Give Me Your Hand
Opening Night: March 7, 2012
Closing: April 1, 2012
Theater: Irish Repertory Theatre
In Give Me Your Hand, Paul Durcan has taken some of the most famous paintings in the world, and interpreted them with his own unique, poetic voice. Two of Ireland’s most eminent actors, Dermot Crowley and Dearbhl Molloy, take an imaginative stroll through the National Gallery and re-discover everyone from Van Gogh and Van Eyck, to Rubens and Gainsborough, through the unique prism of the author’s imagination.
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March 20, 2012
The concept of the museum audio guide, with an expert nattering on in your ear, telling you what to think and why, has always seemed particularly loathsome. But if more such guides contained ekphrastic poetry, the idea might be a little more appealing.
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March 13, 2012
In the program notes for Give Me Your Hand, actor and show conceiver Dermot Crowley recalls realizing that the poems of Irish writer Paul Durcan “would lend themselves to performance, or at least to recital.” He and his collaborator, fellow Broadway vet Dearbhla Molloy, may have envisioned performance, but they have settled for recital. Durcan’s 1994 collection was inspired by paintings in London’s National Gallery, and Crowley and Molloy—pinned to music stands flanking a projector screen—are like very entertaining museum guides. They provide the art-historical context of each painting before reading (yes, reading) the literary musings it produced.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 9, 2012
My mother once told me a story about a writer who said that he used to walk past people on the street and spend the rest of the day thinking about their lives. This one line story sums up a certain kind of imaginative artist, who is likely do the same thing for inanimate people as well. This is the premise of Give Me Your Hand, a staged reading of a collection of poems by Paul Durcan, based on characters in paintings at the National Gallery of London.
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March 11, 2012
The beauty of "Give Me Your Hand" is not merely what we see and hear before us, intriguing as that is. The show serves as a pathway to the essence of art itself, connecting us to the creator’s impulses to send us on flights of our own. Inspired by paintings in the National Gallery of London, Irish poet Paul Durcan dreams up biographies for portraits or interprets captured moments. As the script says, he "treats the paintings like kites in the gusty air of his imagination."
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March 12, 2012
Give Me Your Hand, now at the Irish Repertory’s W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre under Richard Twyman’s bold direction, is by no means a traditional play.
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