A Nightingale Falling by PJ Curtis, directed by Garret Daly and Marting McGlynn

A feature film set in war – torn Ireland in the early 1920’s which was filmed in Daingean and surrounding areas in July 2013

Set against a backdrop of a turbulent, war-torn Ireland in the early 1920’s, this is a story of three people and the unfolding events from a crucial time in their extraordinary and tragic lives.

It is a story of a household and its inhabitants caught in the crucible of the merciless politics, cruelties and hardships of the period. It is also a story of love, of broken hearts, entrapment, desperation, madness and of secrets revealed and darker secrets kept – even to the grave.

Starring Tara Breathnach, Muireann Bird and Gerard McCarthy, ‘A Nightingale Falling’ was filmed entirely on location in Co. Offaly.

It will be released later this year.

Teaser Trailer  http://youtu.be/HkzyLp5K4Dw

The Ulster Orchestra has recorded a full, feature-length film score for the first time, joining only a handful of film scores to be recorded entirely in Ireland.Donegal-born composer Graeme Stewart wrote the music for the Mixed Bag Media film.    Stewart likened the score to “an emotional spectator of the film,” and described it as having “a lyrical and a pastoral quality, featuring woodwind and solo stringed instruments, while at the same time becoming much more symphonic when it needs to.  I got involved in the film after watching the trailer for ‘A Nightingale Falling’ and I just thought it looked like a really beautifully shot film; I was blown away by what Mixed Bag Media has created from PJ Curtis’ book,” Stewart said.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Gaiety Panto Directed by Daryn Crosbie

with Megan Cassidy as Snow White, David Glynn-Crowley as Prince Valiant

Rose Henderson as Wanda,

David Latham as Wally and Sharon Clancy as the Evil Queen

written by Maeve Ingoldsby and Cheech Maguire, with musical direction by Peter Beckett

 

This year’s Gaiety Panto was seen by over 75,000 people, was performed 78 times and was judged to be the most successful panto since 2005.  The run was extended due to popular demand by a week.

 

IMG_0373[1]   IMG_0404[1]

Sunday Business Post Reviewedby Garvan Grant

If a theatre has been staging pantomimes for nearly 150 years, you imagine it knows what it’s doing.  And when it comes to Christmas pantos the peopt the Gaiety really know what they’re doing.

Yet again they’ve come up with the goods in this entertaining and funny production.  If the purpose of a panto is to keep children entertained for a couple of hours while also making sure that parents don’t get bored, then this is panto at its very best.

Megan Cassidy and David Glynn-Crowley are wholesomely spot on as Snow White and Prince Valiant, while Sharon Clancy is melodramatically terrifying as the Evil Queen.  The comic turns are provided by the brilliant Rose Henderson and David Latham as Wanda and Wally who sing dance and crack jokes throughout the entire performance.  The Seven Dwarfs really come into their own with a stunning setpiece called Dwarfversity.

Backed up by a large ensemble cast, great costumes and a fantastic set, the Gaiety has nailed it again, and a production like this could easily hold its head high in London’s West End.

 

The Herald

Review Fiona Dillon

The Gaiety Theatre’s Christmas panto offering is a cracker this festive season. It is a classy looking production..  The pyrotechnics and lighting are used to good effect, and the sets are elaborate and change frequently keeping the attention of the kids, and the cast certainly catered to their target audience.  The children booed, they clapped and they sang to their hearts’ content.

Much of the huour came courtesy of two cast members and the script had flourishes that were right up to the minute.  David Latham, who played the role of Wally did a mean Nidge from Love/Hate and Rose Henderson who played Wanda the queen’s beautician also had some of the best lines.

The theatre has hosted the annual Christmas pantomime each year since 1873.  Its something of an annual pilgrimage for many families, both Dublin and nationwide.  And there’s a really good reason for that – its a fun two and a half hours.  So if you get the chance, go and enjoy.

 

 

8 x 10 at the Pavilion Theatre

Directed by Conall Morrison

8 ten minute plays set in DunLaoghaire, written by Rose Henderson, Kevin Gildea, Celia DeFreine, Michael O’Meara, Shay Linehan, Ivy Bannister, Michael Casey and Gerard Dalton.

When Conall Morrison was artist in residence at the Pavilion in 2011, he put out a call for new playwrights in the area.  8 were chosen from over 100 manuscripts submitted and these playwrights met for a year working on their own plays and studying classic works. In an attempt to stimulate new work, they have each written a 10 minute play which showcased in front of a packed live audience last Saturday at the Pavilion.

Pop Up Tosca

Norman Hewson (owner) and Aongus Hanly (chef) re-open Tosca Restaurant for one night only in Smock Alley Theatre, Temple Bar on Fri 26 October.  Over e31,ooo was raised  for Self-Help Africa and former waiters, waitresses and kitchen staff travelled from Australia, Argentina and Athlone to reunite for this special occasion.  Rose Henderson emulated wine critic Jilly Goolden in an appreciation of the sumptuous food and glorious wine.

OSL-BONO-3

Fair City

Rose is now appearing in Fair City, RTE’s soap, which shows Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Sunday nights, with repeats in the afternoons.  She plays Val O’Dwyer, assistant manager of the new Phelan’s Spar.  She often lands herself in trouble for straight talking and meddling in other people’s business.  After Christy crashing into her car and burning a hole in her blouse, they have formed a stable relationship – but this is a soap – will it last?  And when will she find out that her son Eddie, the financial wizard and apple of her eye, was not working in the Seychelles but in prison?  RTE 1 8pm, and on Real Player.

According to Sydney by Gerry Lynch

Directed by Caroline FitzGerald, and Starring Rose Henderson

By popular demand!  “According to Sydney” is coming back to the Mill for two weeks 23 May to 3 June Mon to Fri @ 1pm. 10 performances only.  Book early to avoid disappointment 01-2969340 – www.milltheatre.ie 

Tickets €14 includes sandwich and coffee

Sunday Times – Eithne Shortall – 20/2/2011

Ruth’s husband of 20 years has died and she is angry, not at death for taking Sydney away but at herself for putting up with him for so long.  Sydney had strict views about everything, from declining social behaviour to why Ruth’s shoes had to be dull in colour. 

Sitting on a park bench, Ruth (Rose Henderson) remembers the other woman who turned up to her husband’s funeral wearing red heels.  Ruth’s fury relates not to sexual betrayal so much as images of herself at home giving in to Sydney’s strict views, and his Swedish mistress enjoying herself on his business junkets.  Ruth feels she has been taken for granted, and after years of suffering in silence, she is finally ready to vent.  It’s worth giving her a hearing.

Irish Theatre Magazine – Derek West – 18/2/2011

The studio at the Mill is an unprepossessing cuboid; the set for According to Sydney uninspiring (a garden bench and some scraps of ferns to denote a park) so there is little to prepare the lunchtime audience for the animation that Rose Henderson brings to the space.

The energy derives from a number of things:  Gerry Lynch has written an intelligent piece, and for suburbanites everywhere, a piece that trades in the familiar.  Lynch cut his playwright teeth on radio, so while the action is static, the writing sparkles with sharp observation – “domestic dialogue was not an option”, a glorious pun on Orwell, the writer and the road in Rathgar; “I grew tired of being wrong”; “It was hell having him at home”; “Life is like a subject for an exam”.  Behind the cozy and local lies a degree of discomfort.

Ruth has lost her husband of twenty years to a stroke.  Now she’s half-heartedly doing 2.5 circuits of the park for her health (she’s a diabetic) and in every sense she’s clinging to the edge.  She pauses on the bench to confide in the strangers before her.  Her narrative is of Rathmines, trim lawns, a hatred of pigeons, murder mysteries – Morse and Frost – the Buttery in TCD, musicals and crooners, accountants and auctioneers and the minutiae of medical complaints.  At one level it’s what one might overhear in the shopping-centre coffee shop.  Its authenticity gives it traction, but the familiarity masks a menace.

Through Ruth’s narrative, the other main character – the invisible, deceased Sydney – emerges from behind the bourgeois facade as a monster.  He is portrayed as a man who liked clarity of thought and purpose; hated fiction, loved history; reacted with tyrannical irritability to certain colours; had a fastidiousness that led him to hand-wash his own socks and to favour cremation – on grounds of hygiene and of economy.  (She buries him, nevertheless, a minor revenge.)  The convention of a long marriage barely conceals the condescension, the sneering and the bullying.

Rose Henderson’s portrayal of Ruth is spirited, lively, and full of facial and verbal nuance.  Director Caroline FitzGerald, with a lightness of touch, has allowed the actor plenty of room to develop the portrait of an interesting lady and to animate that neutral space.  Henderson makes Ruth bright-eyed and positive.  Is it the exhilaration of new-found release, or is it the brave face of the desolate widow?  Really Sydney sounds so awful she’s far better off without him, but the twist in the plot is that “another woman” came to the funeral, and this has dented Ruth’s assurance.  (“Did I know him at all?”)

There’a a psychological honesty about the piece.  It presents a patina of normality, the polite desperation of the middle-classes, locked into arrangements that drain away the spirit.  Deceits make it bearable: it seems that Sydney – incredibly – had a mistress; Ruth squirreled away some of the money she inherited from her mother.  Scandals around marital failures (the son’s wife gone to California with a nusician; her dentist brother-in-law decamped with the dental nurse) are hushed up.  While Ruth can now buy the pink, comfortable shoes she wants, contemplate a ciggie or munch chocolate (in one excellent, timely moment the Kit-Kat becomes a kind of comfort blanket) and while she relives with some glee the way she taunted the despised spouse, just prior to demise, with oblique references to her first love – her victory is somewhat pyrrhic  She wonders if she helped him on his way (the sub-title is “..maybe I went too far in the end!”) but, as she strides off to the 45 bus-stop, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to her new-won freedom.

Mail on Sunday – 20/2/2011

It was nice to see a full house for the launch of a new lunchtime season at the Mill, Dundrum.  The small Studio at the Mill gives a sense of intimacy between the performer and the audience that suits a one-woman play. 

The story is narrated by Ruth, a woman who recently buried her husband, Sydney and who is just beginning to feel the pleasure of release from his petty tyrannies.  He was the ultimate killjoy, a fussy pedantic bore for whom his wife became almost invisible, except when she was interrupting his History Channel of documentary programmes.

As played by Rose Henderson, Ruth is a chatty outgoing character, intelligent and lively, who will hop happily from subject to subject and who enjoys the simple pleasures of reading, gardening or watching television for entertainment.  She’s obviously a well-educated woman, condemned to live life through the deadening dictates of the all-knowing, all-wise and ultimately hypocritical Sydney. 

Since he had high blood pressure, should Ruth have looked after him or let it help him on his way?  And who was that woman with the red shoes at his funeral? 

This is an enjoyable 50 minute piece and Rose Henderson plays Ruth with a nice mixture of annoyance, resignation and humour.

Fair City

Rose appears in Fair City as Val O’Dwyer, Tue 5 April and Wed 6 April.  An unhappy first meeting, maybe there is a chance Val can help Christy unburden his sorry story.

Raw 3

Restaurant drama Raw has been brought back by popular demand for a third series.  Rose plays Mrs. Moloney, Registrar of births deaths and marriages.  The main character wants to bring forward the wedding as her mother in law is driving her crazy with demands.  There need to be extenuating circumstances to warrant a change of date and the young would-be bride obliges by pretending she’s pregnant.  Mrs. Moloney stretches the rules to let her have her way, and there happens to have been a cancellation for next week!  Directed by Charlie McCarthy, this series is due to be aired by RTE and ITV early 2011.

Behold the Lamb

Dumbworld Productions present a first feature film for Director John McIlduff.  Set in Northern Ireland it is a comic drama starring Aoife Duffin and Nigel O’Neill.  Rose plays Ivy, a professional foster mother.  She is childless , a fact she attributes to her useless husband Stan (Paddy Rocks), and always has at least five foster kids under her care.  Kevin, one of her foster children, is disabled and a week after his birthday his mother Liz comes to visit.  Liz is pregnant again, and Ivy expects to foster the new baby.  She knows Liz is a drug user, and a physical and emotional mess and she warns her not to mess things up this time.

Earthbound

A comic sci-fi feature film recorded in Dublin, Rose plays Mrs. Reilly, the main character’s landlady.  Joe comes home to see lights under the door and bursts into the room, ray gun aimed at a shocked Mrs. Reilly who is blowing up balloons for his birthday.  “How did you know it was my birthday?” he asks as he disuades her from doing a bit of tidying.  “I saw it in your passport!”   The film is directed by Alan Brennan and produced by Rippleworld Productions.