ArtScapeSteel-eyed and hawk-faced James Cromwell is one of Hollywood's most in-demand character stars, with a penchant for playing the senator/CIA boss/chief executive of a global corporation who turns out to be the villain in the last reel, writes Deirdre Falvey
But to kids he'll always be Farmer Hoggett in the Babe movies of the 1990s, a role for which he received an Oscar nomination. He was born in 1940 into a Hollywood family, the son of actor and director John Cromwell, who was blacklisted in the era of McCarthyism. James, too, has long been associated with liberal causes.
He'll be in Ireland later this year to perform in the Druid production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, the playwright's masterwork following the Tyrone family over a single day and night in 1912. Druid director Garry Hynes is "delighted to have a great Irish and American cast for this great American Irish play". Cromwell will be joined by Marie Mullen and Aidan Kelly in what will be the first major Irish production for many years of a work in which O'Neill's Irish heritage plays a significant part. Rehearsals start in Galway on August 7th, and the production opens in Galway's Town Hall Theatre on September 19th, before transferring to the Gaiety in Dublin on October 3rd for the 50th Dublin Theatre Festival.
DTF artistic director Loughlin Deegan commented that the festival has hosted "many of the world's greatest actors over its long history and Cromwell's forthcoming appearances are a very welcome addition to a long and illustrious roll call, which already includes Aidan Quinn, David Soul, Neve Campbell, Tom Waits, Geoffrey Rush, Jeremy Irons, Sorcha Cusack, Simon Callow, Derek Jacobi, Pete Postlethwaite and Tom Conti amongst many others."
Cromwell was aware of Garry Hynes's work in the US, and Hynes approached Cromwell to see if he'd be interested in the role. Cromwell made his movie debut in Neil Simon's Murder by Death in 1976 and has kept busy ever since in films such as LA Confidential and last year's The Queen, in which he assumed a clipped English accent to do a subtly comic turn as Prince Philip. On television he was a regular (as George Sibley) in the first two seasons of Six Feet Under, and he also guest-starred in ER and The West Wing. Currently he can be seen on the small screen in the new series of 24 as the father of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and in cinemas as Capt Stacy in Spiderman 3. Even if you don't recognise that distinctive face around the streets of Galway and Dublin while he's here, he'll always stand out in a crowd - he is 6ft 7in.
Refurbished Gaiety to reopen
Also at the Gaiety as part of Dublin Theatre Festival is Japanese dance company Sankai Juku's production of Hibiki - something to look forward to in the newly refurbished theatre, which reopens at the end of June with a return of Riverdance. Managing director John Costigan thanked the Department of Arts, which has invested considerable money in the refurbishment of the glorious theatre, and owners Denis and Caroline Desmond, who have also shelled out. In recognition of the support, Costigan announced that the Gaiety Theatre is setting up a student bursary scheme worth €100,000 over 10 years: two students from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and two from the Gaiety School of Acting will be awarded the bursary each year. John O'Conor and Patrick Sutton (from those two institutions) accepted the cheques for the bursaries, set up in consultation with the Department of Arts. This year acting students David Farrell and Esther DiMagio (see On The Town, above) and music students Tara Erraught (mezzo-soprano) and Macdara Ó Seireadáin (clarinettist), each get €2,500 towards fees and other study.
Celebrating Cork's gory trade
Cork city is to have a new festival this weekend based on its one-time renown as the ox-slaying capital of Ireland - it used to absorb more than 90,000 animals a year, writes Mary Leland. This gory business was largely concentrated in Blackpool, a semi-urban village that is now disappearing, as an enormous expansion and building programme leaves the narrow streets, lanes and houses to decay while retail malls and apartments rise all around. It was through those streets that the herds of cattle would be driven towards the sheds, from which their carcasses would emerge to supply for the naval and merchant fleets in Cork harbour and to feed those on board - often soldiers on their way to the Dominions or the European and American wars.
While Corkonians ate the leftovers (offal is still popular locally and appears on the very best menus), Blackpool prospered, with tanneries, saltworks, cooperages, and leather and glue factories, from which the merchants of Cork grew rich. Now a big community festival has been designed by Moray Bresnihan and his Goldiefish events company to celebrate trade and traditions in the area, and workshops have been continuing for months as performers, artists, schools and community groups prepare for the carnival, which runs today and tomorrow.
More than 50 craft and jewellery traders and stalls offering slow food produce will add to the mix. Rekindling the neighbourhood awareness of its past (the mart and associated trades finally died out only 30 or so years ago) and sponsored by the Shipton Group of developers, the multicultural event will include dancers, musicians, circus acrobats, puppeteers and jugglers from countries where cattle have special symbolism.
Participants from the Philippines, Brazil, Burundi, China and Russia will join gospel choirs, the Cork Pops Orchestra and barbershop quartets in the festivities, which culminate in a "bull run". Virtual bulls, that is; this isn't Spain.
Plans for PQ 07, the Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition of Scenography and Theatre Architecture, which Ireland is taking part in this year for the first time, are moving along briskly. The Irish national exhibition for PQ 07 will feature the work of 40 Irish designers working in stage, costume, make-up, lighting and sound design for theatre, opera and dance. Irish designs for three small-scale theatres will be exhibited in the theatre architecture section, and curator John Comiskey last weekend put together a working model of the set in a warehouse in Santry to get an idea of the scale and shape of the exhibition, which runs in Prague from June 14th to 24th. The Irish catalogue was launched by Eugene Downes, incoming Culture Ireland director, this week. Meanwhile, Nena Zoma McNamee and David Mulreany, both post-graduate students of production design and art direction at IADT in Dún Laoghaire, have been selected to exhibit in The Birds, a project commissioned for PQ 07, with more than 40 students and emerging designers creating set and costume designs for a critiqued international exhibition of Aristophanes's classic Greek comedy, which will be part of Scenofest - the student and emerging designers section in Prague. Projects were judged by an international panel of designers, and selected entries come from Sydney, Brussels, Edinburgh, Sofia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Toronto, Belgrade, Bratislava, Barcelona, Connecticut, San Diego and Dublin.
Nena Zoma McNamee's set design is on the theme of escapism - two men from an asylum who have hallucinogenic dreams about escaping society travel on a matrix out of reality into another dimension, where they build a city in the sky and live with the birds. The expression "cloud cuckoo land" came to mind for David Mulreany while developing his stage design - characters pop up from trapdoors to inhabit an alternative physical environment, where trees are made out of stone and the ground becomes planked wood. A virtual online exhibition featuring all applications can be viewed from June 15th at www.scenofest.org.
84 Charing Cross Road, the last show on the main stage at Andrews Lane Theatre, opened this week and runs into July. It will not be the last production in the building, however: other productions running at Andrews Lane Studio include Tardy Lasso's three short plays by Harold Pinter (Party Time, The New World Order and Precisely), from July 2nd to 14th, and Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park next week.
There aren't that many opera productions in a year in Ireland, so surely it's odd timing to have the newly positioned Wexford Festival Opera overlapping with Opera Ireland's season in the RDS, as well as Castleward Opera in Strangford and Opera 2005's The Merry Widow in Cork. Talk about giving opera lovers difficult choices.