Elegy. This event is a juxtaposition of emigrant history and human desire to love and belong, in the form of words and music, bringing together the rich multiculturalism of the past and present in Ireland.

A 'Yidlife crisis' and a hit show about Jewish identity

Thu, Jul 20, 2017

GEFILTE FISH and Chips, the award winning show by theatre maker, songwriter, producer, and broadcaster Daniel Cainer, opens tomorrow in The Cellar Bar, as part of the Galway Fringe Festival.

'I try to create a situation where the onlooker has to ask questions'

Thu, Jul 13, 2017

ONE OF the major visual art shows in this year’s GIAF is Dark Night Of The Soul by Ana Maria Pacheco. A powerful sculptural installation comprising 19 over-life size painted wooden figures, it reworks the story of the fourth century Christian martyr Saint Sebastian to set it in a modern context.

'A mountainscape of pianos'

Wed, Jul 12, 2017

PERHAPS THE hottest ticket in GIAF 2017 is Woyzeck In Winter, in which some of Ireland’s foremost theatre-makers combine to present a thrilling fusion of two timeless German classics; Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck and Franz Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle.

'Music that makes people feel stronger'

Tue, Jul 11, 2017

BRIAN WILSON is not the only veteran of thrilling 1960s harmony-based singing coming to the Absolut Big Top in this year’s GIAF. Ladysmith Black Mambazo are flying in from Durban with their world-renowned celebratory sounds of South Africa.

Marwa Al-Sabouni - ‘The Power of Home’

Mon, Jul 10, 2017

WITH HER country still convulsed by war and destruction, the visit to GIAF of Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni, for a First Thought Talk, will surely prompt keen interest. Al-Sabouni, with her husband and two young children, has continued to live in her home city Homs throughout the war, even as much of it was destroyed in the conflict.

'The Cure is my family, it's never not going to be'

Thu, Jul 06, 2017

WHEN DID The Cure begin? Was it December 1976 when the band played their first gig? Was it 1972 when the original line-up, in their early teens, held a jam session? Or was it 1964, when seven-year-olds Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst sat beside each other on the bus to school?

‘You can be more dark, more beautiful, more scared.”

Thu, Jun 29, 2017

CAMILLE O’SULLIVAN loves that line in Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ - “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”, that even in the darkest recesses of life and art, some hope will be found, light will always break through, to, if not banish the dark, then at least to light the path through it.

Looking into the psyche of 'toughened, conflicted' women

Thu, Jun 29, 2017

UNDER A dark and unforgiving sky, in a society in chaos and turmoil, three women who have endured physical, sexual, or emotional trauma and violence, drug abuse, and one finding herself needing to seek an abortion, gather to tell their stories.

'Reservoir Dogs meets medieval literature'

Thu, Jun 22, 2017

ONE OF the hottest tickets in this year’s Galway International Arts Festival is Kneehigh Theatre Company’s exhilarating production of Tristan & Yseult which runs at the Town Hall Theatre from July 18 to 22.

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