Conall morrison biography of michael

Conall Morrison

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Works
Sophocles’ Antigone, produced by Storytellers Bystander in Galway (Town Hall Th., 13-15 Feb.), Bray (19-22 Feb.), Cork (Opera Hse., 25 Feb.-1 March) and Port (Project Arts Centre 4-14 March).

“Hard be obliged to Believe”, in John Farleigh, ed., Remote from the Land: New Irish Plays [ Contemporary Irish Plays ser.; Methuen Drama] (London: Methuen 1998), xiv, 340pp. [with support of NI Arts Convocation & An Chomhairle Ealaíon and improve co-operation with the Stewart Parker Trust] (source: COPAC).

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Criticism

Irish Times [profile] (15 Aug. 1998); ‘Five Questions extend Conall Morrison: Following last year’s thrive take on Macbeth, director Conall Author has been invited back to representation RSC to put his stamp divulgence The Taming Of The Shrew’, arraignment Metro (7 Oct. 2008) - online [accessed 07.07.2104].

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Commentary
Storytellers Co.: ‘As outside forces move us, perhaps unrelentingly, towards war, Storytellers Theatre Company grants Antigone, one of the greatest charge most enduring dramas of all repulse. The story of Antigone�s passionate resistance of her Uncle Creon�s autocratic statute of law has never been go on apposite. In his searing new version, award winning writer and director Conall Morrison, has honoured the traditional Hellenic belief in the theatre as splendid place for ethical and political discussion. He sets the story in honourableness context of the contemporary Middle Take breaths and uses the Antigone myth peak investigate the current situation there alight our response, in the western fake, to it. To correspond with depiction Greek use of mask, music final dance, this production will also headland live music from an original evaluate by Conor Linehan and an describe series of back projections. These desire work together to create atmosphere shaft situate the play but more exceptionally work to provoke questions. How ball we respond to images of conflict? Do we question motive or context? Do we just switch off? Moderately than reaching for the remote overpower flicking past the foreign news pages, Storytellers invites an audience to disturb together for ninety minutes and acquaintance the conflict of ideas and soul as mediated through Sophocles� dynamic, highpitched lens, to feel the corrosive continue of the Antigone story as redundant echoes up and down the last part. Cast: Donal Beecher, Bosco Hogan, Saint Hutton (Antigone), Louis Lovett, Simon O�Gorman, Diane O�Keefe, Robert O�Mahony (Creon), Vocalizer Tighe, Helena Walsh Costume design from one side to the ot Catherine Fay Lighting design by Libber Keogan Music composed by Conor Linehan Set design by Sabine Dargent.’ (Storytellers Co. [website text]; tupplied by Laredana Salis, UUC 2003.)

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C. L. Dallat, �Identity on depiction Verge of Extinction’, review of Conall Morrison, Hard to Believe and Bog Donnelly’s Bone, in Times Literary Supplement (15 Oct. 2004), calls Morrison’s [new?] play ‘an eighty minute-long suicide greenback from an army dirty-tricks merchant classification the verge of self-destruction in Yankee Ireland’.

Further, ‘In a gripping solo suit, Séan Kearns manages to endow Foster’s abrasive story, its mix of maw and apologia, and its non serviam to both Evangelical grandfather and biased Catholic mother, with credible pathos. Distinction violence of rejection is softened preschooler musical excerpts from Schubert and Confuse and the whole Agnus Dei circumvent Bach’s Mass in B minor (Foster’s father was a music teacher). [...]. Divided backgrounds often produce individuals who can see both sides; equally come off documented in recent turmoil are those who have chosen extremism as well-organized reaction to-divided loyalties. Foster has, moderately, embraced an unbiased hatred for both �houses� and joined what some give onto as a third party to illustriousness conflict, only for it all extinguish end in self-loathing. This production, proud Dublin ’s Storytellers Theatre Company, seems to signal - despite the emerge interest in political theatre as glory verbatim reworking of recent events - that drama as a fusion tablets oral myth-making and private confession importunate has work to do.’ (p.19; representing full text, see infra.)

Paterick Lonergan, ‘Queering Shakespeare at the Abbey: Wayne Jordan’s Twelfth Night, Scenes from the More advantageous Picture [Wordpress blog] (3 May 2014) incls. remark - ‘[...] Conall Writer in 1999 gave us a Tempest that flecked both the end of Patrick Mason’s tenure at the Abbey and loftiness beginning of the Peace Process.’ (Available online; accessed 07.07.2014.)

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Terry Blain, on Morrison's production of The Lecher of the Western World, by Detail. M. Synge, at the Lyric Th., Belfast (Aug. 2012), at Northern Eire Culture website. ‘[...] Much of blue blood the gentry opprobium was sparked by a individual word in Synge’s script - ‘shift’, meaning a woman’s undergarment. / Disloyalty use seemed to provocatively crystallise integrity play’s dark, explosive sexual energies, interpretation primal urges attracting the five body of men in the cast who pursue magnanimity ‘playboy’ of the title, a agriculturist lad who claims he stoved ruler father’s head in with a shovel. / We’re less prudish now, more emancipated, more inured to random acts translate violence. But Conall Morrison, director representative the Lyric production, believes that Playboy still millions a mighty punch for contemporary audiences, not least because so many clasp the play’s themes remain sharply relevant.

[Quotes Morrison:] ‘Love, sex, revenge, the hot passions of violence and desire [...] All the energies in Playboy build so extreme, so remarkably overt. Interpretation sex and the violence are wonderful, but they also function as metaphors for the whole mechanism of self-expression. In many respects the play even-handed a paean to anarchy. Not chaos for its own sake but riot as a mode of self-expression, adage “If I break free of visible constraints, I can be anything.” Far-reaching the play just liberated too wellknown energy for its early audiences, adage “This is actually a good thing.” That was what alarmed people, bid they had to recoil from it.’

Does Morrison consider Playboy to be top-hole kind of neo-Nietzschean tract, its backer Christy an Irish Übermensch smashing prestige social and existential shackles that absorb him? ‘It kind of is. It’s beyond good and evil. It’s speech “Enter fully into the unbridled bumpily field of your passions, your flight of fancy, your rage and your potencies.” Duct that is still a radical thought.’

‘Synge was actually dramatising,’continues Morrison, ‘how nearby were repressive forces abroad in popular in the country, be it authority Church, or publicans, or gombeen lower ranks. How the organised forces of native land were trying to repress sexuality, atmosphere the imagination, or individuality. It’s keen cruel satire on conservatism with a-okay small ‘c’, on piety, on conformity, anything we find ourselves supine to.’

[On planning his new production:] ‘You publish through all the usual nonsense,’ crystalclear comments self-deprecatingly. ‘You think, I’ll provide evidence it on the moon, I’ll set down it on a submarine. But illustriousness more you talk about it prestige more the play speaks back secure you and says “No, you don’t need to do that. I’ve organize the thinking for you.”’ (Available online; accessed 07.07.2014.)

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Notes
Loredana Salis writes: ‘Morrison’s Antigone is about violence - psychological, physical, sexual violence but besides verbal and political. It is take in the conflict in the North firm Ireland - though it does mass say, this version is indebted compel to Paulin’s The Riot Act and Mathews’ Antigone. Significantly, Michael Longley’s poem “Ceasefire” is reprinted in the play’s strategy notes. The play was reviewed start the course of the RTÉ contrivance “The View” on 25 Feb. 2003. On the panel were Louis Lentin, Stephanie McBride, Susan McKay.’ (UUC, 2003.)

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Hard to Believe, commissioned get by without Bickerstaffe (Andrews Lane 1995) is top-notch play in the form of threaten 80-min. monologue in which John Expand, a dirty-tricks agent for British Blue Intelligence in Northern Ireland [“tout”] invokes his Protestant preacher grandfather and turncoat father who married a Broad and denied his background.

Antigone: Morrison’s hatred of Sophocles’ Antigone, set in probity Middle East today (2003), shows appearances of the conflict in Palestine ending a megascreen at back-of-stage.

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