I took this portrait of Brian Friel in the study of his Moville home in July 2010, shortly before he would be honoured with a season of his plays at that year’s prestigiously World Famous, Edinburgh Festival. It was a singular honour, traditionally afforded to writers such
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Challenging family relationships are too frequently a rite of passage in the process of growing up. In his first novel, ‘Miles Away’, NJ Edmunds adds stultifying dreams, mutilated corpses, suicide, occasional football games and finding a girlfriend, to the mix. The small town boy, Dacre, eases through
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I went to see ‘Red Ellen’, at the Lyceum yesterday; it told some of the story of Ellen Wilkinson, working class MP for Jarrow and main organiser of ‘The March for Jobs’, the North East Crusade for Work. Wilkinson operated on many fronts, trying to liberate
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Watching Adrian Dunbar’s moving production of Brian Friel’s ‘Translations’ at the Kings in Edinburgh last week, it was difficult not to apply the message to 21st Century Scotland. Set in the early nineteenth century, the play explores the difficulties of dealing with a culture which is alien to
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I went to the cinema recently. That’s an opener because it must be two to three years since I was last there. The Academy winner, ‘Argo’ was showing at a local multiplex. More about the film anon but the cinema experience has changed utterly. There is no
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