Search Results for 'Hamlet'

KENNETH BRANAGH’S career continues to mystify me. In the early 1990s he was the poster boy for the RADA’s new wave, his peers included Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, and Jonathan Pryce, but it was Branagh who catapulted to fame first through adapting, directing, and acting in big budget adaptations of Shakespeare.

For three years after the opening of the Gate Theatre in Dublin Mícheál MacLiammóir continued to work for An Taibhdhearc. He travelled to Galway as often as three times a week. Despite the Gate's rave reviews for its first play Peer Gynt, for which Mícheál designed its 'symbolic' scenery, money was slow to come in. Mícheál needed the salary that An Taibhdhearc offered. The Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe (who was soon to take over the running of the Abbey Theatre), and who had taken such interest in the fledgling Galway project, urged its directors to offer MacLiammóir full-time employment. But MacLiammóir felt that his destiny was in Dublin. The Gate opened later in 1928, the same year as An Taibhdhearc, offering Dublin audiences the best of European and American theatre, and rapidly becoming a venue for a new wave of talented Irish writers.

FRANK MCGUINNESS’S adaptation of Sophocles’ Electra will be staged as part of the inaugural NUI Galway Theatre Season.

Anjelica Huston’s mother, Ricki Soma, grew up over a popular Broadway Italian restaurant called Tony’s Wife on West Fifty-Second Street in New York. At 14 years of age she was already a beauty, and a ballet dancer. She looked like the Mona Lisa, in fact she was considered so beautiful that a few years later her photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

It has been six years since the Tchaikovsky Perm State Ballet last visited Galway so needless to say there is great excitement about the company’s forthcoming return to the Town Hall with their staging of Giselle. One of the greatest Romantic ballets, Giselle is visually captivating and hauntingly beautiful. In the Perm Ballet’s production of this perennial classic, glorious costumes coupled with stunning sets and superb dancers guarantee a wonderful evening’s entertainment.

AND SO another year winds down and, over a seasonal mince pie and mulled wine, we can reflect on the past 12 months of Galway play-going.

AS SHAKESPEARE’S most complex, enigmatic, and ambiguous creation, Hamlet has inspired countless interpretations and commentaries, both within the field of theatre itself and in diverse areas of literature and scholarship.

THE AMAZING adventures of a young French woman, a tiny girl who lives under the floorboards, the lives of three young street dancers in Germany, and making sculptures from other people’s rubbish - it is all in this year’s Junior Galway Film Fleadh.

SECOND AGE Theatre Company come to the Town Hall with a sleek new production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks, one of the brightest young directors in contemporary Irish theatre and a graduate of NUI, Galway.