The Works Presents

This week, John Kelly meets THE Irish film director of the moment, Lenny Abrahamson, whose new film Room has been on something of an awards roll since it started showing at film festivals worldwide in 2015. Based on the book of the same name by Irish author Emma Donoghue, it stars Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay as a mother and son who live in captivity in a world called Room. Lenny says: “What you’re also talking about in Room is you’re using that dysfunctional lens on the functional and universal aspects of childhood, child-rearing, parenting, growing up…” Here, he tells John about his own childhood in Dublin and his family’s eastern European Jewish background. He also talks about the links between his own love of Laurel and Hardy and the film Adam and Paul, about directing actors such as Pat Shortt in Garage and about why he put Michael Fassbender in a mask for most of the film Frank!

John Kelly meets actor, writer and director Olwen Fouéré, a theatre artist who in the last four decades has combined roles in the classics – from Greek tragedies to Shakespeare – and contemporary classics – starring in plays by writers like Mark O’Rowe and Marina Carr – with her own, highly experimental, work. This revealing and intimate interview opens with her looking back on her unusual childhood in Connemara: her parents were Breton separatists who were forced to flee France in the 40s because of their political views, and the young Foueré grew up between languages and cultures as a result. She reflects on a career that has been marked by the influences of Ireland, France and her Breton roots; her love of experimentation and compulsion to explore hitherto uncharted territory in her performances; how she developed her own, unique, movement-based style; and her many and varied collaborations with artists from different disciplines. Foueré is a true pioneer; a performer who, over a long career, has never ceased to explore, question and innovate. She is currently touring two, universally-acclaimed, solo shows that she has devised herself: Lessness by Samuel Beckett, and Riverrun, inspired by the voice of the river in Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce.

John Kelly meets Iarla Ó Lionaird, who has established himself as one of the foremost exponents of sean nós in the country.

John Kelly meets Brian Maguire, an Irish artist of international repute who is drawn to subjects on the margins of society, including convicted criminals in prison and residents in psychiatric institutions.

John Kelly talks to theatre director Louise Lowe, who since her first show, Tumbledown, in 2005, has been consistently breaking the rules of theatre.