The Arts Review​

Lesley Conroy in Epiphany. Image uncredited **** I would die for you. Lovers say it often. They may mean it; they may even believe it. But it is not a binding oath or a genuine plan. Rather, it is an attempt to give language to a feeling so overwhelming that ordinary words seem insufficient. A feeling that must, undeniably, be love. It is the memory of such a love that returns to Gretta Conroy in James Joyce’s masterpiece short story The Dead. In her youth, a delicate boy ha

Teddy Moore and Peter McGann in The Whiteheaded Boy. Image: Patricio Cassinoni. *** Sometimes it’s better to let the dead rest in peace. Like Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy. Director Annie Ryan taking Robinson's historical text and decorating it in the trappings of a nostalgic 70s sitcom. In which the class conscious Geoghegan family’s notions of middle class upperosity are focused around Mummy’s favourite boy child. A perpetual medical student siphoning off the family

Ciara Molloy, Ghaliah Conroy, Pattie Maguire, Libby Conway Dunne, Eimear Hussey in The Good Luck Club. Photo: Patricio Cassinoni ***** Memory’s a living thing. We live memories, live in our memories, relive our memories. Our world, bodies and culture all psychosomatically shaped by the contractions and convulsions of memory. Memory denied, embraced, erased, suppressed, repressed, refashioned, romanticised. Otherwise known as history. A habit whose outcomes are often unquestio