The Crucible Gaiety Theatre, Dublin ★★★☆☆ Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play about the perils of moral panic, groupthink and superstition. But, as its title suggests, it is also about the civilisational importance of fire in a literal sense. The characters’ lives are dominated by wood: buying it, growing it, fighting over it. Arson … Read more
“Try to keep your cool,” my 16-year-old daughter instructed as I left the house to interview Andrew McCarthy. The night before we had rewatched one of his most enduring movies from the 1980s, Pretty in Pink. That movie turns 40 years old this year, but the universal language of teenage longing is so perfectly expressed … Read more
A Streetcar Named Desire Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York “The sky that shows around the dim white building is a peculiarly tender blue, almost a turquoise, which invests the scene with a kind of lyricism and gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay.” Not bloody likely. Those stage directions from Tennessee Williams’s published script for … Read more