Reading Matters

DublinSwell 2011: Sebastian Barry puts on a theatrical performance and leaves the audience wanting more

It's funny how the writer in person rarely marries with the notion of the writer you've created in your head.

I've been a long-time admirer of Sebastian Barry, having read all of his novels bar one (which I'm saving up), and I had envisaged a quietly spoken, shy retiring type. But in person, or at least on stage at DublinSwell last Friday night, he was larger than life, with a big booming voice and a confident swagger.

Of course, Barry is also a playwright, and I imagine he's trod the boards a few times, either in the process of writing his plays or helping to stage them, so performing his work in front of an audience, whether real or imaginary, probably comes quite naturally. I found that I couldn't take my eyes off him, and the voice, well, the voice boomed across the auditorium and held everyone in its sway.

Barry chose to read an excerpt from his 2005 Booker shortlisted novel A Long Long Way, an extraordinary tale about a young Irish soldier caught between two wars -- the Great War and the Irish War of Independence. It is heart-breaking in places, one of those stories that leaves an indelible print on the memory.

Hearing it being read out loud was an astonishing experience. Barry chose the scene in which the young Willie Dunne returns from the battlefields of Belgium, still covered in mud, grime and lice from the trenches, and presents himself to his father, a much-respected member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, based in Dublin Castle. His father is a strong, proud man, not prone to shows of emotion.

In the scene he shoos Willie's younger sister away, and proceeds to bath his son, dousing him in hot water and scrubbing away the evidence of war. It is one of those quintessential scenes, that is tender without being sentimental, emotionally moving without being mawkish.

Barry reads it in a loud, strong baritone. He does the voices of the characters, even when there is no dialogue, so you get the full effect of who is thinking what, in particular the father, who is grappling with the realisation that his son has gone to war and experienced unimaginable things he will never truly know about.

It concludes with father and son gently embracing, but in that one embrace there is more than words can say, and Barry leaves it there, abruptly, while the audience, 2,000-strong, gives an audible groan of disappointment, as if to say, don't go, keep reading, we're listening and we want to know what happens next...

My reviews of Sebastian Barry's novels can be viewed on my Sebastian Barry page.

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

DublinSwell 2011: Paul Durcan's poetry leaves us reeling in the aisles

There's a fine line between comedy and tragedy, and the poetry of Paul Durcan treads it perfectly.

At DublinSwell last Friday night, wearing black trousers and a bright canary yellow jumper, he regaled us with several poems, each one more hilarious than the last, and I'd barely caught my breath before he was reading us something else.

Poetry, on the page, doesn't usually make sense to me. But hearing it read out loud, by the person who wrote it, was mesmerising.

Durcan has an expressive voice. It rises and falls with emotion, he whispers some lines, croons others, occasionally he shouts. It all adds up to a powerful performance.

Two poems stood out for me. The first, hilariously entitled The Woman Who Kept Her Breasts in the Garden, was, well, hilarious.

The second, Golden Mothers Driving West, started off as a laugh-out-loud comedy, about three elderly woman doing a runner from their nursing home in a stolen car, before it mutated into a poignant, tragic tale about the past, and, finally, death.

I've taken the liberty of reproducing the poem in full below, which I found on The Ireland Chair of Poetry website:

Golden Mothers Driving West, words by Paul Durcan

The inevitable call came from the Alzheimer’s nursing
     home.
Mummy had been sitting there in an armchair for two
     years
In a top-storey room with two other aged ladies,
Deborah O’Donoghue and Maureen Timoney.
Three Irish orang-utans, silent, stationary.
The call was to say that between 3 and 5 a.m.
The three of them had gone missing from the room.
At first it was thought that all three had slipped
Out the window, ajar in the hot, humid night.
But, no, there were no torsos in the flowerbed.
It transpired that a car had also gone missing.
Was it thinkable they had commandeered a car?
At five in the afternoon the police called
To say that a Polish youth in a car wash in Kinnegad
Had washed and hot-waxed a car for three ladies,
All of whom were wearing golden dressing gowns –
Standard issue golden dressing gowns
Worn by all the inmates of the Alzheimer’s nursing
    home.
Why he remembered them was that he was struck
By the fact that all three ladies were laughing
For the ten minutes it took him to wash the car.
‘I am surprised,’ he stated, ‘by laughter.’
At 9 p.m. the car was sighted in Tarmonbarry
On the Roscommon side of the River Shannon,
Parked at the jetty of the Emerald Star marina.
At 9.30 p.m. a female German child was taken
To the police station at Longford by her stepfather.
The eleven-year-old had earlier told her stepfather
In the cabin of their hired six-berth river cruiser
That she had seen three ladies jump from the bridge.
Her stepfather had assumed his daughter imagined it
As she was, he told police, ‘a day-dreamer born’.
The girl repeated her story to the police:
How three small, thin, aged ladies with white hair
Had, all at once, together, jumped from the bridge,
Their dressing gowns flying behind them in the breeze.
What colours were the dressing gowns? she was asked.
‘They are wearing gold,’ she replied.
Wreathed on the weir downstream from the bridge
Police sub-aqua divers retrieved the three bodies,
One of whom, of course, was my own emaciated
    mother,
Whose fingerprints were later found on the wheel of
    the car.
She had been driving west, west to Westport,
Westport on the west coast of Ireland
In the County of Mayo,
Where she had grown up with her mother and sisters
In the War of Independence and the Civil War,
Driving west to Streamstown three miles outside
    Westport,
Where on afternoons in September in 1920,
Ignoring the roadblocks and the assassinations,
They used walk down Sunnyside by the sea’s edge,
The curlews and the oystercatchers,
The upturned black currachs drying out on the stones,
And picnic on the machair grass above the seaweed,
Under the chestnut trees turning autumn gold
And the fuchsia bleeding like troupes of crimson-tutu’d
    ballerinas in the black hedgerows.
Standing over my mother’s carcass in the morgue,
A sheep’s skull on a slab,
A girl in her birth-gown blown across the sand,
I shut my eyes:
Thank you, O golden mother,
For giving me a life,
A spear of rain.
After a long life searching for a little boy who lives
    down the lane
You never found him, but you never gave up;
In your afterlife nightie
You are pirouetting expectantly for the last time.  

I was so taken by Paul Durcan's performance, I bought one of his books (A Snail in My Prime) the next day. He now has the dubious honour of being the author of the very first poetry book added to my personal library.

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

DublinSwell 2011: Mike Scott interprets W.B. Yeats' epic poems 'September 1913' and 'Let The Earth Bear Witness' in song

As much as I love literature, I have a mental block when it comes to poetry. I simply don't "get it". For that reason I've never bothered to read W.B. Yeats, arguably Ireland's greatest poet.

But at DublinSwell on Friday night the poetry of Yeats was brought to life by Mike Scott, a Edinburgh-born Dublin-based singer songwriter, best known as the founder of The Waterboys in 1984. Scott's influences are steeped in literature and his most recent project has been to create an entire suite of Yeats' poetry set to music.

He performed two of these poems on the night, the first September 1913, which you can view on YouTube below.

 

September 1913 words by W.B. Yeats

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry, 'Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

The second was a very profound and incredibly moving rendition of Yeats' Let The Earth Bear Witness, which Scott dedicated to "all the people of the earth struggling for self-determination".

As he performed the song, accompanied by Iona Marshall on guitar, a video from the recent protests in Iran was screened behind him. This powerful imagery took on greater potency when accompanied by Yeats' words, almost as if they had been written for the revolutionary times in which we live. It was an emotional way to end a brilliant evening of words and voices...

 

Let The Earth Bear Witness by W.B. Yeats

They shall be remembered for ever
They shall be alive for ever
They shall be speaking for ever
The people shall hear them for ever

Let the sea bear witness
Let the wind bear witness
Let the earth bear witness
Let the stars bear witness!

For further literary events in Ireland, visit the Dublin UNESCO City of Literature website.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.

DublinSwell 2011: a celebration of one city's love affair with words

If there is one city in the world where a star-studded cast of writers -- whether of prose, play, poetry or song -- lives and works it is Dublin, Ireland. So it was fitting that so many of them gathered in the newly built Convention Centre Dublin, on the banks of the Liffey, on Friday night to celebrate Dublin's recent listing as a UNESCO City of Literature, one of only four cities* in the world to be designated as such.

As an admirer of Irish literature, I felt a little like all my Christmases had come at once. It's no exaggeration to say I hadn't been this excited about seeing a line-up like this since I watched LiveAid on TV 25 years ago!

In her opening remarks Margaret Hayes, Dublin City librarian and Chair, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, described it as "the largest single literary event in Ireland's history". She might also have added that it was the longest event in the country's history, because the evening, which got off to a delayed start, ran until 11.45pm. But the quality of the performances was so exceptional I don't think anyone in the 2,000-strong crowd minded.

There was rarely a dull moment in the programme, which featured everyone from novelists Sebastian Barry and Joseph O'Connor, to songwriters Mike Scott and Damien Dempsey. There were multi-talented writers such as novelist and film-maker Neil Jordan, actors from the Abbey Theatre performing acts from plays by Sean O'Casey and Marina Carr, and a host of poets, including Ireland's only living Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney, who received a standing ovation when he walked onto the stage.

Over the next few days I will cover performance highlights (by which I mean the people that made a particular impression on me) in more detail in a series of separate posts. In the meantime, here's an overview of the programme, divided into the categories of song, poetry, prose and script.

SONG
Can there be a more appropriate song to open an event celebrating Irish words than The Auld Triangle? The lyrics to this unofficial Dublin anthem were written by Dominic Behan in 1954 for his brother, the writer Brendan Behan. The tune is based on a traditional Irish song called Galway Shawl, but it's the memorable chorus -- "And that auld triangle went jingle-jangle / All along the banks of the Royal Canal" -- that makes it such a terrific song for a singalong.

Indeed, Damien Dempsey, who performed the song on the night, had the crowd singing along while he took a step back from the microphone. The sound of 2,000 voices beginning tentatively and finishing with great roar and vigour was spine-tingling.

Dempsey later performed a song of his own, Sing All Our Cares Away, which was similarly impressive.

But the true musical star of the night was Mike Scott. I'll talk about him at length in a later post, but he performed three songs (with Iona Marshall), including the one for which he is probably most famous -- This is the Sea -- and two interpretations of W.B. Yeats' poems -- September 1913 and Let The Earth Bear Witness -- which were so mesmerising I think I might have become an accidental devotee of poetry, an art form I've previously thought "difficult" and "pretentious".

Lisa Hannigan, whose work I'm familiar with via her association with Irish songwriter and musician Damien Rice (she was a member of his band and sang backing vocals but left to pursue a solo career in 2008), performed a haunting song called Lille, her ethereal voice ringing out across the audience.

And, finally, Robbie Overson, who is a member of Irish folk fusion group Scullion, performed a guitar instrumental to accompany a reading of Ghost Light by novelist Joseph O'Connor. It was a fascinating combination of O'Connor's silky, modulated reading voice with the rich warm tones of an acoustic guitar, and certainly a different approach to a normal reading where an author stands in front of a microphone and you can usually hear the sound of a pin drop.

POETRY
I'll be the first to put up my hand and say that poetry is not my thing, but the line-up of poets on the DublinSwell bill might have changed that forever. Hearing poetry read aloud, by the people who wrote it, has transformed the way I view it. The tone and musicality, the rhythm and beat of it, came alive for me on Friday night.

First, there was Seamus Heaney, an undeniable legend and grand master, who read three poems -- Casualty, Chorus and Postscript -- but it was Paul Durcan's sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic-comic poetry that sold me. (Ironically, I had been sitting next to him for the first part of the show, completely oblivious to his fame and talent as the "inspired minstrel of modern day Ireland"). He read a handful of poems, including The Cleaner Woman and The Woman Who Kept Her Breasts in the Back Garden, that had the audience shrieking with laughter.

Paula Meehan, who is better known as a playwright, read two poems in a flat Dublin accent, the first of which was about her grandmother's vicious opinion of the Catholic church, or, more specifically the priests "who are dirty feckers", which had all the more fire because of the monotone in which it was delivered.

The Irish language poet (with the English name) Biddy Jenkinson was indisposed on the evening, but her poem Ab Dhroimeanaigh was read by an unnamed performer, accompanied by a saxophonist and a slide show. Sadly, it was all in Irish, so I had no idea what it was about. But it sounded beautiful.

Multi-talented writer Dermot Bolger read a moving poem, Venice, dedicated to his late wife. He was accompanied by his two sons, Donnacha and Diarmuid, tall gangly young men, who performed a song, Sad and Beautiful, on guitar and mandolin. I thought it was the one weak spot of the evening, possibly because I didn't understand the background to it, which is explained in this piece in the Irish Times.

PROSE
The line-up of novelists to do readings of their work, both published and forth-coming, was like a veritable who's who of the Irish literary world.

I've already name-checked Joseph O'Connor (see above under "music"), but another of my favourite writers Sebastian Barry was also in attendance. His reading of A Long Long Way was quite theatrical, but I'll expand on that in a separate post.

The grand master of popular contemporary Irish writing, Roddy Doyle, who seemed slightly nervous, read an extract of his short story Brilliant! which was specially commissioned for the St Patrick's Festival and brought to life during the St Patrick's Day parade through the streets of Dublin the day before. He's obviously very warmly regarded by the people of Dublin judging by the reaction of the audience, first when he walked on stage and later after he completed his reading.

Gerry Stembridge, an author with whom I wasn't previously familiar, read an extract from a forthcoming novel, as did Christine Dwyer-Hickey and chick-lit author Cathy Kelly.

Crime novelist Declan Hughes read the first chapter of City of Lost Girls, Claire Kilroy (another favourite of mine) read from her latest novel All Names Have Been Changed and Neil Jordan read the ending of his newest work Mistaken.

And just to prove that not all Irish novels are dark and depressing (as someone recently commented on this blog), Paul Howard, aka middle-class South Dublin snob Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, had the entire audience in hysterics with his reading of Mr S. and the Secrets of Andorra's Box. I'd never heard of Paul before but he made such an impression, I'll be devoting a separate post on him shortly.

Writers, long since dead, also had their work read on stage, including Samuel Beckett's Watt (hilarious), Oscar Wilde's child's fairy story The Selfish Giant and James Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.

SCRIPT
Actors from the Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theatre founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904, performed several pieces during the evening, each of them more powerful than the last. They included Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, Mark O'Rowe's Terminus and Marina Carr's Marble. Again, I'll write more about this in a separate post.

Eamon Morrissey, who is an actor, director and writer, performed Jonathan Swift's 1729 satire A Modest Proposal (full title: A Model Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick). As well as giving the audience many belly laughs, he kept us all in suspense as he wandered the stage, wielding a set of carving knives and threatening to lift the white cloth off a dish sitting on the table in front of him. We were all very fearful of what might lie beneath it...

The Convention Centre Dublin, all lit up in green as part of the St Patrick's Festival 2011.

RUNNING ORDER
Mike Murphy Master of Ceremonies
Margaret Hayes Chair, Dublin UNESCO City of Literature
President of Ireland Mary McAleese

Damien Dempsey Dominic Behan's The Auld Triangle
Barry McGovern Samuel Beckett's Watt
Christine Dwyer-Hickey The Cold Eye of Heaven
Biddy Jenkinson Ab Dhroimeanaigh (music by Seán McErlaine, imagery by Margaret Lonergan)
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way
Abbey Theatre Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) W.B. Yeats' September 1913
Gerry Stembridge Unspoken
Eamon Morrissey Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal
Claire Kilroy All Names Have Been Changed
Abbey Theatre Mark O'Rowe's Terminus
Lisa Hannigan Lille
Seamus Heaney Poems

[Interval]

Paul Durcan Poems
Declan Hughes City of Lost Girls
Dermot Bolger (with Donnacha & Diarmuid Bolger) Sad and Beautiful/Venice
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) This Is The Sea
Paula Meehan Poems
Damien Dempsey Sing All Our Cares Away
Paul Howard (Ross O'Carroll-Kelly) Mr S. and the Secrets of Andorra's Box
Cathy Kelly You've Got Mail
Abbey Theatre Marina Carr's Marble
Neil Jordan Mistaken
Claire Kilroy Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant
Joseph O'Connor (with Robbie Overson) Ghost Light
Roddy Doyle Brilliant!
Sebastian Barry James Joyce's A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man
Mike Scott (with Iona Marshall) W.B. Yeats' Let The Earth Bear Witness

 

*The others are Melbourne, Edinburgh and Iowa City.

I travelled to Dublin and attended this event as a guest of Tourism Ireland.