The Arts Review​

Isolde Fenton in Girl in the Machine. Image, Marcin Lewandowski *** Sauntering along Cork’s MacCurtain Street, a notice asks: would you switch off AI if you had the power? A publicity ploy to highlight a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its spectre of life-threatening, self-conscious technology making for science-fiction fantasy in 1968. A theme echoed in Stef Smith’s 2017 dystopian fantasy Girl in the Machine. Fantasies that now resemble prophecies, with

Kathy McGarry and Emma Dargan-Reid in Love and Other Promises. Image by Al Craig. **** Already, up-and-coming playwright Colette Cullen appears to be building a brand. Bewley’s Café Theatre’s revival of Love and Other Promises, a sequel to the utterly charming When Rachel Met Fiona, looking like the next episode in an aspiring movie franchise. Or Netflix series. Cullen’s New York frame of mind, jazz-piano follow-up sees the troubled couple end their marriage, navigate a new

Aoise Meaney, Séamus McLean Ross in Disco Pigs,. Image, Marcin Lewandowski *** When it first premiered in 1996, Enda Walsh’s undisputed classic Disco Pigs was informed by the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Today, its dated references remind us of when Ireland began to find cultural confidence through a refusal of what was in favour of what we might become. Walsh’s coming-of-age tale of two darkly twisted seventeen-year-olds discovering desires beyond the friend zone drenched