Word: irishness
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Great Big Sea’s music is an interesting mix of many styles. Generally lumped under the blanket term “celtic-rock,” the group draws heavily on their Irish/Scottish backgrounds. The traditional music of Newfoundland is rooted in Irish music. Great Big Sea is famous for is the way that they take traditional Newfoundland songs, such as “Mary Mac” and “The Night That Patty Murphy Died”, and turn them into rock tracks that have a far more universal appeal. Maybe the only band ever...
...Kirkus flips over "The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories" by Emma Donoghue (Harcourt; May), giving it a starred review. "Seventeen stories by the Irish-born Canadian author ransack what Donoghue calls 'the flotsam and jetsam of the last seven hundred years of British and Irish life' for razor-sharp vignettes of the fates of women in judgmental male-dominated societies...These jewel-like stories vibrate with thickly textured detail and vigorous period language. Donoghue's colorful, confrontational historically based fiction is making something entirely new and captivating out of gender issues. One of the best books...
...dramatic figure, given to quoting Shakespeare, Haughey is reportedly not at all pleased to be stage-fodder; his lawyers are said to be scanning the text with litigation in mind. Nor were the Irish media any less sensitive when the Abbey presented the piece. "Haughey fury at Abbey play" blazed the front page of the Sunday Independent, while daytime TV and radio was full of Hinterland talk. Press comments - the Sunday Times (not a reviewer) called Hinterland "feeble, puerile, trite, dissociated, shallow, exploitative and gratuitously offensive" - might also make the Irish Arts Council reluctant to extend more funding...
...opening night in London, the play was greeted with nothing more sensational than polite, slightly disappointed applause. It's neither as bad nor as worthy of prolonged debate as the Irish media suggested, but turns out to be a frustratingly uneven outing from a writer whose 1995 play The Steward of Christendom marked him out as a special talent...
...aging Johnny Silvester paces and faces his demons. He is plagued by the press, his bitter wife and his mentally disturbed son - even the imagined ghost of the friend he betrayed. Barry has denied that Silvester is specifically Haughey. However, there are some obvious parallels - both are ex-Irish Prime Ministers, both have had affairs with journalists, and both are accused of dubious financial dealings. At one point Silvester even growls, "I have done the state some service," the Shakespearean quote famously employed by Haughey...