In this time of recession it’s a very clever idea to use the same crew for two show in the one festival. As the press release says;

New times call for new ways of making work. And so, as part of Absolut Fringe 2009, Loose Canon are presenting two new shows, by two cutting-edge directors, which will share designers, cast, space and time in order to serve audiences with a double helping of work from one of Ireland’s most exciting theatre companies.

The shows in question are Anatomy of a Seagull and Jesus Has My Mom In There And Has Beat Her Up Real Bad

I’m reliably informed, by those that have had sneak previews, that both shows are worth seeing.

Anatomy of a Seagull is a forensic examination of death by a thousand cuts, adapted from Chekhov’s classic The Seagull by Jason Byrne, who also directs.

Jesus Has My Mom In There And Has Beat Her Up Real Bad, created by Dee Roycroft, is a bold new performance about planes, love and diffusion theory.

The cast for both productions includes Noelle Brown, Jonathan Byrne, Simon Coury, John Cronin, Damien Hasson, Charlie Murphy, Catríona Ní Mhurchú, Karl Quinn and Dee Roycroft.

The Piggyback Project | 4-19 September 2009

Jesus Has My Mom in There and Has Beat Her Up Real Bad | Directed by Dee Roycroft
Opens | 15 September Until | 19 September
Time | 6.15pm Venue | Absolut Fringe Factory at Smock Alley Price | €16/13/11

Both shows can be purchased together for a discounted price of €30/25 (conc.)

Booking Details
Online | www.fringefest.com
Call | 1850 FRINGE (1850 374 643)
Box Office | Absolut Fringe Box Office, Filmbase, Curved St, Dublin 2

It’s nice to be back.

Clinic Media will be making their first short film in June. We are delighted to announce that actress and author Jody O’Neill has agreed to turn her short play Breakfast into a short film.

Originally written for Project Brand New, Breakfast tells the story of a Man and a Woman in love. They have the perfect relationship, the perfect house and the perfect toaster… As interest rates rise, inflation soars and house repossession reaches all time highs, this Man and Woman make a choice. With no way to make their next mortgage payment (or the one after that) we find them enjoying one last breakfast together.

O’Neill will be taking up the female role, but we’re still looking to fill the male role. He is a restaurant manager in his late twenties/early thirties. An all round dependable type of guy.

The 2-day shoot will be directed by Eoin Ó hAnnracháin for Clinic Media.

Please send Showreel (or examples of work), Headshot and CV to clinicproductions@gmail.com or post to 33 Slieve Mish Park, Kinsale Road, Cork, Ireland.

As this is a no-budget short film it will be an un-paid job, but expenses will be covered.

See Clinic Media for further details.

Penny, written and directed by Patrick O’Shea, won the Best Drama award at the Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival this weekend.

It tells the story of Penny, a young teenage girl, played by Mary-Louise Mc Carthy, who discovers she is pregnant on the morning she is to sit her first leaving cert. exam.

O’Shea, pictured right, is a Cork filmmaker who produces his films independently. His past credits include An End To Dreaming, Uncle Joe and The Sign. He is in post production for Tunnel at the moment, which should be ready for the Cork Film Festival in November.

Check out the trailer for Penny.

From The Times;

Try this for an Agatha Christie plotline: performing on stage inside Vienna’s Burgtheater, one of Europe’s oldest and grandest, an actor takes a knife to his throat in his character’s desperate attempt at suicide. As audience applause fills the opulent theater, blood pours from the actor’s neck. But something’s not right. Buckling and staggering his way off stage, the actor collapses to the floor. That’s because the knife, and the harm that it’s done, are both tragically real.

Unfortunately for Daniel Hoevels, a 30-year-old actor from Hamburg, those pages from a murder-mystery came to life last Saturday night during a performance at the Burgtheater of Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller’s play about the wretched life of Mary Queen of Scots. Rushed to the nearby Lorenz Bohler hospital having sliced through skin and fat tissue but thankfully not his main artery, Hoevels was fortunate to survive. “Just a little deeper,” said Wolfgang Lenz, a doctor who treated him, “and he would have been drowning in his own blood.”

The police investigation into the calamity points more to a foul-up than foul play. Viennese police say they’re not probing the possibility of attempted murder; press reports had speculated a “jealous rival” could have had a hand in Hoevels’ injury. Instead, investigators are focusing on possible negligence within the props department of Hoevels’ Thalia Theater ensemble. According to local media, the company picked up the knife in Vienna to replace one brought from their Hamburg base that was then found to be defective. One possibility: that props staff forgot to blunt that new blade, which, police say, still had the price tag on it.

Hoevels himself seems to have put the snafu behind him. “I am now absolutely fine again,” he told local media, “but I will always for the rest of my working life have a strange feeling about this scene.” After reprising the role Sunday, albeit with neck bandaged, Hoevels headed back to Hamburg Monday in preparation for his role in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. In that play, the long-suffering title character winds up shooting himself in the head. Someone might want to double-check the gun.

The search for justice continues today!

The Fields of Anfield Road for Hillsborough

For those of you who don’t know, Hillsborough

He recently posted this which I thought was hugely relevant to our current affairs, so I’ve posted here instead of under sport.

How do we judge Avram, Jose, Ferguson and Benitez?

Avram Grant has just written a fascinating article for this website, published here in the Guest Writer section, where he talks about the challenge of implementing change at Chelsea…

The former Chelsea boss also talks candidly about his long term vision for that club and his justifiable frustration at not being given the time to see his ideas come to fruition.

Avram`s article has reminded me of one of the most interesting debates we have had in the blog recently, which was prompted by my observation that we are sometimes deprived of independent thought in the modern media. Collective thinking seems to be the order of the day and if ever we needed an example of how, like a shoal of fish we are first led one way, and then the other by a press that has the power to decide who we should hate – and then subsequently fall in love with – then this week`s outpourings of collective grief over the death of an individual we were once taught to vilify shows just how pervasive this culture has become.

You are probably wondering what that has to do with Avram Grant.

The Israeli understood something that Brian Clough did not. As anyone who has just seen or read The Damned United will tell you, Clough`s decision to tell the Leeds players that everything they previously represented was wrong and that they must discard everything they thought they had achieved, meant that he lasted just 44 days in the job at Elland Road. Whereas Clough smashed up the office of his predecessor, Avram Grant understood that he could not set about immediately dismantling the legacy of Mourinho. He believed that the transformation of Chelsea should be a gradual, long term process. He was subsequently given 8 months in which to do so: seemingly a long time in football and a lifetime at Stamford Bridge.

What was Avram Grant`s crime? According to the Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck: “We have very high expectations at Chelsea and a couple of second place finishes is just not good enough for us. So although we never would have thought in September when Mourinho left that we would be able to make it into a Champions League final as we did – and that is fantastic – Chelsea are here to win trophies.” So, despite the fact that Avram Grant exceeded expectations, he lost his job because another team was marginally better – or marginally luckier on the day – than his team was.

If Lampard or Anelka had found the net instead of the post at the Champions League final, or if Heskey had not scored the goal of his life in the 1-1 draw with Wigan – would that have made Grant a better manager? According to Buck, it would have done – because according to everyone else, especially the press, Grant was now a loser. We have reached the stage where it has little to do with how well you do your job: appearance and perception are everything.

To be fair, we are also guilty of this in Spain as well. Very recently, after spending most of the season kicking his heels on the bench at Barcelona, Bojan Krkic finally got the opportunity to start a match, in place of the rested Eto`o. Bojan scored twice.

At the moment, in the eyes of the Catalan press, Pep Guardiola is a winner: a hero who can do no wrong and every decision is proof of his genius. In the eyes of the Barcelona faithful – including Lee, who the edits this site with me – Pep can walk on water. Consequently, the loyal Catalan sports press saw the decision to play Bojan as a perfect example of how to manage a young player: Guardiola`s decision to play him in that particular game was described as a masterstroke. And so it was that Bojan`s brace was conclusive proof that Pep is a genius.

But what if the Barcelona coach were public enemy number one? What if, in the local press, he was more Grant than Mourinho? Then it would have undoubtedly been decreed that Guardiola got it wrong: that after forcing the young striker to spend the season in purgatory, stifling his development and shredding his confidence, the fact that when Bojan finally gets his chance to play, he scores twice, provides the damning evidence that Guardiola has no idea what he is doing. Same scenario, two different interpretations.

In our recent discussion in the blog, it seems that we have allowed others to decide for us that one particular team is `boring` – despite scoring more goals than any other team in the league this season. We have also decided that one man`s `rant` is the sign of another man`s mastery of mind games. When one storms off refusing to talk to the press, or flies in to a rage, it is a carefully controlled psychological tool and an indicator of the man`s intellectual dominance over the rest of us; when another man betrays the slightest emotion, well he`s cracking up ain`t he.

One of our readers a Liverpool fan – commented in that discussion that if Benitez loses the title this season: “he should be sacked – he has failed.” I wonder, if Liverpool finish the season on 84 points and win the title, does this make Benitez a better manager than if he finishes the season on 84 points, missing out on the title by a single point because United draw, rather than lose a particular game?

How do we define success and failure?

Avram Grant lost two league games all season at Chelsea. He finished second, two points behind Manchester United on 85 points – possibly more than enough points to win the title this season. He lost the Champions League final by a matter of inches, by a skewed shot. According to his employers, he lost his job because he did better than they expected, but someone else did better than he did. According to the fans, he wasn`t Jose. According to the press he was neither flavour of the month nor sexy enough.

When did we stop defining people by what they do, and start judging them by what other people think of them…

Anyone interested in football should check out Grant article too.

The extremely short version is that RTÉ went from this;

to this;

Will Ferrell has been doing a Broadway show called You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush and HBO aired one of the final performances live last night. I hope to get my hands on it soon to see what it’s like.