Following Tuesday's post about Ryan Tubridy's thunderingly ignorant approach to theatre criticism (in summary: don't bother seeing the play, assume that writing about a subject is the same as endorsing it, imply that a dramatic exploration of a disturbing relationship is irresponsible because it will just encourage people to engage in such relationships in real life, I heard from the director of the Dublin production of Blackbird, Michael Barker-Caven. He told me that David Harrower, the playwright, was seriously shaken up after Tubridy's vigilante-style swoop, and that he had never experienced anything like it in the round of press interviews he had done for the play's runs in other cities, and he's wary about the prospect of doing any more live radio interviews about the play in the future. Which caution is understandable, I guess, but hopefully unnecessary - Harrower would probably have to find himself in the hotseat on Vatican Radio's Concerned Mothers Against Theatre talkshow before he'd come up against a presenter as narrow-minded and blinkered as Tubridy.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Tubridy The Theatre Pundit, Updated
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4 comments:
He hasn't a clue. And he constantly interrupts his interviewees, which is awful. He grills Harrower, then fawns over Pat McCabe. (In The Butcher Boy, Francie Brady defecates on Mrs Nolan's floor before murdering her with the humane killer!) And the way he fawns whenever he has John Connolly on the show! (Ireland's creepiest novelist?)
(Connolly recently said the following on Tubridy's show: "Nick Hornby thinks about what he's going to write before he writes it down - that's why he is a great novelist.")
Who pays these people?
The irony thickens. In Winterwood, McCabe's latest novel, the protagonist (who has been sexually abused himself) kidnaps his own pre-teen daughter and subjects her to abuse. And the story is told from, shock horror, the protagonists point of view!! To be fair, we don't get graphic accounts of this abuse (not saying that harrower's play is graphic. I, like Mr. T. have not seen the play) but what we do get is the protagonist's attempts to justify his own actions to himself. If Harrower's play can be accused of displaying an unhealthy or perverse interest in abuse then surely McCabe's can too. But then again, Mr. T. has never been one for the subtleties. Especially those that get in the way of a good soapbox.
Turbridy is to the theatre what Joe Duffy (and brush shields) are to poetry
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