You have to wonder if there any alternative themes permitted in TV drama apart from murder (preferably multiple, committed by a serial killer) or paedophilia. New five-parter The Fall plonks itself down squarely in category A, with its story of DS Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) from the Metropolitan Police arriving in Belfast to shake up a stalled murder inquiry.
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delivered a devastating portrait of modern-day loss and revenge in a production from the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse.
“Uncensored” is the word that best describes Sinéad O’Connor onstage. Even when she’s singing a less-than-great number she remains fascinating. Where most perform, she just is, in the most naked and mesmeric fashion. There’s stage-craft involved, of course, but she really does seem to be in the moment, prancing and pixie-ing barefoot on a carpet that she always has for shows.
No theme, no message, no set, no title. Northern Irish comedian Jimeoin is a beguilingly old-fashioned kind of standup. “Just jokes,” he told us at the beginning of his new show, and he was true to his word. His gift lies in mining the quirks of everyday life for points of universal recognition, whether it’s the devilish business of refilling the ice tray, changing bin bags, bringing in the shopping, or why you’ll never see a busy man eating an ice cream.
In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively.
People sneer at musicals for endless reasons: they hate Broadway brashness, non-naturalistic lurches in and out of song, the sentimentality. One of the least acknowledged reasons, however, is because their plots – predictability plus songs – have zero tension. And you know what? Placed in the witness box, many a musical emerges guilty as accused. But the quietly astonishing Once is innocent of all those charges.
Molly Sweeney has been blind since early childhood. Supported by her understanding father, she has grown into a confident, independent woman. Then her new husband Frank and an ambitious ophthalmologist, Mr Rice, suggest that it might be possible to restore Molly's sight and she undergoes two operations. Partially sighted, she has to learn how to find her way in a mysterious new world where nothing is as she has experienced it. Her sense of herself is undermined, she loses her equilibrium and becomes confused in a mixture of memory and reality, seeing and not seeing.
The first thing to say about Sinéad O’Connor is that she has a voice like pure, running water and is a fabulous singer. She radiates a rare integrity and is unusually honest (often that gets her into a lot of trouble).
The manner and the speed with which Sinéad O’Connor veers between impishly poking fun at herself and her material, and delivering it with scorching force, is bewildering. For instance, with the “The Healing Room”, a tender song about a spiritual quest for inner peace, she cracks jokes about Mr Blobby during the intro and then changes the opening line to “I have a universe inside me… and a cucumber.” What’s extraordinary is that despite often sending herself up in this way, she can immediately slip back into singing so fiercely and persuasively that everything flows.
The director James Marsh has made his name as a documentarian who brilliantly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Both Man on Wire and Project Nim seamlessly wove together archive and reconstruction. Although Shadow Dancer, an IRA thriller set in the early Nineties, is in many ways very stylised, it is not as needlessly overwrought as Marsh’s TV drama Red Riding, but nevertheless characterised by a cool absence of cliff-hanging narrative tension that is typical of documentary.