Friday 22 April 2016

BLOGPOST SPECIAL:LAUNCH OF A GRAPHIC NOVEL ON FRANCIS LEDWIDGE

BLOGPOST SPECIAL:
TALK AT THE LAUNCH OF A GRAPHIC NOVEL ON THE LIFE OF FRANCIS LEDWIDGE; TOWER MUSEUM, 21st APRIL 2016
© Dave Duggan April 2016


The Decade of Centenaries is a box of curiosities we look into with awe, and a little nervousness. Lift the lid and see: people, events, cross-actions, armies, a new franchise for women, political promises, an arms race, extreme wealth, extreme poverty, aristocratic families across Europe, all inter-related and inter-married, falling out with each other, swathes of the south of the globe divided among countries and corporations in the north of the globe, imperialisms, repressions and rebellions. We're nervous - I suggest - both locally and globally, because the decade of centenaries is not in the past. It is now. And so we get creative, as with this new graphic novel by Marty Melarkey, Danny McLaughlin, David Campbell and Revolve Comics.
Of course, that will be challenged as an ahistorical, even an anti-historical view. And - shock horror - in a museum. Then, I work as a dramatist, not as a historian and I suggest that, while facts are to be fought over, fictions are to be enjoyed. As Alfred Hitchcock said, drama is life with the boring bits left out.
So, I go into the box, relishing the complexity of it all. Instead of one or two grand narratives, I see a mesh of multiple stories and anecdotes, half-hidden occurrences, most of them unearthed by assiduous historians, as we will hear, from Dr. Catherine Morris, in the case of Alice Milligan. And there I find, Francis Ledwidge. One hundred years ago, he was on the Eastern Front, fighting with the British Army against Turkish and Bulgarian troops, mainly young peasants like himself. Ironies of slaughter litter the box of curiosities.
It's the complexity of Ledwidge's character that leads me to write Still, The Blackbird Sings, a play on the life and times of the poet soldier in Ebrington Barracks. He returned to Ireland, to Dublin, a city devastated by the violent events of the Easter Rising. He is devastated himself by the death of his fellow poet and friend Thomas McDonagh, one of the executed signatories of the Proclamation. From this devastation he creates his best-known poem, Lament for Tomas McDonagh, featured in the graphic novel.
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.
Perhaps Francis Ledwidge was more lyric rhymer than soldier, more farmer/nationalist/labour activist/road mender/day-labourer than warrior, though he possibly killed people in hand-to-hand combat.
How does a person hold these two drives together?
The drive to killing, in soldiery. The drive to living, in poetry.
These are the questions that take me rummaging in the box of curiosities and find me responding artistically.
All artistic work benefits from the work of the historians. Now, one hundred years after his time in Ebrington, this graphic telling of Ledwidge's story is launched, composed and drawn by artists who are seeking to face chaos and horror with beauty and order, by forging fact and fiction, in the fires of imagining.
Imagine a young man, a poet, who has dodged death on bullet-riddled beaches in Turkey. Who has possibly killed in action. Who has been injured and recovered in a military hospital in Cairo. Who returns to Dublin to find a friend and fellow poet executed by soldiers in the same uniform as the one he wears. Who is posted to Derry in May 1916 and stripped of his rank, because of tardiness and insubordination. Who sees reflections of his beloved Boyne river in the glorious Foyle. Who learns of thousands of fellow soldiers slaughtered in battles beside the river Somme, in France in July1916.
Who lives with men petrified that they too will be sent to the human abattoirs of France, knowing that the odds on them dying are shortening.
How do you live like that?
And yet he did. Lived like that. Died like that.
His poetry remains.
And when the first surprise of flight
Sweet songs excite, from the far dawn
Shall there come blackbirds loud with love,
Sweet echoes of the singers gone.
But in the lonely hush of eve
Weeping I grieve the silent bills."
I heard the Poor Old Woman say
In Derry of the little hills.
There is a new pub, round the corner on Foyle street, called Blackbird. Francis Ledwidge would have enjoyed a pint there.
Today, historians and artists open the box of curiosities and peer inside, discovering facts and creating fictions, often forging them together. Delicate work. With this graphic novel, we have a marvellous instance of the work of artists, aiming to introduce young people to the life of the poet-soldier Francis Ledwidge. I commend it to you.
Please allow me to conclude with an extract from my play, Still, the Blackbird Sings, which I hope Creggan Enterprises may take on a tour of non-theatre venues, as a script-in-hand performance, in September.
Francis Ledwidge stands on the edge of the square in Ebrington, above the Foyle. He is with his squad. He is relishing his poetic voice and foreseeing his death in a bomb blast, as he looks over the river.


A sparkling river. And a bridge, bedecked on every side with roses. Smell them lads! Pink ones. Ruby red ones. Yellow ones, the flaxen yellow that sweeps from a girl’s hair and gladdens a man’s eye. White ones. White roses. Innocent as peace. We’re at the crossroads. The five of us. Mugs of tea in our hands. Just like now lads.
We’re laughing and telling stories and I have new poems about blackbirds and robins and the way the water runs silver in the river. Oh! The river! Oh, my darling Boyne river, by the high reed banks where we hear.....The bittern cry! Stand to lads!











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Tuesday 19 April 2016

CAN BOTH THESE SHOWS BE THEATRE?




Two shows on the same stage, one Saturday after another.

Bag for Life by Colin Bateman, produced by The Playhouse, 2016.
Puckoon adapted by Vincent Higgins and Zoe Seaton, from the novel by Spike Milligan, produced by Big Telly, 2015.
An opportunity for an 'old school' essay.
Compare and Contrast.

Bag for Life TELLS and shows.
Puckoon SHOWS and tells.
Can both these shows be theatre?

In Bag for Life, one actress stands on a box and tells a story in the 'I' voice, supported by digital images on screens.
In Puckoon, six actors show a story in episodes of action, movement, song, dance and explosions.

Bag for Life uses the long tradition of story-telling theatre, with a modern day 'seanchaĆ­', pinned to one place in the metaphoric space created by her history and the circumstances of her world.
Puckoon acts out a narrative in scenes of riotous energy and invention, with jump-cuts of telling to set-up/move along/comment.

Bag for Life brings a tv drama aesthetic to bear, with live action images, graphics and animations augmenting and illustrating the telling.
Puckoon use the traditions of physical theatre, farce, vaudeville and melodrama.

Bag for Life is a staged tv drama, with the 2D attributes of the genre.
Puckoon is a live absurdist romp, with the benefits of the form.

Bag for Life uses the digital effects offered by pre-recorded moving and still images, which dialogue with the actress a number of times.
Puckoon uses costume, props, set and staging, quick changes and smoke/bubbles machines for effects.

The language in Bag for Life is a spare, quasi-realist argot of the north-east region of urban Ireland.
The language in Puckoon is overloaded, embellished, thrilling, poetic and punning, heard somewhere in Absurdia.

Both stories are 'thin', in different ways.

Both Bag for Life and Puckoon are delivered by effective performances and productions.

Large audiences attend both performances. Reactions each night are generally positive, with some dissensions. There is little overlapping of the audiences.

Generally, the Bag for Life audience knows and likes the work of Colin Bateman.
Generally, the Puckoon audience knows and likes the work of Big Telly.

Bag for Life goes for shocks.
Puckoon goes for laughs.

Bag for Life offers tragedy, being concerned with murder, grief, madness and revenge.
Puckoon offers comedy, being concerned with caricature, jokes, playfulness and satire.
Both are concerned with threat and violence.

Both are touring.

Can both these shows be theatre? Do they work?

Go see.

Enjoy.







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Sunday 17 April 2016

IN PRAISE OF DUBLIN REVIEW OF BOOKS



What is it that New York, London and Dublin have in common? They all produce a literary magazine that reviews books. Paris has one too, but it does something different, featuring fiction more than reviews. Sydney set one up in 2013. Other cities have such magazines and this selection has a very occidental orientation and a focus on English language books. All have on-line versions and some come in physical forms. They're all 'good' in the sense that you'll find plenty of readable material in them.


By way of illustration for drb.ie, the Dublin one, there's a long essay by Tom Hennigan, writing from South America, on the opinion writer in The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole,

http://www.drb.ie/essays/the-analyst-as-eeyore

Tom Hennigan's essay is not simply a biography or a style criticism of the writing of Fintan O'Toole. It's also a sweep through global capitalism; the role of the intellectual in Ireland and beyond; the challenges of modernity; the notion that there are some ideas that are progressive and others that are not and the question as to why we citizens don't pick the apparently 'progressive' ones. Maybe because writers like Fintan O'Toole tell us we should and make us feel that we're thick if we don't.


When Tom Hennigan uses the word 'power' in his excellent essay, it has the sense of being a given, as if he's describing something pre-ordained, rather than something generated everyday in contested engagements by people aggregated in hierarchies of military, business (often the same thing), religious, legal and cultural institutions, which encompass the bulk of citizens, most of whom have no impact on the activities of the hierarchical institutions. It's an old macro/micro matter. And a POWER thing.


So are drb.ie, and all the other such reviews, simply google for monoglot English-speaking chaise-lounge users? It depends on whether you think books, in physical or digital forms, remain places to go to when looking for knowledge, data, information and, occasionally, wisdom. At least they're clear that the knowledge presented is opinion and subjective.


The New York Review of Books (nybooks.com ) is the big one globally. And it knows it.


What has made The New York Review of Books successful, according to The New York Times, is its “stubborn refusal to treat books, or the theatre and movies, for that matter, as categories of entertainment to be indulged in when the working day is done.”


And, from the chaise lounge image of idle old-timey leisure, it's a short step to intellectual snobbery, readily taken by nybooks.com which was set up to be a review


in which the most interesting and qualified minds of our time (says who?) would discuss current books and issues in depth.


and


a literary and critical journal based on the assumption that the discussion of important books (eh?) was itself an indispensable literary activity.


The other 'big' one is lrb.co.uk, coming out of London, both on-line and in physical form at a hefty subscription cost (an appeal to Santa and other benefactors may be required). The whiff of intellectual snobbery can rise heartily from this particular chaise-lounge when they write about themselves


Since 1979, the London Review of Books has stood up for the tradition of the literary and intellectual essay in English.


And


A typical issue moves through political commentary to science or ancient history by way of literary criticism and social anthropology. So, for example, an issue can open with a piece on the rhetoric of war, move on to reassessing the reputation of Pythagoras, follow that with articles on the situation in Iraq, the 19th-century super-rich, Nabokov’s unpublished novel, how saints got to be saints, the life and work of William Empson, and an assessment of the poetry of Alice Oswald.


Every reader is allowed a minimum of two who?s with the above paragraph.


Perhaps snobbery, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and snobs are best met with the rejoinder f- - k 'em. On we get with the interest in literature and the search for knowledge via google, the telly, other people and books, as reviewed in drb.ie and elsewhere.


In drb.ie you'll find long-form essays and shorter reviews of newly published books; blog entries ranging over a number of fields and news of events and literature-related matters. The editors say their ambition is


to promote analysis and ideas by reflecting on international and Irish themes and, where appropriate, on their interaction.


And all free to an on-line subscriber. 
drb.ie? Highly recommended.


others?




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