Tuesday 29 December 2020

Reading The Voice is a Leaky Vessel


A friend sent me a Jan Carson essay; The Voice is a Leaky Vessel. She focusses the essay on ‘the first person’. At the end of the essay, she says she’s never going to master that voice, because she herself is a leaky writer. The metaphor gets strained to within an inch of its life.

I enjoyed Jan Carson’s essay. It got me thinking. And what could be better than that?

I was about three pages in when it struck me that Jan Carson and I have different understandings of what fiction is. I rest on the definition in my Chambers dictionary: fiction is an invented or false story; to form or fashion; with origins in the word Italian fingere (to feign); it is a novel or storytelling as a branch of literature.” 

I make the work up, as per the Chambers’ definition. I use the formula

experience+imagination=story.

Selecting the voice to write in is part of the feint. 

The opening line of the novel Tristam Shandy introduces, in the “I” voice, a character who is not the writer, Laurence Sterne, though Sterne’s own reading, life and times inform the character and the novel, which are imagined grandly. And that was in 1759.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.”

The choice of voice, I suggest, is one of the many choices a writer makes when setting out. I’ve just finished Sue Divin’s new book, Guard Your Heart. It is written in two “I” voices. There’s nothing leaky about Sue!

I was three or four pages into Jan Carson’s essay, when the sense grew that she and I have different understandings of the word empathy. I went back to my Chambers: empathy is the power of entering into another’s personality and imaginatively expressing his or her experiences. 

The key words there, for me, are ‘personality’, which does not mean ‘person’, and ‘imaginatively’. The word ‘solidarity’ kept coming to mind and I was delighted to find it bolstering Jan Carson’s arguments as the essay drew to a close. Though she’s hesitant about it, I was pleased to read that

In short, I can practice solidarity without trying to make another’s personal experience all about me.”

And there’s the rub. I found the essay all about "me” rather than all about “Empathy and the first-person narrative in the era of Covid-19”. I sense this is one of the challenges of writing a personal essay, where the writer’s practice, their person and their world, notably how they manage to survive in the world, are the material of the essay.

Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, uses the notion of re-description as a way for writers to make solidarity manifest in the world.

Her description of what she is doing when she looks for a better final vocabulary than the one she is currently using is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversity and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedent present. She thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as the fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria.”

Might such thoughts assist writers such as myself and Jan Carson as we gather voices, ideas, structures, language, characters and more, to caulk our works, our vessels of solidarity, and keep them from leaking and sinking?


The Voice is a Leaky Vessel; Jan Carson; Little Atom, 27.12.2020

http://littleatoms.com/voice-leaky-vessel?fbclid=IwAR02H61JnIdsjezN0Yb8gajf7l7MHDZrbv6gaEhqSxLOW4Oyyo4j41fvqro

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Richard Rorty; Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1989

Guard Your Heart; Sue Divin; Macmillan Children’s Books; London, 2020 


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Wednesday 30 September 2020

READING WAR AND PEACE BY LEO TOLSTOY: LOCKDOWN READING


Arguably the perfect read for a period of self-isolation, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is a lengthy and, at times, absorbing book, for which the reader needs to have a sound stomach in order to digest the shenanigans of aristocrats domestically, in political and civil society and in war. It’s like Downtown Abbey crossed with Apocalypse Now, on speed. 

Tentative comparisons may be made between the early 19th century, when imperial armies wreaked havoc across Europe, going west to east, then east to west, and early 21st century, when today’s imperial armies ravage eastern and southern regions of the planet. However, War and Peace is an historical novel, while offering insights into social and political processes today. Readers may consider it offers insights into human relationships and behaviour, but this reader is not convinced.

The best bits, in this reader’s opinion, are Books Ten and Eleven, including the run-up to the grotesque Battle of Borodino, as well as the aftermath. The section on the departure of the French forces from Moscow is striking, in particular the treatment of prisoners of war and the role of guerrilla parties of Cossack horsemen, also presented in Books Fourteen and Fifteen. 

The First and Second Epilogues are very interesting. They contain the kernel of Tolstoy’s thinking on history and power, as well as some neat narrative tidying up, mainly by getting aristocrats married off in readiness for the new-normal of the post-war period.

The worst bits, in this readers’ opinion, are in Books One and Two, where a slew of aristocratic characters is presented, in a flurry of soiréesballs and happy jaunts to country estates. This reader struggled at that point, finding the ‘bold boy’ antics and jolly japes of young men increasingly tiresome, in particular around a duel and a gambling loss of 43, 000 rubles in Book Four.

If it was a war film, a viewer might ask ‘why are we watching all this?’, while accepting that some set-up is necessary before getting the core story underway, with the invasion from the west in 1812. The French and Russian emperors, Napoleon and Alexander, preside over the story, with aristocrats and commoners all across Europe in their thrall. Tolstoy, as a questioning Russian patriot, treats the Russian Emperor better than he treats the French, though he comes down hard, at various points, on the view of history as the works of ‘great men’.

There are a number of terrific images and scenes involving bees, inserted as parables. In Book Eleven Chapter Eleven, Moscow is described as a hive without a queen, with no life in it. Writing about historical processes in the First Epilogue, Tolstoy describes the proliferation of causes and effects in the actions of a bee to illustrate his theory of history as a multiplicity of interconnections and events beyond human comprehension. 

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilises the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic characters and nations. 

Rising above Napoleon and Alexander is God, ever present, which is where Tolstoy locates the ultimate purpose that is beyond our comprehension. At a number of points Tolstoy asks why the immolations of war exist and why ordinary men leave their homes, farms, cities and towns to murder one another? He doesn’t supply answers. And his question remains before us today. 

The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death amazed Pierre. 

"They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?" And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozhaysk hill, the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind. 

This Pierre, the central character of the novel, is the illegitimate son of Count Bezúkhov. He inherits great wealthy in one of a number of twists Fate plays on the central characters, enabling them to move through and often prosper in the novel. Inheriting wealth and securing a fortune by marriage frequently appear as methods of personal advancement. 

Pierre Bezúkhov seems to amble through the novel, trying out his new wealth, then ignoring it, while spending time as a voyeur at the Battle of Borodino, then enduring deprivations as a prisoner of war. He finally marries Natasha Rostóva, thereby creating an amiable family life on his estates. If the novel has a through line, it is strung along by Pierre, who embraces Freemasonry, portrayed as a stage in his moral and spiritual development, civic politics, public service, and the pleasures of being a notable land and serf-owner. He feels destined to assassinate Napoleon, whom he earlier admired, but doesn’t go about it with any degree of commitment. It would be reasonable to label him a wealthy dilettante.

Pierre is the character who mostly clearly resembles Tolstoy himself, in attitudes and behaviour. He presents an earnest benevolence in his treatment of his serfs, which foreshadows the release of serfs from servitude in Russia in the 1860s, at about the same time as slavery was abolished in the U.S.A.. This relationship is most clearly seen in scenes with Karatáev, a peasant-soldier who endured imprisonment after the overthrow of Moscow by French forces. Pierre admires him in a patronising and paternalistic manner, typical of the benign feudal lord Tolstoy aspired to be. 

Every word and action of his (Karatáev)was the manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.

To his credit, Tolstoy despises the elevation of the ‘great’, whether it is a man or a nation, throughout the novel. Though he disdains the ‘great man’ view of history, he places Kutúzov, the leader of the Russian forces at Borodino and during and after the invasion of Moscow, as the key figure, the one person who soared above the intrigues of the military staff to persist with his own purpose, which was to drive the French forces from Russian soil. The widely-held view that the Russian winter destroyed the French forces is expanded to include the destruction of Russian forces, with thousands of men from a number of European countries, dying in the east to west surge. Tolstoy supports Kutúzov’s decision to cease the harrying of French troops at Vilna (modern day Vilnius, in Lithuania), though many military leaders and the Russian emperor wished to carry on to Paris. But Kutúzov decided against it, citing the burden of prisoners of war held by both armies and the decimation of both forces as reasons not to push further west.

Tolstoy hails Kutúzov as the military hero of the novel because of the common touch of his patriotism.

The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the events then occurring lay in the national feeling which he possessed in full purity and strength. 

Kutúzov’s speech to assembled Russian forces in Book Fifteen Chapter Three at the beginning of the battle of Krasnoé, as the horrific military engagements were drawing to close, is dramatic and chilling. He points to the French prisoners and seems to offer compassion.

Worse off than our poorest beggars. While they were strong we didn't spare ourselves, but now we may even pity them. They are human beings too. Isn't it so, lads? 

He ends the speech by dispatching the prisoners to oblivion

But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody bastards!" he cried, suddenly lifting his head. 

Thus he draws war and peace together into the bitterest of human experiences. The summary treatment of prisoners by both armies is a telling theme in the book.

From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that a larger guard had been allotted to that baggage train than to the prisoners, and that one of their comrades, a German soldier, had been shot by the marshal's own order because a silver spoon belonging to the marshal had been found in his possession. The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three hundred and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a hundred now remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort than even the cavalry saddles or Junot's baggage. They understood that the saddles and Junot's spoon might be of some use, but that cold and hungry soldiers should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who froze and lagged behind on the road (in which case the order was to shoot them) was not merely incomprehensible but revolting.

The novel graphically illustrates the ability of imperial force to galvanise and transform men (and, in modern times, more and more women. China has recently announced the ‘passing out’ of its first batch of female fighter pilots.) into beasts of burden, submissive robots under the power of officers, often aristocratic or upper class, to commit horrors of violence and killing that fly in the face of the religious injunctions that underpin their societies. It makes depressing reading.

On reflection, what Tolstoy says in his mini-essays and in the two epilogues is more interesting than the narrative in the novel. Certainly it more clearly states and illustrates his themes, whereas the narrative sections and the ‘journeys’ of the principle characters are no more than ‘going along’ with events, private and public, as if matters were happening to them, rather than being determined by them. Though Pierre Bezúkhov has some qualms, he supports the war effort from the Russian side, even if his own efforts, which some readers may consider to be heroic, could also be considered as self-indulgent and feeble. Towards the end, he skirts the edges of liberalising impulses emerging in St. Petersburg, which later contribute to the Decembrist Revolt by army officers appalled by the brutal experiences of peasant soldiers in the wars against the French. 

No character dissents from the thrust of events, though perhaps that is the truth of a society only slowly emerging from the grip of imperialism and feudalism, an awakening which erupted in the violent revolutionary years of the early 20th century. 

The novel comes to an end in Book Fifteen, with only narrative tidying up amidst mini-essays on the history and practice of war. The Second Epilogue presents Tolstoy’s thinking on ‘power’ and ‘force’ which he sees as underpinning historical views of the events in the novel. He is cynical towards leaders, because he believes that history is not produced by ‘great men’. He sees history as the outcome of millions of individual chains of cause and effect, often too small to be analysed fully. He considers that people, including emperors, are caught in chains of circumstance, incomprehensible to them. He removes agency from people and rests it with ineffable entities such as ‘love’, a very powerful human emotion and ‘God’, a very powerful human spiritual urge. This absence of agency in the sweep of history limits the capacity for dissent in the characters.

As you might expect in a novel published in 1869 and set largely among military aristocrats, roles for women are meagre. Princess Hélene Kurágina causes a stir by her philandering and comes to a sorry end, in a sort of unrighteous reflection of the moral strivings of Pierre Bezúkhov, with whom she shared a loveless marriage of convenience. Countess Natasha Rostóva first appears as enchanting and talented, but by the end she is matronly and plain. No woman is presented as having an inner life beyond meditations on survival, love, marriage and child-care. Their choices appear to be hard-labour and servitude or idleness.

A striking feature of the novel is the degree of intimate social and cultural relations existing between aristocratic Russians and aristocratic French people. Many wealthy Russian households speak French on a daily basis and only speak Russian to domestic and land-working serfs. There are a number of French tutors, companions, musicians and aristocrats scattered through the novel. This adds to the reader’s sense that the early 19th century wars in Europe, and the devastation wrought in human life and economic well-being, were in part instigated by the outworking of power struggles and personal antipathies between French and Russian aristocrats. Ironically similar spats between aristocratic cousins contributed to the immolations visited on Europe in the early 20th century. 

There are hunt scenes in Book Seven which pointedly set the scene for the violence of battles to come. They also show the relationships between the social classes. When we meet Daniel and Uvarka, huntsman and serf, ready to take Count Nicholas Rostóv wolf and fox hunting on his estate, the men are presented as simple beasts, out of sorts in the grand house of their master, better suited to the yard, the fields and the forests.

Five minutes later Daniel and Uvarka were standing in Nicholas' big study. Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the master's apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, out into the open under the sky once more. 

During the drive from east to west, the French forces were harassed in guerrilla actions by Russian forces, most notably by Cossacks, from independent, self-governing groups on the banks of the Don and Dnieper rivers. They appear as expert horsemen in support roles to officers and are shown in a poor light for their acts of plundering, which were no doubt widespread among all elements of both armies. 

Some Cossacks on the prowl for booty fell in with the Emperor and very nearly captured him. If the Cossacks did not capture Napoleon then, what saved him was the very thing that was destroying the French army, the booty on which the Cossacks fell. Here as at Tarutino they went after plunder, leaving the men. Disregarding Napoleon they rushed after the plunder and Napoleon managed to escape.

Does the book make good ‘lockdown reading’? This reader thinks it does, not simply because it is a classic in the canon of world literature; Virginia Woolf is quoted as saying that ‘There is hardly any subject of human experience that is left out of War and Peace’. It is long enough to sustain the reader through a lengthy and tiresome period of self-isolation. The reader may find the early sections difficult to unravel, with the slew of characters brought on stage and the fascinating variety of Russian names in their three part form: first name, patronymic and surname. Bear with it, because by Book Three the domestic and social whirl gain pace and lead to the Battle of Austerlitz, in 1805, where 17, 000 people were killed and over 20, 000 taken prisoner and marked the lift-off of early 19th century imperial wars in Europe and across the globe.

By way of recommendations for further big-book Lockdown Reading, readers could try Middlemarch by Mary Anne Evans aka George Eliot, which is more about ‘peace’ than ‘war’ and is terrific – the last paragraph is worth a read at any time. 

… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville is also terrific. It is more about war than peace, this time the war against nature by a rapacious whale-oil business. It would make good lockdown reading. And for not-so-big war books, there’s none better than The Sorrow Of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh and All quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller stands high and alone among war satires. 

Which leads to a controversial note upon which to end: is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy a humourless paean to a lost imperial age, where devastation, death and destruction were simply part of an incomprehensible given order? 


War and Peace, novel, Leo Tolstoy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1942


War and Peace, film, King Vidor, Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica, Rome,1956

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgC38YZzQ-c

Catch 22, tv miniseries, George Clooney et al., Hulu, Santa Monica, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46wZVmKM-es



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Monday 31 August 2020

NORMAL PEOPLE SPIN-OFF WELL OVER PAR


The hit series Normal People is the putative source of the political spin-off New-Normal People, aka Golfgate, the pilot episode of which left viewers reaching for their remote controls, with a view to tossing them as hard as they could up the corridors of power. Aimed at the 55-plus demographic and billed as a growing-of-age, rather than a coming-of-age, story, New-Normal People missed the public fairway by a mile.

One acerbic viewer, in Kilrossanty, noted:

Even the lame name gives it away, making one word out of new and normal. Who does that anymore? It’s a growing-of-rage story, if you ask me.”

And, in fairness, we did.

The plot is straightforward. A golf-society gathering of over 80 persons, largely white Irish males, devolves into a domino-cascade of dodging, apologising and resigning, culminating in the resignation of the star, Phil Hogan, who previously featured in a major series in Brussels, known as the European Commission.

Despite strenuous efforts by serious influencers (in the old-fashioned sense of the word), Big Phil went, a necessary sacrifice if the organisation behind the series was to have any hope of surviving.

Head Executive at the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyden reportedly said:

No one player is bigger than the series. And if the viewers don’t like a player, that player is gone, having salvaged all their pensions, of course.”

Subtitled ‘Golf-gate, a drama of intrigue, fine dining and access to boys’ club entitlements’, many viewers felt it was even more boring than watching golf itself.

Another confounded viewer, from Glenamaddy, said:

In golf, the ball is in play most of the time. These eejits spent most of the pilot in the dining room and then made a bolt for the rough to hide themselves.”

She was not alone in feeling let down at not seeing a golf club swung in anger at any stage. Some doubt was expressed whether participants actually had golf clubs, with the claim that they swung no more iron than the hotel cutlery and that their caddies pulled nothing more weighty than pints of stout.

Complaints that the pilot featured no one from ethnic minority communities and included very few ‘ladies’, a term for ‘women’ rapidly dropping into dis-use among fair-minded people, have been noted by executives. They vow to take the complaints on board and when the waters around the vessel of state are calm once more to toss them into the briny.

The negative reaction to the pilot led one executive to avow that he was not present himself and that he advised from the very outset against using sponsorship from the digital, hi-tech, hedge-fund, big-pharma, social media and logistics conglomerate, HUGH BRIS, run by a soi-disant magnate and philanthropist of the same name.

The executive said:

Imagine if we’d gone ahead with that deal and let those sharks put their day-glo tee-shirts, with the company logo emblazoned on the front, on all our participants.”

This revelation drew the following comment from an irate viewer in Lettermacaward.

“That word was well-plastered all over their faces anyway. It would have been redundant on a tee-shirt. Why weren’t they wearing masks anyway? Could they not get enough gilt for to do the words ‘arrogant gobshite’ on them?”

Executives have been chastened to discover that viewers have no time for ‘goldfish bowl’ events, especially when the goldfish on view are the power-elite of the country. Or think they are. Or wish they were. 

A clutch of clubbable beef-or-salmon scoffing and pints-and-brandy swilling middle-aged men does not make good viewing any more. If it ever did, a gobsmacked viewer from Bettyville wondered.

Another executive, who begged not to be named, said:

We thought a simple fare of deals and devilled prawns would be lapped up by middle-aged, middle-class, middlin'-intelligence, middle Ireland. We thought a gathering of the political and power elites of the country with golf-clubs in tow, more as dressing than as usable props, would be a hole-in-one. We found that, for all their self-vaunted intelligence, none of the 80 plus participants had the wit to see that this wasn’t a goer. I’m not surprised a number of them fell – or were pushed – on to their putative nine irons.”

A full series is expected to run over the winter, including a set of Christmas specials in expensive Dublin restaurants and Gentlemen’s (sic!) clubs. 






Feature article on Phil Hogan, by Pat Leahy in The Irish Times; 29.8.2020

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/the-rise-and-fall-of-phil-hogan-how-his-hard-work-was-undone-by-arrogance-1.4341077

Normal People; TV series, based on a novel; ELEMENT PICTURES/BBC 3/HULU; 2020

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9059760/?ref_=vp_back



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Thursday 30 July 2020

THEATRE PRACTICE: an interview with dramatist and novelist Dave Duggan



Interview by Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill, for his Phd thesis in drama. April 2019
Part-edited extracts, with permission.

Prompts from interview questions in italics

… authorship and advocacy …

Eh all the work I make be it theatre or fiction is...are and acts is a good word ‘cause they are actions, they are conscious, I get up and consciously say I’m going to make a play, consciously write a novel, I’m going to write something so they’re actions and I would say they’re acts of art so the primary impulse for me is to make art in everything and so a consequence of that is the finished objects to use that as a finished processes and objects are affirmably art practices, art objects, art processes so the people when I engage with professional actors, designers, musicians and so on or non-professional actors or people who don’t see themselves involved in say theatre at all, they...the orientation I am bringing to our engagement is one of an art practitioner. So they are meeting an artist so if somebody meets me I’m not a social engineer, I’m not a politician, I’m not a community worker, community development worker, I’m an artist so I make art so then the question you say well what’s that Dave, well I make things up, firstly they’re fiction and I think that’s important to me. They are unashamedly acts of fiction, they tend to be in the main poeticised rather than realistic, they are acts of imagining and where words like beauty and order are the primary words. So yea, so in a roundabout way coming back to your question are they acts of advocacy, yes, more primary thing they’re advocating is art. The primacy and importance of art in the world and everything you set in a context, nothing is neutral, people will say ah it’s just a story or it’s just a play, they are affirming the current discourses, current world order so the people who say they are neutral or kind of just telling a story they are consciously or unconsciously affirming the current order. In my case the acts of art are advocating the possibility of other world orders, ones that would move us closer to greater equality, greater justice among peoples and considerably less violence. So they advocate as art and in those directions. 

fiction and truth … 

Yea, specifically in relation to an earlier remark you made the play Scenes from an Inquiry an individual came to me from one of the Bloody Sunday families and said that they found the representation in the play which is an art object, doesn’t tell the story of the occurrences, it’s represented in a poeticised form and he said to me...in fact he said it to me since in a slightly different way is that he found them more truthful than the films and two films are terrific, he wasn’t decrying the films, in fact he was praising the films but he found he got closer to a sense of the truth of what occurred in the Saville Inquiry through the play and thus through the events of Bloody Sunday and the family experiences of it. He wasn’t setting one up against another you know, the piece of documentary theatre that was made and films they rely on forms of realism that the play of mine that you’re talking about Scenes from an Inquiry is consciously poetic and non-realistic. Now that doesn’t please everybody. Pleased the family a great deal and others and intuition and experience I’ve had around it is that people might find it difficult to see the thing front on are more likely to be seduced, and I use the word advisedly, to come and see an art piece which is not snottery but is beautiful and engaging and thus can have access to difficult things that they may otherwise fend off or be defensive around. It wouldn’t shy away the plays in the peace process plays, the play Denizen specifically to play Scenes from an Inquiry, you don’t hide away from things and the image I use around it is it’s very difficult to look at the sun but you can look at the moon and that’s a way of looking at the sun.

… different ways of talking … … poetic/realistic … 

Yea I mean all of that’s very true and accurate in your observation Donall. The...my experience of going to the Saville Inquiry...taking a step sideways in a parallel existence I have historically going back a long time a practice in what’s known as group work, conflict resolution through group work practices so I would have worked with support of Bloody Sunday families very privately, very quietly, very off the radar at various times during their own processes particularly as they approached their campaign so in that spirit of association I would have attended the Inquiry on a number of occasions and the events in the Guildhall were ritualised in such a high art, high theatrical fashion that it spoke of theatre to me you know. Here we were the empire had arrived in Londonderry from London, the kit that they had had never been seen in Derry before, the equipment they had, it was extraordinary televisual computer communications equipment, the cabling that went it, it’s the kind of thing that interests me. I walk around and look at the cables going into the room and think that’s fucking money that’s gone in there, big money. One of the head Counsels was referred to as Two Brains Clarke, he’s a very smart 10.51 in the room so the empire has turned up and all the chariots, all the kit has turned up and the citizenry is reeled out in front of them and asked very direct questions about events that happened a long time ago and we’re effectively told answer yes, answer no in the performative manner of a Trial. Now it was not offered as a Trial, it was...it was said to be wasn’t supposed to be adversarial but the actual form, the human dynamic form, the actors, these are of interest to me in...as theatre practitioner, spoke to me and that the voices....sorry the capacities of that ritual weren’t adequate to the event hence I was drawn to the play, I’m suggesting...not suggesting that my play is adequate to the matter but it is another matter and I felt that it required another matter...another address to use that language. To come back to your theme of advocacy, the play is primarily advocating art, beauty and order as an imaginaire as vital forces in the resolution of matters in our society particularly matters of great hurt and historical hurt, people keep saying we need the facts. I’ve always taken a view is that facts can be disputed and fought about, fictions can be enjoyed and shared and if people are going to spend a whole lot of time beating themselves up about the facts, well actually no that gunshot came from the left window, no it was the right window and the window is people get so bogged down into that then what happens my own sense is that power in the world remains unscathed you know. At the minute I’m...I live in the UK, I pay UK taxes, my taxes are paying armament companies to bomb the living shit out of poor people in Yemen. Doesn’t matter whether that bomb comes from the left, comes from the right, it fell on a Tuesday, it fells on a Wednesday, still my money is paying for that and it’s devastating lives but that’s a matter that galvanises me as an artist so when such a matter comes to my city then I’m likely to respond artistically. 

authorship … 

Yea, yea, it is influenced by the matter shall we say or the thing but I think the key point to make Donall is that me as I write the plays, these are solely authored by me, nobody else has any input, responsibility, ownership whatever words you want to use, authorship is solely mine, I didn’t write this with somebody, for somebody, because somebody, I wrote it for me and I tried to make it present in the world.

authorship … … ownership … 

Yea well the rationale for that for me is it’s mine. If it’s a fuck up, it’s my fuck up. It’s not the people on the stage, it’s not the people in the community who assisted, it’s mine. I put two actors on the stage saying what could be in various plays controversial matters, they have responsibility for their performance and their quality of their actions and so on but if somebody starts saying that’s wrong they then say he wrote it and I go let’s go, do you want to chat about that so authorship out of this is solely mine, yea, so I don’t...I don’t go and gather people’s stories, I don’t do research, I live in the world, I listen to the radio, I read the paper, I talk to mates, I hang out and then I go home and make it up. 

songs … 

Those are mostly written yea. Well they’ll be a mix of...the play Waiting ends with The Parting Glass, it’s a very famous Scots/Irish kind of song but lots of them are written. The rationale or the you know the authorial reasons for that is I like singing, my mother was a good singer, singing songs in the house would have been a feature, there’s a wedding coming up in our...my daughter’s wedding, I know it will be over in Manchester 3 o’clock in the morning there’ll be a crowd of paddies sitting singing, my sisters will be...so there’s that I think that informs it. Technically in the plays audiences warm to them, it also a place when a song can kind of achieve an emotional depth that straightforward dialogue may not and you need to be careful to set up...for me you need to be careful to set up that this is not realism, but suddenly somebody over there starts singing but the conventions are usually such that anybody watching the plays will know you know this isn’t...we’re not really in a hotel room or we’re not really in a courtroom or we’re not really in a trench or wherever, we’re in a play and hence the notion...sorry the notion of song is viable artistically again yea. 

realistic and expressionistic …

And they may...that’s a very accurate description again and they may...it may or may not work for somebody so they may think that’s cat there, he wouldn’t say that or she wouldn’t sing that or say that and another person might be quite comfortable and engage with that. I think the key thing for me when people say why did you say that Dave, you wouldn’t say that in real life, I say it’s not real life, it’s a play, you know well what’s in a play. Look he’s got makeup on, look there’s lights up there you know, look it’s a black box, that’s not a kitchen, that’s not a courtroom, that’s a theatre and I have a highly... a heightened sense of theatricality you know, now possibly overly so in the sense that you and I are talking here and there’s some people there and there’s some people down there and I’m...I’ve a mind that we’re all in a play so that’s a bit OTT now you know but...but certainly in the work yea so there’s a conscious...and just take a step slightly sideways from the play Scenes from an Inquiry but to the play Denizen, yea the...the setting of that is such that what you might call the entrails of the theatre work around the stage so when you sit down we’re in a courthouse and when you sit down you can see the technicians who are running the lights, they’re all sitting there and they’re in courtroom technician garb and the guards who are guarding the prisoner they’re in the same garb as the technicians so the props manager is in prison guard uniform and so on so I like that idea that not pretending that we’re not in a play you know, let’s show the entrails of the thing

entrails of the thing … … transparency … 

And it’s not a...it’s not a problem you know and it’s not saying it’s better than any other way, it’s just a particular feature yea. I happened to be in Antibes in France last week and I saw a play in a small theatre in Antibes, seven, nine performers on stage all in blacks, put on bits of costume, did work and they moved furniture and props and so on and it was definitely all elegantly performed as part of the event. They spoke to each other off you know, they passed each other bottles of water and step forward you know so the theatricality of the thing is another aspect of authorship I would suggest. How that connected with advocacy you know people might say Dave that’s not beautiful you know and or that’s kind of and for me I kind of think it is. The other thing you might connect it with transparency you know, this is not hidden, this is in front of you, there isn’t somebody upstairs pulling levers you know, you can see they are stripped down, they are bare, they’re in front of you.

funding1… 

Well let’s again take the play Denizen right, that came about during the city of culture. One of the aims of the city of culture 2013 was to address matters that are difficult to address so some of the people involved said Dave a play, I go yea. I want to write about dissident republicans. They kind of went Jesus and I went uh it’s a...aim 3 of the thing you know we want to celebrate, we want to enjoy you know but there was...and I said I’ll do that and to be blunt I said show me the money ‘cause I knew UK city of culture pile of money flying around relative to what’s before and after and certainly what’s come after pretty grim. So to their credit some of their people involved did tackle that and I wrote a poetic play in which the last militant dissident republican breaks the pike and throws it down. Part of that is advocacy saying back to back Picasso kind of line of something can be imagined it can be real so if it can be imagined on a play and can be visually represented, artistically, it might happen. So that’s part of an answer to your question, I would be mindful of opportunities for funding but they would have to be consistent with things that I want to do so for instance there’s been a number of people approached me over the years and said Dave would you write a play about da da da da da because there’s money for it and I say that doesn’t really catch me. I have a number of friends and I have a number of quite striking health challenges so people say Dave you know you could write something about that and I go not really you know. Enjoy plays for children or teenagers, adults, all these plays are for adults so...so I am mindful of the way the world works I’m being wise but I’m...the work is not determined by it yea. 

funding 2… 

Well I...the bulk...well let’s put it this way, the main streams of funding that I have found available to work for me has been the Arts Council so the aims of the Arts Council are to make art, right, now it’s written in a more complex way than but I say I’m going to make art, look, why wouldn’t you fund it, it’s art and I’ve had the good fortune over the past 20, 25, 30 years to make successful, to use that language, art. So I have avoided funding such as Peace 1, Peace 2, Peace 3. I’ve avoided those, one reason is there are huge administrative burdens and they want to employ people in jobs, I don’t want a job, I want to make work so that would be it so the opportunity lies within in the main the Arts Council but also the City Council has been very supportive under its arts umbrella funding as it were and you know that has varied over the years so yea and also the work has tended to be in scale, Denizen was a fairly big thing but in the main it’s tended to be what would be known as small to medium work so not huge amounts of money. For instance, I made in the UK City of Culture here 2013 a piece that the UK City of Culture people didn’t fund and I got money from the Arts Council in association with Bogside Brandywell Community Association. I made a piece of theatre in McLaughlin’s hardware shop, in the Yea, yea just the 100 anni...I was shocked to hear that nobody was marking the 100th anniversary of this magnificent local business in the UK’s City of Culture.

Yea, in any other city it would be held up as...it would be on the front of tourist brochures so now they’re very humble and modest people, three brothers currently in it. Anyway so I made a piece there and Arts Council supported that. 

Well I think it’s an actuality for me. Go back to your other remark about funding just to take a point is my first play in The Shopper and the Boy, I wrote that, got some money from the City Council, Pat Byrne joined it as an actor and we toured locally. The joke I make is we went to the states, Shantallow Estate, New Buildings Estate, Nelson Drive Estate you know so we toured... we toured the states and then off the back of that we founded the company. Now go back to your note about funding and limiting and opportunity, at that time I had young kids, I needed steady work. Steady work, not just play and then another play and another so forming the company served two functions, one was it was a vehicle to write those seven plays and also once we got into being core funded by the Arts Council I had a monthly wage. We’d enough in partnership with my wife to raise two kids. Now when they’re reared, I was able to step away from that so there’s a kind of a mix of people say you know artists are flaky and waffly and...artists working are very good business people you know. 

making a living … 

Yea again an anecdote I quote, I don’t name the incident but I was at a meeting one time where shall we say in a period of my life when my public profile was very high in a small C celebrity kind of way, a budget was passed around, I was to be the writer for this thing that was emerging and a budget was passed around everything was scanned and the budget money for the director, money for actors, money for trucks, money for vans, money for blah blah blah, I couldn’t see a budget heading, right any questions and I put my hand up and said I just...I’m just looking at the budget here it looks great. I just don’t see a line for writer. There was an embarrassed silence in the room and...and the person chairing the meeting said aw ha I’m sure...I’m sure we’ll find something Dave, poor people involved were embarrassed but I’m sure we’ll find something Dave. I stood up and gently said see when you do, give me a shout, my kids need shoes this week and I walked out and the thing didn’t happen, not because I walked out but because they hadn’t really figured out what they were doing so...so that’s kind of part of authorship for me you know, I’m writing these things, if it suits you great if it doesn’t suit you fine. To go back to Denizen, at the time when Denizen mightn’t have happened it eventually the book...the text came out, Arts Council supported that, UK City of Culture supported a public reading, a rehearsed reading with the text and then various other people who did a full production in 2015 so I remember saying at various stages I said look if this doesn’t all come off don’t you worry, I’ll stand on the steps of the Guildhall and read it, don’t you know don’t sweat, don’t sweat this. Aw Dave we can’t get the money, no bother, just have another go, let’s have another go and if you don’t I’ll announce it, put it in the Journal, I’ll stand at the Guildhall and I’ll read it so there’s a kind of a, I don’t know what it is about but I just want to get assertion that we’re going to make it and if it doesn’t get made it’s alright.

… persistence … … business … 

Yea but it’ll happen in some way is the thing you know and the other thing is when I get into something like this and it gets tight as it does in rehearse for I’m a director, there’s actors, things get tight. I would...without being bolshy about it but I would make it clear I won’t leave...I won’t be leaving the room you know, I’ll be here, you can leave the room, you can whatever but I won’t be leaving the room, we’re doing this thing you know and if you leave the room that’s fine, no hard feelings or if you go we’ll go again you know so there’s a kind of a...I think I’m trying to deal fairly with people clearly. That goes back to something which is an area of complexity, may be relevant to you but it’s certainly to me around the advocacy aspect. I would be advocating – go back to your funding stuff - again at all times putting money in people’s hands so if we do something everybody gets paid. Professional actors get paid equity plus, non-professional actors would get if possible equity money, everybody’s who’s in it will get money put in their hand, cover for days off work whatever subject to budget so you know I don’t have a practice of going to people and say tell me your story and I’ll write a play, I say I’ll make it up is that any good to you? 

directors … 

Yea I think that’s a good question and there would be limitations to me doing it. I mean for instance the plays in the peace process, you referred to Denizen, I would not have welcomed anybody else directing any of them. It’s back to the thing I said earlier about I stand over it, somebody’s going to write a play about dissident militants, yea me, next. I wouldn’t ask anybody else and I’d also be naïvely immaturely fearful and I’d be blunt that they would fuck it up you know and so there’s lines in there which you don’t say that line then that line there doesn’t work so a director says I need to cut that for good reasons but those lines on page 3 are there so they...they salvage the lines on page 43 you know so those particular plays...other plays of mine I mean delighted to had other people direct so I would be open to that, somebody says write a play but Joe Bloggs or Mary Bloggs is going to direct it, fine, I’m open to that on the assumption that he or she’s good.

With the permission of Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill, July 2020.



Plays in a Peace Process, Dave Duggan, book, Guildhall Press, Derry, 2008
McLaughins’ 100, Dave Duggan, book, Guildhall Press, Derry, 2013 
Denizen, Dave Duggan, book, Guildhall Press, 2014