Ringmaster Dara takes the floor

ARTSCAPE/Deirdre Falvey:  "I'm the new, straight Irishman," comments comic Dara O Briain about joining the Irish-presenters-…

ARTSCAPE/Deirdre Falvey: "I'm the new, straight Irishman," comments comic Dara O Briain about joining the Irish-presenters-in-Britain pack - by hosting BBC2's Live Floor Show, starting tonight (10.25 p.m.).

The 10-part series features O Briain as "ringmaster" for live bands and comics. So is this the big break for O Briain, who's been based in Britain for about 18 months? "I hope so. I don't know. But it's great, after dragging my arse from one club to another over here. I opened Heat magazine and there was a photo of me in the TV section - and I thought: 'I have now signed a Faustian pact - I'm in Heat magazine'."

The gig came out of the blue, even though he'd been "bouncing around the BBC for years with my CV - love-bombing them". The show is recorded in Glasgow, so he's commuting from London. He lives in a "student house" (a long story) in Kilburn, where he's "three to five years older" than his housemates. "I opened the fridge and there were five different butters ; and I thought: I'm back on rotas!" Nonetheless he enjoys living in London "even though I'm into the whole Irish thing: the GAA, Irish language, owning a greyhound". He's back and forth all the time - and his production company (with Seamus Cassidy), Happy Ending, got a good reaction to the broadcast pilot of The Panel on N2 over Christmas.

So did he see how the Radio Times referred to him - "though little known elsewhere in the UK, he's huge in Ireland"? "I wouldn't be too pleased about that, what with my republican sympathies," he laughed.

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Theatre judges named

The judges have been announced for this year's Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards. They are Phelim Donlon, Maureen Kennelly, who was also a judge for the 2002 awards, and Helen Meany.

Phelim Donlon  was appointed general manager of the Olympia Theatre in 1977, and became general administrator of the Irish Theatre Company in 1980. He joined the staff of the Arts Council in 1983, and held the posts of administration officer, film officer, opera officer and from 1985 to 2000, he was the council's drama officer. He left the Arts Council in 2001, having been director of the Auditoria Project, which was a review of planning, provision and programming of the performing arts in Ireland.

Maureen Kennelly  remains from the 2002 panel of judges. Until recently, she was director of Kilkenny Arts Festival with which she had worked since 1998. Previously she worked with Fishamble Theatre Company, Druid Theatre Company, The James Joyce Centre and Dublin Fringe Festival. As a freelance arts consultant, she is currently working with the National Craft Gallery, Earagail Arts Festival and is on a consultancy team with the Arts Council. She is a native of Kerry and a graduate of University College Dublin and NUI Galway.

Helen Meany  worked for The Irish Times from 1991 until last year. She covered all areas of the arts as a feature writer and reviewer, with special interests in literature, cultural history, film and theatre. She was also a critic with the paper for three years, as well as a sub-editor and commissioning editor. Most recently she held the position of acting arts editor. She is now a freelance writer, editor and critic.

The winners of the 2002 Irish Times/ESB theatre awards will be announced on Sunday, February 16th.

Gerard Dillon retrospective

Fans of the work of painter Gerard Dillon can look forward to a major retrospective opening next week in Drogheda. Droichead Arts Centre, in association with Belfast's Linenhall Library and the Arttank Gallery, will host the retrospective. It opens on Friday and runs until February 20th before travelling to Dillon's home city of Belfast (he was born in the Falls Road area), where it will be divided into two venues, the Linenhall Library at Donegall Square and the Arttank Gallery on the Lisburn Road. There will be 50 pieces on show, dating from 1938 to 1971 and will include paintings, collage, sculpture and prints. The artist's last retrospective exhibition took place in 1971 in Dublin and Belfast. He became a housepainter at the age of 14 and, as an artist, was mostly self-taught.

He lived in both Dublin and London, and spent periods painting in the Aran Islands and Connemara, where he established a base in Roundstone. Dillon died in June, 1971, in Dublin and was buried, as he wished, in Belfast.

The Beckett sound

In light of the row at the Beckett Symposium in Sydney, about the use of music in Company B's production of Waiting for Godot, it's interesting to note that Philip Glass started writing music to accompany Beckett texts in Paris in the 1960s.

"When I started working with Beckett's plays," Glass said in a recent interview in the Guardian, "the language of music I had wasn't appropriate to his plays. The first of the minimalist pieces, as people call them, were written to go with Beckett. I did about 10 scores - Endgame, Company, Mercier and Camier, The Lost Ones, some adaptations of little novels - working with a theatre company in Paris. We were friends of his and he would give us permission to do these pieces.

"He didn't like music in his plays, but he allowed it in my case. I developed a very pristine, reductive language that worked beautifully with his pieces. And that became the language that I began to use for my own ensemble. When he died, the estate closed it down and they won't let me do it any more."

Brief encounter

Thursday was something of a red letter day for Aidan Devon of Glenageary, Co Dublin. It marked the culmination of close on two years of effort to visit a local art gallery on Vico Road, Dalkey, writes Aidan Dunne. The gallery, a big, landmark, minimalist structure, houses the Donnelly art collection, which is generally reckoned to be the finest collection of contemporary international art in private hands in Ireland.

Under the terms of the planning permission for the building, the gallery would be accessible to the public on 60 days of the year, by appointment, Devon pointed out.

That all sounds very manageable, but he had found it difficult to secure a viewing time and has accumulated a large file of correspondence in trying to do so.

Eventually Thursday's visit was arranged under the auspices of the gallery administrator, Penny Gray. He was one of a party of 10 people - "not more, not less" - and certain other strictures, such as a ban of photography, applied. He has no gripe with the Donnellys, he points out, but does have one with the local authority, Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, which laid out the conditions for granting planning permission but seems, he argues, to have no interest in seeing that they are met.

And now the good news

The Arts Council may have the unenviable task of dealing with the Government decision to slash arts funding, but the Minister managed to have a nice job this week - approving good news for a handful of arts bodies.

The Cultural Relations Committee recommended spending €187,070 on Irish artists working or showing work abroad, including Blue Raincoat (€6,000 for performances in Warsaw and Berlin); Film Institute of Ireland (€7,000 for film festivals worldwide); Irish Chamber Orchestra (€20,000 to perform in South Korea and China); Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (€10,000); Ireland's participation at the Sao Paulo Biennale (€45,000); Consulate Shanghai (€5,500 for Irish participation in Chinese Irish Literary Seminar); Ireland Literature Exchange (€60,000 towards translating Irish literature). The funding available for 2003 is €700,000, the same as 2002.