Enniskillen-born actress Aislín McGuckin has been a fixture on our screens for more than two decades, from breakthrough roles in films like Trojan Eddie and The Nephew to numerous TV appearances in everything from Heartbeat and Outlander to Normal People and, most recently, Silent Witness.
Now she plays the role of Elmire in Frank McGuinness's retelling of Moliére's infamous book and play Tartuffe, which premieres at the Abbey Theatre this March, prior to a nationwide tour.
We asked Aislín for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
I'm looking forward to seeing John Carney’s Flora and Son, which has just been screened at the Sundance Film Festival to a very warm audience response. Sometimes research for my roles has drawn me towards darker themes, say of isolation, or desolation. So I loved the energy and optimism of John's Sing Street, both in the film and the forthcoming Broadway stage version. Flora and Son promises similar optimistic energy. By all accounts, Eve Hewson’s performance radiates from the screen and I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.
It also emphasises how important the international success of Irish produced work or work with a strong Irish nexus is to sustaining the artistic and performing community here. Success for one should be seen as success for all.
MUSIC
Still bonkers for Bon Iver, Saint Sister and The Staves, but for a bop around the kitchen there’s nothing quite like David Holmes or a guilty Justin Timberlake throwback pleasure.
BOOK
We’ve recently moved house, and one of the things that happens when forced to rearrange your books is that you are faced with placing old friends on the shelf who have been constantly present but also oddly out of mind. Either by serendipity or fate, an old college copy of Tartuffe was discovered hidden at the back of a shelf. It's a reminder that the richness of a reread that can be as satisfying as the joy of the new purchase. But the great recent revelation came in the form of a gift received after a Christmas party conversation on the topic of the Morgan Library in New York. She Who Wrote is the accompanying publication to an exhibition there entitled Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, dating from 3,400-2000 BC. The book opens with the line 'The first author known by name was a woman: Eheduanna' - and what follows is a fascinating education on the origin of written language and creativity. It reminds me to revisit the Chester Beatty, one of Dublin’s standout gems that can argue its case among the great libraries of the world.
THEATRE
I was thrilled by The Last Return at The Gate last year, so will jump to see whatever Sonia Kelly as writer or Sara Joyce as director next produce.
TV
Sometimes the collective wisdom is correct. So many random and diverse people had highly recommended the second season of The White Lotus. They were right. This is a dark, joyous, ridiculous, spectacular 'sprezaturra' of a television show, it requires no further analysis than that. It brightened the dark first week of January.
GIG
Last year we experienced the joy of being out and about listening to music in the outside world in the company of others. Brilliant and moving memories from the Borris Festival and the Electric Picnic have me on tenterhooks for indulging in live performance again this year. London Grammer was a highlight, Mick Flannery and Susan O’Neill singing John Prine’s Angel of Montgomery turned a muddy tent into a transcendent experience. I’m looking forward to large gigs and small. Live performance is addictive.
ART
Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again is an exhibition dedicated to the poet located in the Cultural and Heritage Centre at the Bank of Ireland, College Green. I had the privilege last year to participate in a short film that was commissioned by the National Library and the DFA in cooperation with the Heaney Estate. Postcards From Heaney Country is a visually re-imagined reading of four Heaney Poems with Stephen Rea, Jeanne Nicole Ni Ainle, Aaron Monaghan and myself. The landscape in the film is starkly urban and stands in contrast to previous more bucolic or rustic visual representations of his poems. I’m back in this film in the darker territories (see above) reciting his poem Tinder and have to confess I found the flame-filled filming thrilling. Perhaps the archeological theme is repeating here from Eheduanna. Heaney is so rooted in his exploration of the human tracelines on landscape and place and Tinder adds elegant language to a Neolithic moment, yet it is thoroughly relatable in the modern day. The whole exhibition is a revelation and you leave the exhibition centre better than when you entered it.
RADIO
There is something very reassuring about Fiachna O’Braonain’s radio voice late in the evening on RTÉ Radio 1.If he wasn’t a musician he should have been a doctor, reassuring you that everything was going to be OK. Plus he has immaculate exploratory taste in music. Well worth the musical wander with him.
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THE NEXT BIG THING...
I’m not sure I’m providing any great new insight here given that he has already exhibited in the National Gallery as a result of winning the Zurich Portrait Prize and has had several solo exhibitions, but Salvatore of Lucan’s work has grabbed a hold of me. I had the recent pleasure of visiting him in his studio in Dublin and saw some new spectacular works in progress and think he is a genuinely exciting artist. Works like Me Ma Healing Me which won the Zurich prize or Me and My Dad in McDonalds, 2018 are so visually striking and place him simultaneously in a modern vanguard and an ancient tradition. Many of his other works are fantastically challenging and provocative and I think reveal a fearless painter, without timidity, unafraid of hard themes, but possessed of an empathetic sensibility toward his subjects that is hard to find in many artists, never mind an artist so early in their career.
Oil on canvas © Salvatore of Lucan
Tartuffe premieres at the Abbey Theatre from March 3th - April 8th, then tours until 13 May 2023 - find out more here.
