What’s On

What’s on – check out Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf and get booking for the Film Fatale Gatsby Mansion Party.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

You’ll breathe a sigh of relief at the end of director David Gridley’s three-hour production of Edward Albee’s iconic play – in a good way. Explosive, excruciating and totally brilliant, this Dublin Gate Theatre production will leave audiences as exhausted as its sparring players. Unhappily married couple George (Denis Conway) and Martha (Fiona Bell) unleash ?total war? in front of their hapless young guests Nick (Mark Huberman) and Honey (Sophie Richardson), whose own marriage, we soon discover, is too unravelling. George a failed Harvard academic, Martha the college president’s daughter, their vitriol spares no prisoners as fact and fiction becomes increasingly blurred with every mouthful of liquor. There are a few suspensions of disbelief, however: Bell is too sylph – and too young – to warrant George’s jibes about Martha’s weight and age, while Huberman is clearly not the blonde Aryan referred to in the text. Furthermore, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton’s exquisite cinematic turns as the gruesome twosome in 1966 can’t help but overshadow every rendition since. Still, it’s a tour de force production, with Jonathan Fensom’s fiery red set underscoring this hellish, claustrophobic night of smoke, mirrors and some of the cruellest barbs in theatre: ?I swear to God, George, if you even existed I’d divorce you.?
Until June 11; http://www.gatetheatre.ie/production/WhosAfraidofVirginiaWoolf2016

Film Fatale: Gatsby Mansion Party – booking now

If you missed Film Fatale’s fifth birthday party at Dublin’s Westin Hotel a few weeks? ago, never fear: Ireland’s best-dressed party returns to IMMA this August 13. Slip into some glad rags – dress code is strictly Jazz Age – and party like it’s 1929 in the museum’s grand surrounds, where punch cocktails, landscaped lawns, gambling tables and a vintage car await, while electro-swing, live ragtime, burlesque performances and Stomptown Brass invite guys and dolls, mobsters and molls to a Charleston-happy dance floor. It really does feel like stepping back in time, and if you book now you’ve loads of time to source a suitably swell outfit to have Daisy Buchanan and Zelda Fitzgerald absinthe-green with envy. Tickets from €31 (at the time of writing, tier one early bird tickets are almost sold out?http://filmfataleevents.blogspot.ie).