Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

My column from Saturday's News Letter. As last week’s election count ground on through Friday evening, I took a much needed break from the coverage to visit the reopened Lyric Theatre in Belfast.   It’s been closed for the past year or so, as the old building was more or less rebuilt from the ground up and replaced by a gleaming, modern venue costing £18.1 million.   The Department of Culture, Arts and Lesiure stumped up about half of that total.   A hefty price tag, but it seems to be money well spent.   The lack of sound-proofing at the old Lyric was a particular irritation, with the roar of traffic from Stranmillis Embankment, car alarms and the like constantly intruding on performances.   Nothing quite explodes the illusion that you are in say, 7 th century Denmark, like the cheesy jingle of an ice cream van. There are no such issues with the new theatre.   The heavy wooden panels surrounding the auditorium insulate it perfectly from the outside wo...

On Saturday evening I attended Prime Cuts’ version of Black Milk, a play by Vassily Sigarev, receiving its Irish premiere at the Belfast Festival. Set in a desolate Urals’ backwater, at a crumbling train station, a trashy ‘New Russian’ couple from the city find themselves in a clash of culture and values with the rural poor. Lyovchick and his heavily pregnant wife are ‘shuttle traders’, hustling the locals to buy ‘super toasters’ for exorbitant prices. Apparently many of their customers believe the devices will enable them to bake bread. When Shura’s waters break she is taken in by kindly ‘Auntie Pasha’ who helps deliver the baby, and the chain smoking female lead, with a dissolute past, becomes seduced by the notion of living a simple, honest life in the countryside. Her abusive husband has different ideas and an intense and occasionally brutal final scene is played out, as Shura pleads with Lyovchick to embrace a new life and he attempts to wrench her back to the routine to which...

The Lyric Theatre is due to be levelled later today to make way for a brand new facility. The replacement is sorely needed as the current theatre is uncomfortable, pretty chilly and very poorly soundproofed. Nothing quite damages the impression of twelfth century Denmark, like hearing an ice-cream lorry revving its engine and playing ‘the Entertainer’ at full volume, somewhere outside. The theatre has contributed to a fair amount of dross over the years, Marie Jones’ career spring to mind, but it is still the leading arts’ theatre in Northern Ireland. Hopefully the work goes well and it will open on schedule in March 2010.

I am no fan of the Northern Irish actor Dan Gordon. He is best known for his role in the execrable comedy series Give My Head Peace and the other part which brought him to prominence was the lead in Marie Jones’ One Night in November – a ‘play’ which makes it its business to demonise fans of the Northern Ireland football team. This week however, BBC NI have been showing a fascinating programme in which Gordon directs a group of prisoners from Belfast’s Hydebank Wood Young Offenders’ Centre in a performance of Frank McGuiness’ play ‘Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme’. The programme followed the process of Gordon selecting his cast and rehearsing the play with them over a number of months. Last night the four part series culminated with a performance of the play given to a selection of fellow inmates, staff of the prison and a rather arbitrary group of local luvies. However it was the process of cajoling the prisoners to produce the performance through a mixture of...