The New Electric Ballroom

Synopsis

'Staring back behind the blusher and the eye shadow a girl who’s yet to be kissed. Properly kissed.' In this play, three sisters in a remote fishing village, trapped in the years that have passed since their halcyon days at The New Electric Ballroom, are still obsessed by darker memories of something resembling romance. This is a coiled, dark, glitter-dusted fable of the emotionally stultifying effects of small-town life.

Our Review:

9 March 2009

Enda Walsh has been in the news lately for his screenplay (co-written with Steve McQueen) for Hunger, the highly acclaimed film about the Maze prison hunger strikes of 1981.

But The New Electric Ballroom, seen at last year’s Edinburgh Festival, finds him back in his more theatrical helter-skelter groove; this is a powerful, poetic play for three sisters in a remote Irish fishing village who are unlikely to get as far as Cork City, let alone Dublin or Moscow.

The script is a dazzling corkscrew of memory and sadness. Two older sisters, Breda and Rose, played with sumptuous misery and resignation by Rosaleen Linehan and Ruth McCabe, are supervised, almost manipulated, by the much younger sister Ada (Catherine Walsh) – whom you might mistake as a daughter, or even a medical attendant – playing back an old tape, or possibly making a new recording.

We could be in a living room, or a bleak canne...

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Latest User Review

Sarah - 18 March 2009:

I saw this with my fiancee and we both werent sure about it as some of the reviews in the paper werent great. But it was fab and really enjoyable and interesting. Surprising, weird, funny and moving. The cast were great and I am hoping the man will release a single as we couldnt find a better version of Wondrous Place on itunes. ...

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