The Arts Review​

Daddy Issues by Brigid Leahy. Image uncredited ***** “The old is dying and the new cannot be born” Antonio Gramsci once wrote in the prison cell of the Italian fascists. Identifying the dangerous meaning-gap arising from social discontinuity and stasis. Now, in recent culture and politics, it has felt as though the inability to conceptualise the future has created insistence to rebirth the past. To mythologise and revert to traditionalism. The trad wife lifestyle emerged as o

Gleek of the Week by Conor Burke. Image Fnati.c.ph **** Glee. A jukebox musical, TV series that ran from 2009 to 2015 promoting compassion, inclusion and acceptance. Then there's glee, described as opening yourself up to joy. Finally, twee, a sugar-rush sentimentality trying to pass as heart. Evoking the hugely popular "aw" response, as when looking at a doe-eyed puppy shivering in the rain, begging you to love him. All three in evidence in Conor Burke's suspiciously autobiog

The Act of Existing by Croí Glan. Image uncredited ** Choreography gives way to durational performance art in Croí Glan's The Act of Existing, choreographed by Philip Connaughton. Its advertised fifty minutes running well over seventy. It's not the vomiting, the spewing, the spitting, or the drooling that's the problem. We've seen all that before. It's not even its playful cursing at the audience or watching the cast waterboarding each other with milk. No, the problem is its