ALSO PLAYING
Asking For It, at the Everyman Cork, runs from Friday, June 15, until Saturday, June 23. Based on the novel by Louise O’Neill, winner of the best-newcomer prize at the Irish Book Awards in 2015, it’s about a teenager, Emma, whose life is changed utterly when she suffers a horrific assault from a gang at a house party. One of the interesting aspects of the book is that Emma is not an attractive personality. She’s a bullying, jealous flirt, callous towards a friend who was sexually assaulted, and she doesn’t help her own cause by getting tanked up on drink and drugs before she herself becomes a victim. The novel raised the whole issue of consent and behaviour and the attitude of the community towards the victim. The cast of 12 includes Lauren Coe as Emma, Frank Blake, Venetia Bowe, Síle Maguire and Ali White.
How would we be changed as individuals and as a society if we knew at what age we were going to die? That’s the basis of Corcadorca’s presentation, The Numbered, by Elias Canetti for the Cork Midsummer Festival. As usual, Corcadorca chooses an imaginative location and time — Cork’s Fitzgerald Park, from Friday, June 15, to Saturday, June 30, at 10.30pm.
Elias Canetti (1905-1994) was a Bulgarian Jewish Nobel Prize-winner for literature in 1981. Having lived in Austria and England, a lot of his work is based on the study of mass psychology, fascism and the individual at odds with society. Tickets online or from corkmidsummer.com