This is not a rehash of my Skinty Fia review, but smoke from the same grate.
The Arts Desk’s movie reviewers voted The Banshees of Inisherin the best film released in the UK in 2022. Here are our choices for the top 10 with the names of their directors:
1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonough)
2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)
Only a group of top musicians stood, or mostly sat, between a full but necessarily small house and Dr Malatesta’s Plastic Surgery Clinic in the bijou surroundings of Dun Laoghaire’s 324-seater Pavilion Theatre.
The set at the Arcola for Frank McGuinness’s Dinner with Groucho naturally features a table with two place settings and a backdrop of clouds in a blue sky. Overhead are pendant globe lights that will transform into stars. But the floor is a key feature too, covered in sawdust.
There’s a song by Kevin Ayers called “The Lady Rachel”. It was on his 1969 debut solo LP Joy Of A Toy. Play it alongside “This Still Life”, the second track on the second album from Ireland’s Aoife Nessa Frances and the aesthetic kinship is clear. The differing genders of the singer-composers aside, one could swap with the other and snugly fit onto either release.
Previous works by screenwriter-director Martin McDonagh, which include In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, might give you an inkling of the perverse and tantalising mindset that lies behind The Banshees of Inisherin… but then again, perhaps not. You could call it a drama, or a comedy or a tragedy. You might even call it a parable.
Gabriel Byrne is not a typical film star. From his breakthrough as the lustful and doomed Uther Pendragon in Excalibur, via his iconic Prohibition-era gangster in the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing and the wickedly twisty The Usual Suspects, the Irishman has evaded the usual, overexposed trappings of celebrity, remaining a familiar, respected, but largely private figure.
Essay-writing can be a great art, at least when executed by Hubert Butler of Kilkenny, on a par - whether you know his writing or not, and you should – with Bacon, Swift and Orwell. The same goes for speechifying. That level I witnessed, at the start of my three days at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, from Masha Gessen delivering the Hubert Butler Annual Lecture, and at the end from Professor Roy Foster, Fiona Shaw and the winner of this year’s Huber Butler Essay Prize, Kevin Sullivan.
The giraffe still baffles me. This model beast appeared stage right at the Royal Albert Hall during Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation, only to be loudly wrapped by a pair of percussionists and then removed. A critique of mindless consumerism, a satire on the destructive domination of nature (both among this work’s sprawl of themes), or a little absurdist interlude of the kind Walshe evidently enjoys?
An artist with a myriad of strings to his bow – gifted wordsmith, multi-instrumentalist, captivating storyteller – what enables James Vincent McMorrow’s singularly personal songs to take flight is the fact that he’s also a supreme melodist.