In several senses, Barrie Cooke occupies the middle ground in Irish art. He lives in Kilkenny. At Jerpoint near Thomastown, with Sonja Landweer, and he is one of the few artists in the country to have earned the near universal approbation of his peers. The quahty. range and consistency of his work have engendered wide and genuine respect.
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THE TWO HANDS TENSE AS HE HOLDS THE script; when each piece of music is coming to an end he raises his left hand and quickly lowers it to his chest, with a look of professional pride and ease, as the red light comes on. The script is per¬fectly rehearsed. "Good evenin' listeners," he begins and even the ‘g' in "evening" is missing in the script. He has timed the introductions and the music so that his pro¬gramme runs to just over 29 minutes. Every single pause, or inflection, or laugh has been prepared and rehearsed; the guy knows exactly what he is doing. Add a comment

In recent weeks the long-awaited Orwell circus has come to town. The Orwell legend has been employed to make political capital by the kind of people Orwell raged against with typewriter and rifle. It has been used to sell horoscopes and to draw conclusions about English soccer. We await the "Orwell Lives!" tee-shirt and the Big Brother Bubblegum. GENE KERRIGAN examines the man 's life and politics. Add a comment

About four hundred years ago, on the stage of the Globe Theatre in London, a minor military character in a major English drama of war and peace asked a question which continues to reverberate through the life and literature of this island. When in Henry V, Shakespeare's stage Irishman, Captain Macmorris asked his Welsh compatriot in-arms, Captain Fluellen, "What ish my nation?" he was acknowledging, in his own too easily imitable manner, that a problem existed, that his national identity was in question. Although he proferred his own rumbustious and provocative answer - 'Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal.' - it was neither conclusive nor convincing. Add a comment

MICHAEL FARRELL WILL have two books launched next week. One is his "Magill Book Of Irish Politics" which, because it's produced by ourselves, we will not comment on it or mention it in any way. It would be unfair to other books of politics, it would give this one an unfair advantage and would take up too much space. Anyway if you want to know about it, and see all the many reasons why you should buy it, there's an advertisement for it on page 38. Add a comment

The Dean of St Finbarr's Cathedral, the Very Rev J.M.G. Carey, said prayers for jazz musicians and their festival during Sunday Service. Not that the corkers in the Metropole Hotel would have been in a position to notice the extra surge of grace. For them it could have been anyone of the "highs" of the Hallowe'en bank holiday weekend which Cork and Guinness' have transformed into a dithyramb of unparalleled abandon. By Lyn Geldof Add a comment

John Banville at the Wexford Opera Festival

October was at its loveliest. I drove down through a gold and blue-green landscape in a mood of allmost operatic bliss. The hills and fields seemed recumbent in the raked light of the autumn afterrnoon, as if the countryside were resting dreamily, a tired athlete, after the marathon of a fine summer. There are days when everything we love - people, things, places, memories - mysteriously irradiates our surroundings. Everywhere we look we glimpse traces of the familiar, as in those puzzle-pictures of our childhood in which fenceeposts are fairies and faces lurk among the oak leaves. Famiiliar, and yet, seen in this way, infinitely strange too. The know.n has been taken away from us and given back transsfigured. As I approached it, Wexford town, on its long low hill, with that limpid light behind it, was positively Italianate. I was born here.
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In Derry on the evening of sept 20 six bombs exploded in a local fertiliser factory and Field Day launched its fourth dramatic productiuon in the stately Guildhall. In this city, as in most of Northern Ireland, it is impossible to separate politics and culture. Brian Friel and the five other directors of the three-year od Field Day Theatre Company, all writers or arttists from the north, sem subtly aware of this fact. THeir current choice of Boesman and Lena, Athol Fugard's play on the evils of apartheid in South Afriica, is entirely consistent with teir policy of artist commitment. Add a comment