The poet and the City

This article first appeared in the Irish Times

WHEN WE think of the poet in the city, we picture the flâneur : someone who is in the crowd, but observing it too; caught in the teeming metropolis, but not blind to what it means; able to divine images from the constant flux. The poet is alive to the comings and goings of cities, the coincidences, the anonymity, the constant tumult of significance and silliness. But, not rushing to the office, he notices.

He is free from the quotidian concerns, because the muse does not work nine to five.

Lost Booker, or why it should be JG Farrell

This article first appeared in The Irish Times

In August in 1979, JG Farrell was fishing off the rocks near his home on Sheep’s Head, Co Cork, when he slipped, fell into the swell and was drowned. Certainly, death at the age of 44 left his talent unfulfilled, but even in the time he had his achievements were of the first rank. His empire trilogy –Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip – is his monument and The Siege rightly won the 1973 Booker Prize. Troubles is surely his masterpiece – an elegy to the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that was to retreat from public life and, to a large extent, the country in the years following independence.
Given the Booker penchant for historical fiction, Troubles would most likely have won the prize save for a change of the entry criteria which meant none was given in 1970. This is now about to be rectified, with the Lost Man Booker to be announced on Wednesday. Troubles is a justified favourite.
The novel begins in 1919 when English first World War veteran Major Brendan Archer travels to the Majestic hotel in Co Wexford and the fiance he somehow acquired in a careless moment whilst on leave. There he finds a dilapidated hotel – the rooms of its upper floors “boiling with cats”; its Palm Court overgrown to the extent that such guests as there are emerge from the foliage. The reader finds a perfect metaphor for imperial decline: the inevitable dissolution of the colonial project symbolised in the very luxuries of the ruling class. After a brief, farcical non-courtship, the Major’s fiance Angela dies. Though he vows to leave, he is drawn to the Majestic and through his humane, baffled eyes we witness its demise, as well as the eponymous conflict.
At times, Troubles reads like a cross between Cold Comfort Farm and The Last September: it has all the absurd comedy of the former, with the same historical intelligence and sad beauty of the latter. Farrell handles such shifts of tone like a master – which is what he was. For Irish readers, his letting a stranger be our guide is a masterstroke of defamiliarisation. After the terrors of industrialised war, the not-quite-war in Ireland is all the more strange to the shell-shocked Major. After witnessing a shooting in Dublin he finds it “absurd that in Ireland an old man consulting his watch should be killed. In wartime innocent old people were killed – but Ireland was a peaceful country”. That is an eloquent “but” – it is the pleading “but” of the doomed southern Protestants, a class who couldn’t help feeling “it couldn’t happen here”, the disbelieving dilemma of the ascendancy class who lived in one of the “home nations” rather than one of the empire’s wilder outposts.
The storm clouds gather over the Majestic only gradually, news of barrack raids and attacks on policemen usually emerging from the pages of the Irish Times. This initial detachment is an apt imagining of the surreallity of the Anglo-Irish situation. We move from the quaking sod into psychological terrain as Farrell fills in what he said history books left out: “everything to do with the senses . . . the detail of what being alive is like”. His domestic scene is a fitting one, then, for his subject was a family drama.

Book of the Decade

And the nominees are (with occasional snarks):

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor. If only one of the characters had bought a mobile phone
Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor
Winterwood by Patrick McCabe. Can do better.
Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle. Grinding poverty from the pen of Roddy Doyle: marvel at how Paula gets by on €600 a week, living rent free with no dependents. I never knew Corn Flakes could be so expensive
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
Tenderwire by Claire Kilroy
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry.
Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
Stepping Stones by Dennis O’Driscoll and Seamus Heaney
Let The Great World Spin by Colm McCann. Read Speedboat instead. Also set in 1970s NY but neither derivative nor opportunistic
The Builders by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton
The New Policeman by Kate Thompson. I preferred the Third
Memoir by John McGahern
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
The Pope’s Children by David McWilliams. Catechism of cliche.
Back From The Brink by Paul McGrath
The Gathering by Anne Enright. Irish familial misery = Booker
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade by Ross O’Carroll Kelly. The laureate of the noughties, we salute you
The Truth Commissioner by David Parks
The Parish by Alice Taylor
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
Lessons in Heartbreak by Cathy Kelly. Certainly not lessons in writing.
Forgive and Forget by Patricia Scanlan. I will.
The Lovers by John Connolly
It’s a Long Way from Penny Apples by Bill Cullen
The Stolen Village by Des Ekin
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
Yours, Faithfully by Sheila O’Flanagan
The Sea by John Banville. Or how to keep writing the same book over and again until you get a Booker for it.
With My Lazy Eye by Julia Kelly
Connemara: Listening to the Wind by Tim Robinson
In the Woods by Tana French
Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey
A Secret History of the IRA by Ed Moloney
The Master by Colm Tóibín
There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry. A true poet of the pint.
In the Forest by Edna O’Brien. A bit like In the Forest, except it’s crap…
Keane by Roy Keane. A book about an enigma that’s not in any way enigmatic. Ah well.
Havoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
Judging Dev by Diarmaid Ferriter
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. Hmmm. Over there and definitely over-rated.
That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern. A thin line between laconic anc catatonic.
PS I Love You by Cecelia Ahern. PS I can’t punctuate.
Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy
Foolish Mortals by Jennifer Johnston.

No Escape

When the Ryan report on child abuse in Catholic-run institutions was published last year, the Abbey Theatre’s director Fiach Mac Chongail and literary director Aideen Howard began discussing the idea of the theatre responding. They considered having the entire 2,700 pages of the report read publicly, but eventually settled on a short series, entitled The Darkest Corner, comprising Gerard Mannix Flynn’s one-man show James X; a reading of The Evidence I Shall Give, a 1961 courtroom drama mentioned in the Ryan report and centering on the transfer of a 13-year-old girl to an industrial school; and No Escape, the theatre’s first piece of verbatim theatre, edited from the report by journalist Mary Raftery.

She’s a Lady (Macbeth)

The malleable Macbeth has had many incarnations: a drug dealer, a Polish soldier, even a toy in on recent production. For Jimmy Fay’s production at the Abbey the “angle” is a psychological thriller, rooted in Ireland during Cromwell’s time. Such a historical context could add an intriguing resonance to Macbeth’s eventual isolation in an alien-seeming landscape where both heaven and nature are “troubled with man’s act”.

The character of Macbeth dominates the play to a great extent, with the final acts a template depiction of the last days of a tyrant, the bunker mentality and paranoia of a doomed regime. But until Act III the Thane of Fife is in turn dominated, by his wife. If the play is a tragedy of the imagination, of Macbeth’s fateful propensity to foresee results in a way that tempts his actions to be merely faits au accomplis, it is his wife that indulges this in him, latching onto the witches prophesies, questioning his manhood, goading him on.

Dangerous Dunning

This interview first appeared in the Irish Examiner

There’s much to relish, from an actors point of view at any rate, about Nick Dunning’s latest role: Vicomte de Valmont in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. “He is devious. He is manipulative. He is destructive. He is a control freak. He is a seducer. He is a trickster”: Dunning recites his character’s moral CV in the suitably Georgian reception room backstage at the Gate Theatre. Certainly a lot for the leading man to revel in, plus, he notes, he gets to kiss a lot of girls. What more could you ask from your job?

Barry McGovern

This interview first appeared in the Irish Examiner

Mention Philadelphia, Here I Come! and most people will automatically think of Brian Friel’s decision to split the lead character, Gareth O’Donnell, into Gar Public and Gar Private. Friel wasn’t the first playwright to use such a method, but he did put the device to the best use. With it he found the ideal way of visualising what he felt was a defining feature of the Irish psyche: a figure who is literally split in two, exiled from himself and his home by an unacknowledged weight of history and always, because he no longer has his own language, speaking in two voices. Around the time he wrote Philadelphia, Friel said playwrights should be “more concerned with defining our Irishness than pursuing it”, and the figure of Gar O’Donnell began a decades-long dramatisation of the competing identities of Ireland that has made Friel’s the most important body of work in the Irish theatre since Beckett.

Lynne Parker

This interview first appeared in the Irish Examiner

The lot of the theatre director is a varied one. Each new show is different, presenting its own challenges. But even allowing for that, Rough Magic director Lynne Parker’s next two shows are poles apart. First up is Sodome, My Love, a co-production with Emergency Room which opens tonight at the Project arts centre. It’s a one-woman show, constructed by Parker and performer Olwen Fouere around a monologue the latter translated from Laurent Gaudé’s original French text. After that, Parker will be throwing herself into The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety, a play as familiar as it is chock full of great parts, including that of Lady Bracknell, to be taken by Stockard Channing.

Valentine’s day poetry massacre

This article first appeared in the Irish Times

The western concept of romantic love is arguably the most influential idea in history. And it was just that: an idea, invented by poets in the south of France in the 11th century. According to the courtly love tradition, the troubadour is always a mixture of ardent and abject, the woman idealised, her whims his to be obeyed. This dynamic was shaped by feudal society, but has nonetheless persisted to our own times, permeating popular culture and etiquette (it’s ladies first, after all) to such an extent that we think it’s natural, instead of simply the product of the world’s dominant culture.

Twill be Grand

This article first appeared in the Irish Examiner

For some years now, Grand Canal Square, renovated and redesigned according to the plan of New York architect Martha Schwartz, has had a concrete red carpet leading from the water’s edge to a building site. But six weeks from now it will finally fulfill its function, welcoming the first-night audience to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre.