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If Lottie can have her payday delights, then surely so can I. On Thursday, my new Canon 1000D arrived in the post. It’s my first SLR and it’s damn sexy looking:

Now I just have to work out how to use it…

In her opening monologue Catherine Eaton borrows lines from Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar to introduce us to her character, Olivia, a woman in solitary confinement in a mental institution, under the care of her childhood doctor. The play that unfold asks the question, is Olivia mad or is she sanely telling her own truths in the only way she knows how, through the language of Shakespeare. This one woman play (which features the disembodied voice of Vincent O’Neill as the doctor) is a tour de force for the young actress and writer.

In interview Catherine says,

I took Shakespeare’s complete works, his canon apart, I fragmented it, and I rewove them together, fragment by fragment, to tell an entirely new narrative.

It’s an ambitious idea and one that works well. Once I stopped my brain from saying “I know that line; that’s from Hamlet; that’s from Romeo and Juliet”, and began to fall into the world she was creating, her narrative flowed beautifully to tell the story.

Sadly, it is her story’s finale that lets her down. Captivated by the battle of minds between Olivia and her doctor and teased by the subtle sexual tension (I’ll remind you that the tension is created solely by Eaton on her own on stage), I awaited a dramatic and climactic conclusion, and I felt let down by this. Perhaps she should have borrowed further from Shakespeare’s tragedies and given us a bloody end, or from his comedies and given us a love story with a happy ending, but she did neither of these. Instead we are left with a character still lost in her own mind, no further developed from the opening moments of the play.

This is a shame, because Eaton’s performance is so full of vigour, love, passion and even humour, that I willed her to have a decent end. Overall, it is like studying a set of monolgues from the Bard’s work. We explore tragedy and beauty, we examine madness, repression and the human spirit, but without the final act of Hamlet, without the tragic conclusion of Romeo and Juliet, without the satisfying farcical close of A Comedy of Errors, we are left with characters in limbo and unfortunately that’s where Olivia is stranded as the stage plumets into darkness.

I suspect Eaton purposely wanted to leave her character in limbo, neither freeing her to the world where she could be ‘normal’ nor condemning her for her madness. Eaton understandable empathises with her. Olivia is a woman who is passionately lost in the works of Shakespeare, as Eaton herself is/was. She sees nothing wrong with choosing only to speak in line from the playwright’s text. Olivia is incapable of even speaking her own surname, as it does not appear in the pages of this complete works. Eaton’s passion for Shakespeare is portrayed in Olivia’s actions and words, but somewhere along the path of writing her play, Eaton has forgotten that Olivia is in a psychiatric ward for a reason. It is madness and there is no method in’t.

I don’t want to be too negative. I enjoyed the play, I enjoyed Eaton’s performance. It was beautiful and courageous, but I would love to see her tweak the ending, or perhaps explain her reasons for the ending she gave it. As it stands, I would recommend the play to lovers of Shakespeare, but others may struggle to find merit in the production.

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It is only the second play I’ve seen in the Greystones Theatre and I look forward to more.  The theatre works so well for intimate pieces like this and it would be great to see more people enjoying the venue. As for Corsetless, it continues its travels across Ireland including a one night performance in the Axis in Ballymun. For more information see Stir Productions’ website.

The boy has his own badge. How could you not trust him…

I trust Tommy. Do you?

Sinéad O’Connor and Shane McGowan – Haunted

It happens every year around this time (okay, maybe it’s slightly earlier this year). As the evenings draw in and Christmas nears, Christmas lunches begin. And come 5.30pm, roaming the street like zombies are lone business men, in expensive suits, staggering from side to side as they desperately ponder where they may have parked their car.

I love seeing them. Their faces are all squirmed up in a weird expression, presumably their attempt at looking sober. They confidently put one foot in front of the other, but unfortunately their body doesn’t want to follow, so they hobble backwards a few feet. Walking in a straight line is not an option.

The first sign of Christmas is not the Budweiser adverts, it’s not the Christmas lights on Grafton Street, it’s not the first Christmas card you receive, it’s the drunken businessman with a bit of tinsel in his hair, staggering towards home.

How did I miss this? YouTube‘s first ever live streaming event happened in San Fran and Tokyo on Sunday night, featuring some of the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) YouTube stars, such as Bo Burnham, Fred, Tay Zonday, Happy Tree Friends and the incredible Charlie.  There were also guest performances from the delicious Katy Perry, will.i.am and Akon.

Check out the whole event – I have a long YouTube-filled evening ahead……

Via OurCountryPAC.org, this is a genuine advertisement thanking Sarah Palin. Watch it to the end. Wonderfully crazy!

Catherine Eaton sold out Carnegie Hall with her one woman show, Corsetless. Written by and starring Eaton, it tells the story of Olivia, a woman confined to a psychiatric ward. She’s been locked up there since the death of her grandfather, who was her sole guardian. Olivia chooses to speak only in Shakespearean text. Her doctor, who has known her since childhood, had her committed. Olivia wages a linguistic battle against the doctor and the medical team she believes is holding her in isolation, arguing that it’s her decision to take on this acquired language, that it’s a reasonable choice. Relaying a tale of mental illness through the use of Shakespeare’s text is an impressive project and one which has really piqued my interest.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday 26th November, Eaton brings her show to Greystones for one night only. I love Shakespeare and I’m fascinated to see how his text will be used to tell this story, so I’ll be heading down to see it. Anyone like to join me?

Okay, they may have made up for it this week, but that doesn’t detract from their massive fail.

G & C, you’re fired!

This week, Gav over on EveryDayIsElectionDay is running the live blog. I’ll be there, wearing bells. Will you?

Reminder: this week’s Apprentice starts on TV3 at 10pm, which means if you are planning to watch 24: Redemption tonight on SkyONE, you’ve got a problem. I say root through your attic and find some old dusty VHS tape and see if that video recorder still does its job. Of course, you could also try using that new fangled SkyPlus remote you got last year but are afraid to touch in case you break something…

Well, we knew it would come, but now it’s official – Warner Bros. has begun pushing Heath Ledger‘s performance in The Dark Knight as a contender for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards. I happen to think he deserves the nomination and perhaps even the win. I loved the movie and his performance in it was nothing short of spectacular.

So, now that the dust has settled on his demise and the movie is heading towards DVD, do you think he deserves the Oscar?

On Friday, a colleague of mine told me about a dream she had the previous night. I was in it. As was Lottie and strangely, so too was Darragh, who she has met only twice.

Doyle had gone missing and was possibly kidnapped, so Lottie, Co-Worker and I headed off to America to find him. When we got there, it turns out he was in hospital. Seemingly, to help people, he had donated some unusual organs that only he had. He died, of course, and this made us furious. We were angry with all Americans and blamed them for the death of our friend. So, to seek compensation, we went to one of those places that turns the ashes of the dead into jewellery (this service actually exists) and demanded that they turn the ashes of Darragh into a ring.  They apologised and, to make amends, agreed to do it.

They created a giant diamond ring (the size of a large watch) and with that Claddagh Darragh Ring, I proposed to Lottie and she said yes. Incidentally, all of the Americans looked like stereotypical Irish people – pale faces, curly red hair and freckles.

So, there we have it. What do you make of it?

Btw, this morning I see that my co-worker isn’t the only one dreaming about me – Jo is having dreams about us too.

Just clearing out my bookmarks and I stumbled across these two videos –

From Foley, this is what the Internet is made for (seriously, watch it all):

From Everything and Less, just amazing:

We got this flyer through our office door this week. I can spot four mistakes. There may be more.