Translations opens this month

Rehearsals have begun for the National Theatre's production of Brian Friel's Translations.

Directed by Ian Rickson, this powerful account of nationhood, which sees the turbulent relationship between England and Ireland play out in one quiet community, will open on May 22. The press night will take place on May 30.

Apart from Ciarán, the cast includes Dermot Crowley, Aoife Duffin, Adetomiwa Edun, Michelle Fox, Laurence Kinlan, Seamus O'Hara, Judith Roddy and Rufus Wright.

The Terror just started

As a Professor Russell Potter writes in his blog: "We'll have to let go of our idealized version, for instance, of Franklin, and let Hinds's masterful performance of Sir John as an ambitious commander who throws caution to the winds, take its place..."

In spite of the presence of a monstruous predator, we must never forget that the real terror is what lies in the hearts of supposedly civilized men.

Ciarán in Brian Friel's Translations this summer

From late May to August, Ciarán will be back at the National Theatre in London, in Translations, "a wonderful Irish play" by Brian Friel.

Set in 1833, when the British army conducts a map-making survey and renames places in a small Irish town to make them more accessible to the British public, Translations shows how colonizers establish their domination through the process of manipulating the means of communication, and destroying the language that is essential to the building of a culture.

One small step...

ignition sequence start ... 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 ... All engines running. Liftoff! We have a liftoff Ciarán stars as Robert R. Gilruth, the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, in a biopic of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, based on James R. Hansen's book First Man: the life of Neil Armstrong.

The part may not be a big one, but the character was at the center of things nearly every step of the way from the Sputnik launching in 1957 to the Moon landings that began in 1969.