EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Micheál

The film writer Sheila O’Malley writes about the Gate Theatre’s Micheál MacLiommóir (a fascinating character), and shares an essay he wrote in the 1950s about acting.

(The Sheila Variations, approx 19 mins reading time)

The actor, in short, should understand that he relinquishes, as he signs his contract and steps upont he floor, his never too-firmly established claim to be an artist in the sense of a master of a creative work, of an entire and complete composition. That task, however important he may become as a star, is left in other hands, who begin their work by skilfully stripping from him, stitch by stitch, the raiments of the craft he had laboriously pieced together in the living theatre, leaving him naked (and it may be exceedingly ashamed) to face his personality in the raw, which alone, he is informed with perfect friendliness and courtesy, is of the slightest use to him or to anyone else.

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>