Gareth Stack

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Selection of articles written between 2005 and today.

  • Airport Romance

    Last year I travelled to my girlfriend’s native Ukraine. Bizarrely, many of the places we visited were shortly to become focuses of the Ukrainian conflict, from Maidan Nezalezhnosti to the coast of Crimea. On the way, thanks to the bureaucracy of fortress Europe, we were trapped overnight in Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport. There are… Read more

  • Inside Margot Wadell – Book Review: Inside Lives

    This is a review written back when I was studying psychoanalysis. These articles critiquing psychodynamic texts proved pretty popular (I’m assuming with students, or practicing psychoanalysts) when I initially posted them. Having recently uncovered a couple that had never made their way to the web, I thought why not release them. Hope you find them… Read more

  • Disco Pigs – Episode 10 – Reading Plays

    Arriving at the end of the nineteen nineties, at exactly the time Martin McDonagh was exploding the Irish national theatre with the first of his Leenane trilogy, Disco Pigs articulated a radical new vision of Irishness. An Irishness deracinated of nationalism, appalled by republicanism, raised on television and clubland. A dissolute Irishness – frozen in… Read more

  • Dublin Characters – Episode 6 – The Gareth Stack Show

    The Gareth Stack Show is back! Dublin’s most obscure chat show, featuring interviews with some of the dirty auld holes most fascinating characters, both pro patria and ex. Today’s episode comes complete with acoustamatic musing from Dublin low-fi warbler and nouveau booky wookie Bobert Ahern, monsternational filmist Donal Foreman, and Dublin scenestress Joanne Stack (yes… Read more

  • The Bald Soprano – Episode 9 – Reading Plays

    Quantum Physics, synchronicity, English mustachios, it has to be Eugene Ionesco’s ‘The Bald Soprano’ (La Cantatrice Chauve). This is a play for which context is essential: Beckett’s growing reputation in France at the beginning of the 1950’s. The efforts of dramatists who became known as the ‘theatre of the absurd’ to acknowledge the horrors of… Read more

  • Free Schools or No Schools

    Serious question: Why are we so comfortable with imprisoning children for 12 – 14 years? It seems the answer is we’ve constructed an economic system that requires both parents to work, for most of each weekday. Schools act in loco parentis, helping to tame children in preparation for an adulthood of service to industry. They… Read more