A cosy bar, a glass of wine and a consummate actor to bring us a little closer to the magic of the Emerald Isle and the writers who hail from its boggy, green, gloriously rich literary heritage. I found all of this in Cockburn Street yesterday—and was the better for the experience.
Oscar Wilde, J M Synge, W B Yeats—Neil O’Shea is passionate about all these great wordsmiths and during this intimate production performs extracts from their work and others with an understated, lyrical voice and turn of phrase that makes the hour fly.
Beginning with Jonathon Swift’s Resolutions for When I am Old (he of Gulliver fame), we then had an extract from Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (Neil playing all the parts of course), G B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island and Percy French’s Elizabeth & Essex, before Neil moved on to some more well known pieces: two W B. Yeats poems (I could have listened to more of him I must admit), an extract from Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, a section from Joyce’s Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man and concluding with the Mr Worthing / Lady Bracknell ‘handbag’ scene from Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Ernest.
Humorous, tender, biting, satirical—all was here and all performed to perfection.
If you enjoy Irish writers and want an evening in the company of the best of them, you could do no better than spending an hour with Mr O’Shea.