act like a lady think like a man reviews

“This translation coincides with reality and not fiction,” she says. On a halting site: “You can see in everyone’s window.”Ĭollins, who is a Traveller, plays Estelle, the dead husband’s lover (and has performed since she was six weeks old: she played Blackie’s daughter in Glenroe for 12 years). McCormack, who plays the central character, Sara, says it is “a very claustrophobic community where there’s all eyes on her. Photograph: Express/Gettyĭuring a break in rehearsals, Fielding and some of the cast of Traveller and non-Traveller actors – Denise McCormack, Christine Collins, Lloyd Cooney – talk about how the play’s Italian community on the periphery echoes that of Travellers. The Rose Tattoo: Tennessee Williams in the early 1960s. It’s an Ireland inconceivable today: quaint, almost, but undeniably repressive.Ĭondom furore aside, the play, which was first staged in 1950 and is set in an Italian-American community, presents a dilemma: how do you keep it relevant in contemporary Ireland? Vanessa Fielding’s new production, at the Complex arts centre in Dublin’s north inner city, has made an adroit and inspired shift: she and Catherine Joyce have set The Rose Tattoo in a modern Irish Traveller context. It “destroyed us”, Swift (who became The Irish Times’ dance critic in 1979) said later. The case never went to trial but it bankrupted the couple and ended their marriage. Alan Simpson, who had founded the theatre a few years earlier with his wife, Carolyn Swift, was arrested and charged with “producing for gain an indecent and profane performance”. Contraception was illegal in Ireland at the time, and condoms difficult to source, so the actors performing the play at the tiny Pike Theatre instead mimed the dropped condom. The script has a condom fall from a character’s pocket, causing consternation. In 1957 the Tennessee Williams play The Rose Tattoo opened the first Dublin Theatre Festival to great acclaim. Its Irish claim to fame seems to belong to another planet.

Act like a lady think like a man reviews