Hugh Travers

9 results

These Stupid Things: As the characters’ desire for each other flickers and flares, will their own judgement become clouded by emotion?
The week’s best theatre: Two new plays going by their gut

These Stupid Things Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, ends Jul 21, 7.30pm (Sat & Sun mat 2pm) You live in the information age, your phone is smart, yo(...)

Caitlyn Jenner as she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Photograph: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair/Handout via Reuters
Top 10 ‘Get Off My Lawn’ moments of outrage in 2015

Ghastly, ghastly last year is over. Let’s cheer ourselves up by saying goodbye to 10 moments of high baloney from the previous 12 months. It’s the fi(...)

Famine statue in Dublin: a debate hosted by the London Irish Comedy Festival about comedy and censorship was dominated by ‘Hungry’, a not-yet written commission for Channel 4 about the Famine. Photograph: Kate Geraghty
Channel 4 Irish Famine comedy fuels lively debate

Comedy can live long in the memory. Charlie Walsh, who left Urlingford, Co Kilkenny, for London in the early 1970s, remembers when jokes mocking th(...)

Funny ha ha: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Photograph: Art Streiber/NBC/Getty
Culture Shock: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler walk into a bar. Fill in the punchline yourself

Funnily enough, no one knows what makes us laugh. Oh, sure, you know what makes you laugh: a chicken crossing the road. Somebody slipping on a banana (...)

Pat McGrath: his Always Going Home is hugely enjoyable but seems unsuited to the programme
Four things we wondered at Theatre Machine

1 If you open your heart, do you get a bloody mess? The Theatre Machine Turns You On 4, a mini-festival of short works in progress, is an (...)

Theatre Machine: ‘It’s brilliant for young companies to test their work in an environment that’s not necessarily final or complete. It’s so important to have someone in to see your stuff before going into a final production’
‘This might be awful’: the Theatre Machine test

This week, Theatre Machine, or to give it it’s full title, The Theatre Machine Turns You On Volume Four, will be cranking into life. Sixteen theatr(...)

A view of the Famine sculpture in Dublin which marks the national disaster that was the Great Hunger. Photograph: Frank Miller/The Irish Times
UK-based Irish group to picket Channel 4 over famine comedy

Protesters are to picket the London headquarters of Channel 4 on Saturday in a demonstration against plans to create a sitcom based on the Irish potat(...)

“You really would have to be talking about making jokes about Belsen and Auschwitz and the gas chambers to make it an equivocal thing in our lifetime,” said Famine historian and author Tim Pat Coogan in response to the proposed sitcom. Photograph: The Irish Times
Famine historian criticises ‘unsavoury’ Channel 4 sitcom

Plans to develop a sitcom about the Irish historical tragedy of the Great Famine have drawn the ire of media commentators, politicians and led to an o(...)

Lambo: Sacrificial lamb

Lambo The New Theatre ****In 1987, Gerry Ryan decided to cause a stir. During an uneventful survival segment in Connemara on The Gay Byrne Show, he re(...)