Preview: Dream, Sleep, Connect (Rosemary Jenkinson & c21 Theatre) – what happens when natural connection is replaced with technology?

Mars confectionery company wanted us to Work Rest and Play. Others deconstruct the monotony of adult existence to Sleep Work Repeat. But in playwright Rosemary Jenkinson’s mind, she homes in on society’s obsessions with digital disconnection with her new piece Dream, Sleep, Connect.

The premise of the play is that Chris (played by Richard Clements) is working on a technological solution for the Irish border under the beady eye of his boss, Lucy (Maria Connolly), when he realises the he has no one to invite to the office party. He joins Tinder only to find he’s met his match in more ways than one …

When I caught up with Jenkinson as rehearsals started, she explained that she feels online dating is “a very untrustworthy medium” and can lead to insecure and paranoid partners wanting to check your social media and your computer in case you’re still swiping. “It only takes one second to swipe. Whereas going out to actually pick up another partner actually requires effort. And, fingers on a screen and fingertips on your keyboard are no match for eyes across the room.”

One of Jenkinson’s heroes, Dario Fo, said that “a theatre … that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.” Her previous plays have tackled topics like finance, benefits, food banks, asylum and whistle blowing, all of them contemporary issues. And the electronic screening of potential dates isn’t so different from the faceless automation behind Chris’s company’s solution for electronic screening at the border.

“You'll get the idea that I'm fairly anti-digital age in this play …

“It's almost like Big Brother is watching has now come round to Big Self is watching me. We’re surveilling ourselves. It's narcissism in the absolute extreme. Something's gone very badly wrong. People think, you know, social media is going to last forever. Well, it absolutely won't. There'll be a revolution against this eventually because people will realize that over-computerisation is damaging for health. It's just a matter of time before that happens.”

The playwright notes that social media and online chat rooms are negatively connected with self-harm and suicide websites.

“Everything is consuming too much time on computers and there’s not enough time for personal interaction with people” she says, adding “I think my life is slightly ruled by social media, which is really annoying. I'm generally against it even though I use it for self-promotion – you're forced to in this society at the minute – but it's not by any desire of mine.”

Clements and Connolly are no strangers to Jenkinson’s plays.

“You can never be sure because they're so busy they might not be free … but both of them are brilliant. Maria gets to play Chris's boss in work as well as some of his dates and gets to swap in and out of different roles which she loves [and] she's brilliant at transforming herself into different characters.”

What’s next for Jenkinson after Dream, Sleep, Connect? The playwright also writes short stories and a new collection – Lifestyle Choice: 10 Milligrams – will be coming out soon. She enjoys the contrast between plays and stories. “I think the theatre is a bit more political, whereas the short stories are probably more personal.”

And while the quartet of Michelle and Arlene rapid-response plays are finished for now – though Jenkinson sounds like she could be tempted to pen another – she still has satire in her sights.

 “I will return to political satire at some point because there's still so much going on, particularly with Brexit, so I'm dying to get back to that.”

c21 Theatre’s new production premières in the Lyric Theatre, Belfast (18–22 February) before touring through Strule Arts Centre, Omagh (Wednesday 26), Island Arts Centre, Lisburn (Friday 28), Cushendall Golf Club (Saturday 29), Sean Hollywood Arts Centre, Newry (Tuesday 3 March), Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick (Friday 6) and Market Place Theatre, Armagh (Saturday 7).

Bombshell – telling the story of Ailes at Fox reveals Trump’s ticking timebomb

Bombshell a sick, telling a story that should never have had to be told. It’s about abuses of power, about chains of command that can keep awful secrets hushed up and not spoken about even though hundreds of people have more than a clue about what is going on. In one sense, it’s a universal story; in another, its awful essence is that it is based on a US television news channel that was meant to be reporting wrong-doing and exposing perpetrators rather than covering up its own sin.

When presenter Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) was forced out of Fox News, she sued the chairman and CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) claiming sexual harassment. Ailes had built the conservative-leaning network up into a huge profit centre of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Even before the film studio video idents are played, a screenful of text reminds Bombshell audiences that the real-life story has been dramatized. A younger composite character (Kayla Pospisil played by Margot Robbie) is used to challenge one of the older protagonists, Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) about the cost to others of her years of silence about Ailes behaviour. I still can’t decide whether a silent scene with the three principle women in a lift is brilliantly uncomfortable or excruciatingly poor.

Over on this side of the pond, these Fox News figures are not particularly well known and some commentators who know a lot more are reluctant to label Megyn Kelly as a hero. But director Jay Roach and screenwriter Charles Randolph seem to attempt to redeem Theron’s character at the start of the film with footage of her challenging Trump over his attitude towards women at a Republican presidential candidate debate:

“You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals … Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on the Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president? And how do you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton – that you are part of the war on women?”

While I’m male and no expert, to me the film successfully portrays Ailes behaviour as unequivocally wrong, and conscientiously explores the complex emotional and financial reactions to Carlson’s accusations. Some women who had experience of Ailes’ harassment lie low while others stand square behind the sleazy second floor boss who had more than a penchant for female presenters’ legs, viewing his abuse as a transaction that had advanced their careers. Even Kelly’s producer, played by Rob Delaney, swings between supporting his female colleagues and self-interest about his own future if they dare to speak out.

Kidman depicts the main accuser as someone who does their homework and remains calm under pressure, even when other women are slow to speak to her lawyers and join her action. Theron demonstrates the hesitancy of her character’s need to weigh up the possible effect of speaking out on her career and reputation. Robbie manages the delicate balance of portraying someone who is young and ambitious yet vulnerable and trapped. Her interactions with a gay colleague played by Kate McKinnon add to the three-dimensional reading of the complex relationships and fears at play in this super-conservative workplace.

Bombshell takes a while to warm up and launch its attack. The opening sequences break the fourth wall and allow Kelly/Theron to address the cinema audience before reverting to more traditional storytelling, though inner monologues still periodically burst out. Shade is liberally thrown, with an element of guilt by association of which the average audience cannot judge its veracity.

Yet Bombshell turns into a powerful reminder that no single man – or in this case, two: Ailes and Bill O’Reilly both leave Fox under considerable clouds – can bring everyone in an organisation down with them when they fall. The inclusion of presidential candidate Trump in the tale is surely a nod to his own feet of clay and the possibility that he is not beyond being toppled over under the burden of past sins.

The film also reminds audiences that there is a cost to speaking out: being part of Ailes’ downfall has not been good for some of the women’s careers and earning potential. In choosing to depict complexity over an (even more) simplified narrative, Bombshell highlights moral dilemmas without mandating particular binary choices that everyone should have taken.

In a good world, there would never be a need to make another film like Bombshell. But in the meantime, this is just one drop in a cinematic ocean from a film industry that has a lot of stories of bullying, harassment and coercion littering its own back yard to expose and atone for.

1917 – set in an immersive battlefield, the technical bravado overshadows a weak story

“Pick a man. Grab your kit.” It’s 6 April 1917, and these instructions thrust Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) into an unwanted mission as he accompanies Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) across no man’s land, through seemingly deserted enemy lines to warn another company not to proceed with an attack that will see thousands of men walk into a trap, with the added hook that Blake’s brother is at the far end and due to be part of the doomed attack.

A single camera travels with the pair, sometimes anticipating their movements, watching from in front and then circling around behind as they navigate the treacherous terrain. The giant CGI rats deserve an Oscar. The very long takes are neatly stitched together, though the passage of time and distance (the lorry, the blackout, the river, resting with the mother and baby) is a constant struggle throughout a two-hour film that relies on enormously detailed trench sets, armies of extras, and fabulous ADR that recreates the immersive sound of the battlefield and the pair’s journey to add grit to the less than weighty story.

As war movies go, 1917 contains at least as many warnings about the failings of war as moments of heroism. Some of its strongest themes are the questioning the motivations of senior leaders (seen to be gung-ho) and the articulation (by Schofield) that widows won’t be cheered up by gallantry medals. This is a film about following orders, brotherhood and sacrifice; about letting go and getting up; about endurance and inner steel; about the fruitlessness and mass death that comes with war.

Neither the storyline nor that dialogue is particularly rich or believable (though the inspiration for the plot comes from a story from director Sam Mendes’ family). It takes a long time before there’s any real sense of tension, even when the pair jump into an Indiana Jones-style sequence running through collapsing tunnels, though the first big death scene delivers an emotional punch. Everyone they meet along the way is merely a wayfarer, present for a few minutes before the mission rushes on past, leaving them in the dust behind. So it’s highly appropriate that near the end Schofield pauses in a field and listens as the haunting voice of a soldier singing The Wayfaring Stranger wafting over resting troops.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
While traveling through this world of woe
Yet there's no sickness, toil or danger
in that bright world to which I go.

I know dark clouds were headin' around me
I know my way is tough and steep
Yet beautious fields lie just before me
Where God's redeemed their vigils keep.

I'm going there to see my mother
She said she'd meet me when I come
I'm only goin' over Jordan
I'm only goin' over home...

The technical bravado (I’d love to see the IMAX version) and 1917’s ambitions are impressive, but perhaps, most of all, Mendes should be applauded for avoiding dressing up war as anything other than a monstrous act that must be avoided at all costs.

Just Mercy – lead performances and civil rights at risk capture attention despite muted direction (UK and Irish cinemas from 17 January)

By telling the story of Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy throws light onto a racist and corrupt criminal justice system in Alabama, and his work from the early 1990s to defend some of the prisoners on death row who sentences were very uncertain. Sadly, it’s also a somewhat universal tale that still has relevance in the US today, though are also significant echoes in a number of recent news stories about summary justice, humiliation, collusion and discrimination at home and abroad.

“You think those fancy words are going to get you anywhere in Alabama?”

Michael B Jordan plays the young lawyer who is not daunted by the total lack of success of overturning convictions of felons facing the death sentence in the state of Alabama, and in particular his work to shed light on the manipulation, intimidation, and even ignored witnesses, that put Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx) behind bars for the murder of a white woman he did not commit.

It’s a strong storyline, and Jordan and Foxx’s performances, often appearing head-to-head in prison interview rooms, are sturdy. Brie Larson is relegated to the role of paralegal colleague Eva Ansley with whom Stevenson can have lofty conversations, including one chat set at the side of a lake seemingly for no particular reason other than aesthetics. The local Sheriff and the District Attorney are in each other’s pockets, though escape being as fully demonised on-screen as they surely deserve.

The strongest and most affecting scenes occur inside the prison. The camaraderie on death row paints a remarkable picture of community and mutual support. A scene of execution is handled sensitively and is a crucial set-up for a number of characters to change their tune. The courtroom scenes are overly succinct and act as dramatic shortcuts, with surging preachy speeches and very little legalese, removing any suspicion that the 137-minute film is about to turn into a docudrama, but also removing any feeling of realism.

Somehow the passion of Stevenson and the perilous life and death nature of his clients’ cases is unexpectedly restrained as the story unfolds. Yet while the importance of the true story behind the film may have deserved a more bombastic movie, the lead performances and the civil rights at risk capture your attention despite Destin Daniel Cretton’s muted direction.

Just Mercy will be screened in Movie House Cinemas and Queen’s Film Theatre as well as other UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 17 January.

Little Women – Saoirse Ronan stars in Greta Gerwig’s superb adaptation, a real tonic for the new year

Why couldn’t Little Women be three and a half hours long and The Irishman cut to half of its flabby run time? Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s book is a magical cinematic experience for the start of 2020.

The March family are strong of spirit, poor in pocket, with riches stored in their hearts. Young Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is the most like her sacrificially giving mother (Laura Dern), while Amy (Florence Pugh) is headstrong and artistic, Meg (Emma Watson) has talent that she suppresses in favour of making a family, while the eldest Jo (Saoirse Ronan) cuts a lonely path as she asserts her independence to the point of lost ambitions.

The sisterly performances are all strong, but Ronan’s sometimes sullen yet eventually caring attitude as Jo is enchanting and deservedly owns the central strand of the story. Meryl Streep’s formidable Aunt March doles out harsh life lessons and makes decisions that upset and surprise. Timothée Chalamet plays a rather dashing boy-next-door love interest who melts more than one March girl heart.

There’s a discussion about whether marriage is transactional from different gender perspectives and yet again this year I seem to be faced with a story that examines the prospect of women being seen as the property of men. In the midst of this, Jo is able to garner an income writing fiction and even secures her copyright, helping support her family through some of the struggles that they face.

There’s a lot of timeline hopping with flashbacks galore, yet it weaves together into a rich picture rather than a confusing melange. The collision of desire between Jo and younger Amy is just one drama that keeps the second half of the 135-minute film flowing.

In a decade that is beginning with harsh and selfish government policies that don’t do much to build community or look out for the disadvantaged, Little Women is a tonic that reminds us that everyone can choose to pull their weight.

The film doesn’t specifically feel like a female led movie written and directed by a woman. It doesn’t feel like an adaptation of a book that is 160 years old. It is all of those things. But more than that, it’s the well-crafted plot devices, great performances and talent in front and behind the screen that create such a successful film. Little Women deserves to win lots of awards, but more importantly, it deserves to be seen by big audiences.

Little Women is still being screened in the Queen’s Film Theatre, Movie House Cinemas, Omniplex Cinemas, Odyssey Cinema, The Strand Arts Centre, and beyond!

Long Day’s Journey into Night – a technical marvel that overshadows its poorly told story

If you ever need an example of film whose form and technical prowess gets so far ahead of the story that the plot dissolves into thin air, look no further than Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

It’s the evening of the winter solstice, and Luo Hongwu (played by Huang Jue) has returned to his hometown of Kaili to search for a lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). There follows an existential journey …

The first half of the movie is conventional, although there is little scaffolding to help signpost the storyline. The early cinematography revels in reflective surfaces that add layers of intrigue to the dank sets. Luo’s behaviour towards women – yanking their hair – makes him an anti-hero and a bad guy.

Then Wan sits down in a cinema and dons his 3D glasses, a cue for cinema audiences to take theirs out of their hands and wear them for the final hour of the film which switches to an immersive, apparently single-shot, 3D extravaganza. (Though not much is lost if you watch a fully 2D version of the film as I did in the QFT.)

The horse with the oranges panics on cue. The rain is Biblical. The subtitles are the smallest ever in the history of cinema. Wan’s green dress should win awards. The steps up and down the final set must have worn out a lot of Steadicam operators. But the wizardry of shifting a camera from bike to human to slide to drone to human, not to mention a location that starts to spin, all distracts from the weakly told story.

When Long Day’s Journey into Night comes out on DVD, it would be worth buying to watch it to listen to a director’s commentary. But the original movie was far from satisfying and left me applauding the handful of souls who walked out of the screening at the 40-minute mark. For the first time in years, I’m not pleased I stayed to the bitter end.

Belfast Children's Festival launches with the best of local and international arts for children and young people (6–11 March) #bcf20

Ireland’s largest children’s festival was launched on Wednesday with a programme packed full of drama, dance, music, and thoughtful activity for babies, children and young people. Between Friday 6 and Wednesday 11 March the festival will explore the theme of ‘place’, asking what makes a home and how to be a placemaker.

Welcoming the festival launch to its hub venue, The MAC’s CEO Anne McReynolds reminded guests that year after year Young at Art bring the best the world has to offer for children and young people.

Some highlights from the programme:

The Untold Truth of Captain Hook by local theatre company Replay allows the villain of Peter Pan to become the hero of his own tale, taking audiences on an awfully big adventure through the time before Neverland in the Lyric’s Naughton Studio between Friday 6 and Sunday 8 March. Age 7+. £10.

After last year’s concert version of horror opera The Musician, Belfast Ensemble are back with the world premiere of Conor Mitchell’s Kindermusik Project which uses nursery rhymes and nonsense songs to explore what a tune ‘means’, how we hear it, and how we might one day play it. Written for narrator, chamber ensemble and toy instruments, it will be performed in St Martin’s Centre, 88 Newtownards Road between Friday 6 and Sunday 8 March. Age 6+. £10.

ØAR is an immersive augmented reality fusion of dance and technology. Participants can interact with short dance works using connected tablet, moving and interacting with and influencing the performances. Belfast campus of Ulster University on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 March. Age 5+. Free.

Baby Rave, pioneered by festival organisers Young at Art, is back with its accessible, family-friendly dancing in The MAC on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 March with its fun-filled Age 0–4. £10 (includes entry for adult and baby).

Last year’s Family Comedy Club with Paul Currie’s brand of madcap puppetry and clowning sold out very quickly. He’s back in the Black Box on Tuesday 10 March if you dare accompany your youngsters. Age 6+. £10.

Hermit is a non-verbal physical performance from Dutch artist Simone de Jong who is the shy inhabitant of a miniature house, promising to be a funny and moving performance about being alone, coming home, and what it takes to open your home. Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 March. Age 2–6. £10.

Seedhead Arts have long run adult magic nights in the Black Box Green Room. But they’re bringing a Mini Midweek Magic to the Belfast Children’s Festival on Wednesday 11 March with close-up magic, stage tricks and thrills for all by the best local talent. Age 5+. £8.

Tetris closes the festival on Wednesday 11 March with a Dutch physical dance quartet Arch8 who – inspired by the well-known game – explore private languages, social architecture and how we fit in and cooperate through a performance suitable for 5 year olds and upwards. Age 5+. £10.

The First Day by Phil Harrison – a tale of biblical knowledge, love, loss and revenge

Phil Harrison’s The First Day is a phenomenal debut novel. Immersed in a protestant evangelical world, it explores the repercussions an east Belfast mission hall pastor Samuel Orr’s passionate love affair with a younger unchurched Beckett scholar and poet Anna Stuart. It’s a setup that doesn’t seem so fanciful with the sad news this weekend from a church in Newtownards.

Initially narrated from Anna’s viewpoint before switching to the thoughts of their son some thirty years later, we watch how father of three Orr manages to rationalise his adulterous behaviour with his faith’s view on sin. Soon we also watch his inability to control the violent fallout from his fall from grace, and discover how judgement waxes and wanes in a society that only pretends to distinguish between good and evil in its most binary form. Though the gospel hall easily separates his no longer tolerable leadership with his continuing membership in a way the Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s General Assembly might find harder to swallow.

“… the way he looked at her, opened her up. The way a farmer looks at a field he’s about to plough.”

This is the second book I’ve read this year that is laced with issues of male ownership of female bodies. Harrison creates unusual similes that surprise, intrigue and often entertain, lightening the flow of reading what is at times a dark and sinister tale.

The somewhat mysterious yet warm narrator and the shifting perspectives are well crafted and don’t distract. The fact that 30 years into the future everything still seems to be the same as today is perhaps part of the books message and metaphor. Biblical text and lines from Beckett, sermon snippets and fine art criticism are melded together with beautifully written passages that describe love, lust, loss and revenge.

Harrison writes with elegance, an accessible intellect, and while Anna and Orr’s relationship has a somewhat rarefied and cinematic feel – The First Day could make a great film split across Belfast and Manhattan – there’s a pace and urgency that propelled this reader to squeeze in another ten or twenty pages before switching out the bedside light in the wee small hours of the morning.

A Run in the Park – an all too brief treat from the pen of David Park

Having missed the first episode but listened to the next three on BBC Radio 4 catch-up on the drive down to an appointment to get stabbed in Newry – a travel vaccination administered by a Boots’ pharmacist rather than anything more sinister – I was delighted to realise that the text of David Park’s ten part series was available in print.

A Run in the Park listens in to the thoughts of some of the participants in a nine-week Couch to 5k programme. I’m shocked, nay devastated, to discover that David Park has taken part in such an exercise regime. I can only trust that this phase of getting his breath in short pants was purely for research purposes and won’t mark the abrupt change of his normal sober and sceptical sensibility that first came to my notice 12 years ago in 2008 with the publication of The Truth Commissioner!

Maurice is a widower who can’t seem to help his family but has decided to step out and tackle his weight and lethargy. Cathy is a sweet librarian who worries about her pregnant daughter in Australia. A young couple are planning a wedding but while a silver spoon was popped in Angela’s mouth shortly after birth, nurse Brendan is unsettled by the ambitious preparations. Yana is perhaps the youngest yet most experienced runner in the group who meet three times a week to train. Exercise was her escape in a sprawling refugee camp before being relocated in Northern Ireland under the UK government scheme to help Syrian families.

The metaphor of individual runners working as a team finds its way into the structure of A Run in the Park. While each episode stands alone as its own short story, they come together to create a powerful narrative about an encouraging cross-generational community, sharing goals, experiencing loss, and the healing power of touch.

It’s a short set of stories, ten internal monologues each spanning nine or ten pages. You can read it end-to-end in a couple of hours. Another one or two hundred pages could have been added to flesh out the backstories and show the reader how Park imagines it all ends. But instead, the accomplished author revels in paring back the detail and leaving every reader or listener to write their own stories for these characters.

Despite the brevity, there are still gut-wrenching scenes from chapter four onwards, and as I switched off the light last night and turned onto my soggy pillow to fall asleep, the pathos of the turmoil facing many of the central characters remained vivid as I closed by eyes. It’s a privilege to join Angela, Brendan, Cathy, Maurice and Yana as they overcome inertia and set their bodies and minds in motion. And hopefully a taster of more fully pledged titles from Park in the near future.