Long we’ve tossed on the open main…

Last year I wrote about the best way to read Patrick O’Brian’s Master & Commander books, but I’m just about to conclude a macro version of that advice.

I said then that the best way to read the Aubrey/Maturin saga aka Master & Commander was a chapter or two at a time, but spaced out with days between chapters so that the entire (usually) ten chapter novel takes at least two weeks. Only that way can one truly savour the flavour of each chapter, and O’Brian’s hilarious predisposition to writing chapters that deliberately ignore the preceding chapter’s cliff-hanger. I am now one chapter away from finishing Blue at the Mizzen, book 20 of the 20 books in the Master & Commander saga. Yes, O’Brian was working on book 21 when he died, but it’s unfinished and therefore un-canonical and I’ve still to reach a decision on whether I do want to gawk over the great man’s shoulder as he’s writing. For me, this represents home shore at last…

Book 18, The Yellow Admiral, gave a chill indication of how the series might end: the ships paid off, everyone thrown on half-leave, and no more war. And then Boney escaped exile and everyone was greatly relieved… But the shadowy existence of book 21 gives comfort, the characters continue to live on – Maturin will continue to ignore comfort to observe rare beasts, and Aubrey will continue lecturing on navigational mathematics. I first started reading O’Brian’s great epic in January 2004, in a tie-in film edition of books 1 and 10 with Russell Crowe emblazoned on the cover. I’d seen Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World in December 2003 after a disastrous cock-up involving tickets for the extended The Two Towers and been sufficiently intrigued to try my hand at the revered books which had been its source.

So starting in January 2004 and ending in December 2012 I have slowly worked through all 20 books in the series, including book 10 twice; having started with it as it was the alleged source of the plot of the film. Over that time I’ve revisited the film at least 5 times, and each time been struck anew by just how much of O’Brian Weir worked into the texture of the film. Dialogue appears from across the gamut of the series and character moments are equally widely sourced. Even deleted scenes on the DVD reveal a super-subtle allusion to the future addiction to laudanum of a character in the books. And of course the books have been equally coloured by the note-perfect renditions by Crowe and Bettany of Aubrey and Maturin, even if their physiques become increasingly unapt in print.

Saying goodbye to House after 8 years was emotional, but leaving behind O’Brian will be even more wrenching as more imaginative effort always goes into the act of reading than merely viewing. Three cheers for O’Brian – Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

An Arrow of a different colour

I root for shows to stay on the air, not least because so many shows I’ve loved (Cupid, Studio 60, Vengeance Unlimited) have been prematurely cancelled, but … I really hope Arrow gets scrapped soon.

There’s been a Smallville-sized gap in my world for a year now, and so Arrow you’d imagine would be right up my street. But it’s not, it’s really not; for many reasons, mostly to do with other programmes. Arrow is a show that seems to have been created by putting other hits in a blender, and then just running with whatever derivative gloop emerged. It would appear that the producers noticed that Revenge was popular last season and so figured they also could surf the zeitgeist and take down 99%ers every week, complete with Green Arrow drawing a line thru the name of the fat cat he’d successfully ruined; just like Emily’s crossing an X thru the face of the person in the group photo she’d destroyed at the end of early episodes of Revenge. Every time I see the Queen mansion in Arrow all I can think of is Lex Luthor’s mansion in Smallville. If it’s not actually the same exterior then it sure looks like it, and it’s just a bit distracting. Furthermore while Arrow fails to match the charm of early Smallville, it’s overdosing on the angst that soon blighted that show. 5 episodes in and Laurel Dinah Lance has already stated, for not particularly clear reasons, that she and Oliver Queen can never be together. Even though their character names make it blindingly obvious they will be, eventually. And so Clark and Lana nonsense begins anew…

But these aren’t even the most aggravating or troubling derivative elements of Arrow. The constant flashbacks, to Oliver Queen’s 5 years on a remote island where he became Green Arrow, complete with meaningful life lessons from a cryptically wise Chinese Arrow screamed LOST and that was before The Others showed up… It was bad enough having to endure a flashback vignette every week that related to the main story, but now there are well-organised and well-resourced military personnel on an island where shipwrecked survivors are hunting animals for food. These Others are led by a man with staring eyes, just like Ben Linus, who is the Big Bad of the show, not least because he has sadistic torturer Deathstroke at his disposal. And then for the final kicker it’s revealed that the Mandarin name for the island means … Purgatory. Just, no… we don’t need more LOST meanderings, six years of pointless nonsense was enough. And then there’s the Nolan riffing. In the first episode Oliver was seen at a grinder getting his weapons sharp, in a scene shot farcically like its model in Batman Begins where Bruce makes his first throwing Bats. But then a shadowed Oliver goes on to growl to Laurel about he can give her leverage for a case, just like Batman growled as he gave his lawyer love interest Rachel leverage on Judge Faden. That’d be okay if perhaps Arrow appreciated why Nolan’s Batman worked…

But Arrow doesn’t seem to have a clue as to how comic-book superheroes operate. When in the pilot Oliver Queen, out of costume, caught a criminal who’d kidnapped him and then broke his neck shouting “No one can know my secret!” it was an enormous shock, because it was such a stunning mis-step, and anti-Nolan to the nth degree despite all the borrowings from Nolan elsewhere. It was a return to the ethics or lack thereof of Tim Burton’s Batman who very deliberately murdered the Joker as well as carelessly offing God knows how many goons along the way. Green Arrow’s subsequent shooting of a corrupt tycoon with an arrow thru the hand was far nastier than Batman dropping Sal Maroni to break his ankles, because Nolan’s Batman was being forced to extremes by the Joker’s madness whereas that’s just how this Green Arrow rolls… And for all Green Arrow’s homicidal antics by the end of episode 4 he’s been arrested by the police for being Green Arrow. So his first murder was in vain… Only things get even better. You see, like The Joker, Loki and Silva – he planned on getting caught! He wanted them to lock him up in the MCU Skybase Churchill Bunker Queen mansion. Because, like The Dark Knight Rises, the important thing is not that Oliver Queen is Green Arrow but that there will always be a Green Arrow, no matter who’s under the hood…

Except, why should we care who is under the hood if he’s just a cold-blooded killer? Nolan’s Batman famously only has one rule – don’t kill people. Maim the hell out of them, by all means, but don’t kill them. Arrow seems to think it can lift huge chunks from Nolan’s Bat-verse and then also appropriate the industrial slaughter of Maggie Q’s Nikita, but Nikita comes from a dark place – that’s the character. She’s a drug addict who killed people before she got forced by the government to join a secret government agency and kill people before she went rogue and embarked on a new mission to kill bad people. Killing is an essential part of Nikita as a character, but not killing has always been an equally essential part of DC Comics’ superheroes as characters. David S Goyer noted that they very deliberately had Batman throw Joker off a building and then save him in The Dark Knight as a riposte to the end of Burton’s Batman because both he and Christopher Nolan felt that Batman killing Joker had been a terrible tonal mistake. And it was a mistake, just witness the brilliance of the scene that Batman then shares with the Joker dangling from a rope. There’s a mystical connection between those two characters that doesn’t allow for simple killing. Superman can’t simply knock off Lex Luthor, and it goes beyond the morality of the characters to a sense of epic grandeur. This isn’t just comic-book bilge incidentally, look at Albert Camus’ description in The Rebel of Spartacus seeking out his opposing number Crassus to die in single combat against him and him alone.

The amorality of the lead character who should be a straight arrow, as it were, is only one part of the problem though. Oliver Queen in Smallville was transparently a Batman substitute, but Justin Hartley’s performance as Oliver Queen/Green Arrow had a nonchalance entirely absent from Stephen Amell’s wooden earnestness in Arrow. Some of this may be due to the different functions of the character, Hartley was there for sparring with earnest Clark Kent whereas Amell as lead character to some degree is earnest Clark Kent. But Hartley’s Green Arrow had the same formative traumas in his past, and it didn’t swamp the character’s traditional sardonic nature, while Amell’s inert demeanour never allows him to convince as the party animal that makes Oliver Queen such close kin to Bruce Wayne. Nolan allowed us to see that public Bruce Wayne, private Bruce Wayne and Batman were three distinct personalities; and that private Bruce Wayne was a good man. But Arrow has failed to make private Oliver Queen much more likeable than public Oliver Queen. And this points to a bigger problem.

Thor and John Carter placed alongside Arrow seem to indicate that we are in the middle of a bona fide scriptwriting crisis. There’s a distinction between a rogue and a dick that appears to have been lost. Taylor Kitsch’s John Carter was deeply unlikeable as a hero, and the film was reduced to not only bafflingly introducing Bryan Cranston as a metaphorical cat to be saved, but then introducing an actual dog to be saved as well later, in a vain effort to get us to like Carter.  Thor meanwhile was entirely upended by the fact that Thor was a thoroughly unlikeable jerk who only became bearable in the last act of the film, which enabled the suave Tom Hiddleston as Loki to steal the entire movie as the cleverer brother forever cleaning up the messes of his petulant blowhard sibling. A classic rogue, like Han Solo, or even Ian Somerhalder’s Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries, is cocky, likeable, and from the perspective of the other characters entirely unreliable, even though the audience always has a sneaking suspicion that the bad boy will come through in the end no matter how many times he weasels out on doing the right thing along the way to serve his own agenda. But Thor, John Carter, and Arrow are sunk by heroes who aren’t remotely likeable. Arrow has dropped the Green to emphasise its edginess but it’s dropped its character’s resonance too…

I’m sticking with Arrow for now to see Seth Gabel aka Jeremy Darling from Dirty Sexy Money as Vertigo, but once Gabel leaves the show I won’t be far behind.

Graham Greene Festival 2012

I’m off to Graham Greene’s birthplace Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire (immortalised in his Kierkegaard-epigraphed first autobiography A Sort of Life) for the Graham Greene Festival 2012 which takes placethis weekend.

I’ve won the screenplay and fiction categories of this year’s creative writing awards, for my short film script ‘Sir Joshua’s Macaw’ and short story ‘For Whom H.R Tolls’ but this festival, which is only a half-hour train ride from London, is well worth the attention of any Greene fans in the Home Counties. The always interesting line up of talks and screenings this year notably includes Jack Gold introducing hissuspenseful 1988 Greene film The Tenth Man, and the book launch by Jon Wise and Mike Hill of their opus The Works of Graham Greene: A Reader’s Bibliography and Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2012, 416 pages), which is the first thoroughgoing bibliography of his work since 1979. As it not only covers the full dizzying gamut of his work across such diverse fields as fiction, poetry, drama, travel writing, autobiography, essays and journalism, but also includes his published letters, major interviews and film adaptations, as well as surveying unpublished works in his archives and offering an extensive commentary with an imposing index, this looks set to become the definitive reference work for academia.

Thursday 27 September

16.30 – 18.00 A Festival Event for Berkhamsted School’s Sixth Form
Old Hall, Berkhamsted School
Sixth-form event with Neil Sinyard speaking to English A-level students. This event includes the announcement of the titles for the GGBT Creative Writing Awards for 2013.

17.30 – 19.15 Social Gathering and Buffet Supper at The Gatsby
Two courses and a glass of wine; vegetarian alternative.
Please order on the Ticket Application Form and pay by Friday 21st September if you intend to be present.
The restaurant is under The Rex cinema on the High Street.
Cost: £15

19.30 – 21.45 Film Night at The Rex Cinema
Film: The Human Factor (1979)
115 mins; UK; Director: Otto Preminger. Starring Richard Attenborough, Nicol Williamson, John Gielgud, and Derek Jacobi. Classification: 15.
Introduced by Richard Combs
Cost: £8

Friday 28 September

Talks at the Town Hall, Berkhamsted

Morning Session

9.45 – 11.00 Researching Greene: PhD scholars discuss their work on Graham Greene. Contributors include Creina Mansfield, Martyn Sampson and Sarah Prescott

11.00 – 11.30 Break for tea and coffee

11.30 – 12.45 Professor Kevin Ruane
“The Hidden History of Graham Greene’s Vietnam war.”

Cost: £12.00

12.45 Break for Lunch

Afternoon Session

14.15 – 15.30 Professor François Gallix
“Greene, Spies and MI6″

15.30 Break for tea and coffee

16.00 – 17.30 Professor Adam Piette
“The Third Man, Underground Intelligence and the Freudian Cold War.”

Cost: £12.00

Evening Session: Civic Centre, Berkhamsted

19.30 – 22.00 Film: The Tenth Man (1988)

(100 minutes, UK; Director Jack Gold, starring Anthony Hopkins, Kristin Scott Thomas and Derek Jacobi)
Classification: PG
With an introduction by Jack Gold who will also lead a post-film discussion.

Cost: £10.00

Saturday 29 September

Talks and Events in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School

Morning Session

9.45 – 11.00 Ian Thomson
“Graham Greene in Tallin”

11.00 Break for tea and coffee

11.30 – 12.45 Dr Christopher Hull
“Sex, Drugs and Communism: Greene’s visits to Cuba”

Cost: £14

12.45. Break for Lunch

Afternoon Session

14.15 – 15.15 Professor Peter Evans
“Belgravia, Vienna, Havana: Carol Reed in Greeneland”

15.15 Break for tea and coffee

15.45 – 16.45 Screening: “Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene” (2012)

A UK Premier screening.
Introduced by Prof. Thomas O’Connor
This is the first American-produced documentary on Greene and includes interviews with scholars, writers, critics and spies. The film is narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, and the voice of Greene is provided by Bill Nighy.

Cost: £14

Early Evening Session

18.15 – 18.30 Book Launch
Dr Jon Wise and Mike Hill present The Works of Graham Greene

18.30 Birthday Toast
Proposed by the Principal of Berkhamsted School, Mark Steed

18.45 – 19.45 Quentin Falk
“Film adaptations of Greene”: An illustrated talk.

Cost: £12

Late Evening Session

20.00 Dinner
After-dinner speaker: Clive Francis

Cost: £33

OR

Saturday 29 September Alternative Event

9.45 – 15.45 A Creative Writing Workshop in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School

A practical one-day course on Prose Fiction and Screenplay led by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone and William Ivory. The morning sessions will be plenary. In the afternoon session delegates will select either Prose Fiction or Screenplay. Delegates will need to bring their own writing paper and pens or pencils. There will be breaks for tea or coffee, but lunch is not included.

 

Character and plot in prose-fiction: The Basement Room

F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Character is plot, plot is character.” Is this true for all writers? Characters need to carry the movement of a writer’s ideas, themes, situations and events, so do they drive the plot or does the plot drive them? Or is this simply a matter of what the writer thinks of first? Through an exploration of Greene’s short story, The Basement Room, in conjunction with excerpts from other short stories, we will explore these questions and begin to build some tools necessary for the development of convincing characters.

How Character Drives Plot in Screenplay: The Third Man

What is the rôle of character in creative writing? Is character merely the personification of the writer’s need to tell story? Or, is character, in fact, the embodiment of the story’s theme and the primary driving force in establishing the plot required to tell that story? Holly Martins and Harry Lime are the diametrically opposed sides of Greene’s character. So, how he manoeuvres them, how he makes them behave and the plot he creates in order to reveal who they are, must expose what he believes as a writer and why he wrote The Third Man.

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone’s first novel was Home (Social Disease, 2008); she teaches Creative Writing at City University (London), and she is a partner of Apis Books, an independent publishing company for shorter fiction. William Ivory wrote Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010), which was nominated for a BAFTA Award; and The Sins, for which he won The Edgar Allan Poe Award in New York presented by The Crime Writers Association of America for Best TV Drama Series. Advance booking is essential to guarantee a place on the Creative Writing Workshop.

Tickets £35.00

Sunday 30 September

Talks in Newcroft, Berkhamsted School

Morning Session

9.00 – 9.45 David Pearce
Founding Trustee and former director of the Festival: who better to show you around?
Prior registration is essential. Meet outside Old Hall for a tour of the School.

10.05 – 11.00 Dr Brigitte Timmermann
“Though never intended for publication, it had to start as a story”. The Third Man – A comparative text analysis

11.00 Break for tea and coffee

11.30 – 12.45 Professor Neil Sinyard
“Temple of Doom: some reflections on Graham Greene, Wee Willie Winkie and the Shirley Temple controversy.”

Cost: £14

13.00 – 14.30 Farewell Lunch in Old Hall
Buffet lunch with wine

Cost: £22

Culture Night: Jessica Casey

Arts & Disability Ireland are  presenting two related activities, readings and a film, in  Temple Bar as part  of Dublin’s Culture Night on 21st September.

From  5.30pm there will be readings from ‘Jessica  Casey and Other Works’, a  collection of poetry by Away  with Words, an  innovative arts project in which people with intellectual disabilities explore  creativity through  writing. The  readings will be given by well-known actors in locations across Temple  Bar.These  events will be followed at 7.45pm by a screening in  Meeting House Square of  animated short Jessica  Casey – The Film, which  brings to cinematic life one of the main characters created by the authors of  the book.There is  never a dull moment when Jessica Casey is around – with her long purple nails,  UGG boots, piña coladas, her dog Rosie and her  plans to go to Ibiza, or Australia,  or to invent a new lipstick, or to  become a farmer – or a  nun?

‘Jessica  Casey and Other Works’ is the first formal publication of Away  with Words, which  was conceived by  Claude and  Mary Madec, and established as a collaboration  between local writers and That’s  Life (an  initiative of the Brothers of Charity Services in County Galway to support  people with intellectual  disabilities engaging in the  arts life of their communities.) Mary  Madec says, “In the individual poems… you will get many insights into how these  writers see, feel, taste and hear the world they live in… Poetry also develops  an ability to observe and listen to others as well as to oneself. It  teaches empathy and compassion…” The book features the three  poems that won the First,  Second and Third  places in the  Inclusion Ireland Poetry Awards. The  12-minute animated short Jessica  Casey – The Film was  created thru the  collaboration of members of Away  with Words and  visual artist Aideen Barry, and  was brought  to cinematic life using stop motion animation and the  inspiration of silent film greats Charlie  Chaplin and Buster Keaton.Many of  the writers, artists  and stars of the Away  with Words  collective will be  in attendance for the Culture Night screening and readings.

These  presentations are part of Arts & Disability Ireland’s on-going and  internationally-recognised work creating lasting change in the way people  with disabilities are involved with, and engage in, artistic and cultural life  in Ireland. They champion the creativity of  artists with disabilities, promote  inclusive experiences for audiences with disabilities, and  work to enhance the disability-related  capacity of venues.

For  further information on Arts and Disability Ireland see www.adiarts.ie

Any Other Business: Part IV

What is one to do with  thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a  proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into  a fourth  portmanteau post on television of course!

Thomas  Dekker Needs to Graduate

Thomas Dekker  desperately needs to graduate high school. It’s becoming a  problem.  In case you  can’t quite place the youthful looking actor, here’s a refresher. He  played the camcorder-wielding confidant  of invincible cheerleader Hayden  Panettiere’s Claire Bennett in season  1 of Heroes. He then took  on the role  of a teenage John Connor under the daunting protection of Lena Headey’s Sarah  Connor and  Summer Glau’s good terminator in The Sarah  Connor Chronicles. When that was unjustly  cancelled he finally managed a sojourn in college in  Gregg Araki’s typically eccentric Kaboom! But then came a return  to high school in The  Secret Circle, which has been mercifully cancelled after one  misfiring season during which it never threatened to equal let alone eclipse its  sister show The  Vampire Diaries. Dekker was actually  pretty good as a warlock in The  Secret Circle but his resume kept  intruding into your subconscious and wrecking his plausibility as a high school  student, even by the usual ridiculous Hollywood conventions. To reiterate, Thomas Dekker was in  high school on TV in 2006. He was still in high school on TV in 2012… Thomas Dekker Needs to  Graduate!

Quirky  McQuirke

I’m not sure exactly when it  happened but the three episodes of  90 minutes duration each format now seems to be BBC One’s preferred mode for  prestige crime shows, as, following in the wake  of Wallander and the  all-conquering Sherlock, John Banville’s  acclaimed Benjamin Black detective novels are being brought to the small screen with  Gabriel  Byrne cast as the titular Quirke. Quirke, the chief pathologist  in the Dublin city morgue, starts investigating  deaths in 1950s Dublin – in Banville’s imagining a place of smoky streets, damp  alleys, bars with peat  fires, and  Georgian houses with sexual tension. Each  episode sees Quirke investigate the death  of an unfortunate on his mortuary slab. Bleak  House  screenwriter Andrew Davies will adapt ‘Christine Falls’ and ‘The Silver Swan,’ while The  Seafarer  playwright Conor McPherson tackles ‘Elegy for April.’ I haven’t read any of  the Benjamin Black novels for two reasons. I find the patronising adoption of a  pseudonym to write mere thrillers to epitomise the Nietzschean snobbery that  characterised Banville’s dismissal of last year’s Booker jury, and I heartily  dislike the  novels he has written under his own name that I had to suffer thru at college.  I’ll watch the show with interest though because Davies is a great screenwriter  and I’ve come to appreciate McPherson more than I once did after teaching The  Weir and  having students enjoy its ambiguities immensely.

A Thought of Sligo: Yeats on Film @ Tread Softly…

Tread Softly… (www.seasonofyeats.com) is the inaugural festival celebrating the link between the Yeats brothers, William Butler and Jack B, and Sligo. Featuring a mix of theatre, music, film, readings and visual art the festival runs from the 29th of July to the 11th of August.The film strand comprises of three separate elements which will be screened at The Model in Sligo throughout the course of the festival. Featuring collaborations between visual artists and musicians, as well as intriguing theatre and readings, the festival will also host a vintage day where the whole of Sligo town will come out dressed in Edwardian style. The festival will welcome some amazing talent to Sligo for 10 days of high summer, including musicians from Kíla and Dervish as well as The Waterboys who recently released An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an acclaimed album of interpretations of various poems by WB. Writers such as Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney, Solace novelist Belinda McKeon, and versatile writer and Waterboys collaborator Brian Leyden, will also to help celebrate Sligo’s artistic heritage.

Film Listings:

Date: Sunday 29th July, Sunday 5th August.Venue: The Model, The Mall, Sligo.

Time: 4pm Tickets: €4

Soul of Ireland, Sean O’Mordha’s two-part 2007 documentary telling the story of the evolution and development of landscape painting in Ireland through the experience of six living artists: Sean McSweeney, Barrie Cooke, James O’Connor, Mary Lohan, Martin Gale and Dorothy Cross. Each part is 52 minutes and there is a 15-minute break between the first and second part.

Date: Wednesday 1st August, Wednesday 8th August.

Venue: The Model, The Mall, Sligo.

Time: 6pm Tickets: €4

A series of short films including the Oscar-nominated and Golden Bear-winning documentary Yeats Country (1965) directed by Patrick Carey. Also included are Bat Eyes, the beautifully made Australian finalist in this year’s YouTube short film competition, which revolves around Yeats’ poem ‘When You Are Old and Grey’, and archive footage of Yeats in Stockholm accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature (1923), and of his funeral in Sligo at Drumcliff Churchyard (1948). Sinead Dolan’s short film Sligo, Yeats and Me; which explores the relationship between ordinary Sligo people, young and old, and W.B. Yeats’ poetry; rounds off this hour long programme.

Date: Friday 3rd August, Friday 10th August.

Venue: The Model, The Mall, Sligo.

Time: 6pm Tickets: €4

Another programme of short films connected with the Yeats family. The Art of Ireland (1950s) produced by Brian O’Doherty, who was a friend of Jack Yeats, traces the development of visual art and architecture in Ireland over 20 minutes. W.B.Yeats – A Tribute (1950) is a 21 minute a film by George Fleishmann and J.D. Sheridan in which readings of WB Yeats’ poems are set to striking visuals of the Sligo countryside, Dublin and London.

Tread Softly… is an initiative of Blue Raincoat Theatre, The Hawk’s Well Theatre, The Model and Sligo Live. Bookings can be made at Hawk’s Well Theatre, Temple Street, Sligo (www.hawkswell.com)  and for more festival information contact Sligo Tourist Office, O’Connell Street, Sligo (+353 71 9161201).

Trevor/Bowen Literary Festival

History, Architecture and Literature will be intertwined at this year’s Trevor/Bowen Literary Festival when Eoghan Harris officially opens the 6th annual weekend of literary activity in Mitchelstown, Cork this Friday.
 
Outside of the opening ceremony and talk by Tom McCarthy, who has chosen “Bowen, De Valera and the Neutrality of the Dead” as his topic, all the other events over the weekend will be held in buildings whose origins date many centuries. Kingston College was built in the late 18th Century to provide accommodation to the less well-off members of the Church of Ireland community. Its chapel will host readings by members of the local creative writing group earlier on Friday afternoon. Other venues include Farahy Church, originally built in the 12th Century then rebuilt as a rare example of an 18th century rural Church of Ireland church, where Sophia Hillan will speak about “Elizabeth Bowen’s sense of place” on Saturday afternoon. The Kingston Arms, located in Kings’ Square, was built in the 18th Century and on the Saturday and Sunday mornings it will be the venue for Creative Writing Workshops for Adults. The facilitators are John MacKenna and Mary O’Donnell who will mostly concentrate on helping those who are at an earlier stage of their writing efforts. Sharpe screenwriter Eoghan Harris will, on the other hand, be concentrating on the plot as the basis for all good story writing.
 
Mitchelstown Town Hall, which was built as a Catholic Church in the late 18th century before being converted into a school 50 years later, will house all of the remaining weekend’s activities. These events include talks, screenings and readings. “A Childhood friendship with Elizabeth Bowen” by Sally Phipps, daughter of Mollie Keane, will see her talk about her memories of the Elizabeth Bowen she remembers as a child. Stephanie McBride presents her very successful talk “The Films of William Trevor”, as well as showing excerpts from various films made of Trevor’s works, preceding a screening of “The Ballroom of Romance” which will be followed by the eponymous Dance with a three piece band. Jim Ryan presents his interpretation of the Bowen’s novel “The Last September” as a reader and, after showing the film, will chair a discussion regarding the film presentation of the book as against the readers’ interpretation. Finally, Danielle McLaughlin, winner of the Trevor/Bowen Short Story Competition 2012, will read her winning entry.
 
Admission prices per person (excluding workshops) are €10.00 for individual events, €25.00 for a Saturday only ticket, and €45.00 for a weekend ticket. Prices for the Adults Creative Writing Workshops are available on the website. There will be a cheese and wine reception and a short, musical performance by local folk group, Eistigi, on the opening night. There will also be a Festival trad/folk session in Auntie Mae’s pub on the Saturday night at 11.00pm. See www.mitchelstownlit.com for full details.

Stay Hungry

I’ll be writing more in the near future about director Francis Lawrence in his own right, but for now let me emit a whoop of delight and a howl of despair regarding the Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire.
 
I have a very high regard for Lawrence and am delighted that he’s been given the chance to direct the sequel as I think his flair for suspenseful action directing and deliberately measured pacing, and his aversion to pointless shaky-cam, are precisely what Gary Ross failed to bring to the table. Regrettably along with the announcement that Lawrence was taking the directing helm came the unwelcome rider that two of my least favourite screenwriters are charged with crash-writing an adaptation of the novel for him to start shooting in August. Ross’ screenplay with novelist Suzanne Collins and (the enigma that is) Billy Ray mirrored his shooting style of showily out of focus backgrounds and close-in focus on the faces of his actors. His film was infuriatingly lacking in scope. Some of this was inexperience in action directing, leading to an inability to locate action within a coherent geography, but some was due to frankly bizarre decisions to leave things unsaid which should have been bellowed. When rebellion was whispered about we had almost no knowledge of the history of the rebellion or the current state of Panem and the districts it domineers. And these aren’t additions that necessitated reshoots, they could have been added in ADR; just take Katniss’ send-off of Rue which incites a riot in District 11. If you haven’t read the book you can only guess at what actual meaning this obviously meaningful symbol has (ditto Katniss’ wearing of a Mockingjay); would it have killed Ross to have Wes Bentley ADR over a shot of his back in the control room a horrified “My God! She’s making the salute of the Rebellion!”?
 
All these problems could be fixed quickly in the opening of the second film, but that Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt are entrusted with the job. I’ve previously berated Beaufoy over his adaptation of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen which sent me scurrying to read the book, which he infuriatingly reversed in multiple respects. Novelist Paul Torday’s dry comedy and political satire was sacrificed at the altar of Beaufoy’s insistence on characters not getting what they want, but instead getting what (they didn’t know) they need; which delivered only clichéd rom-com relationship drama. Fred’s wife was hilariously self-involved in the novel, but largely absent in the film; a synecdoche of how the realism of the novel and its blackly comic conclusion were all completely reversed. Beaufoy’s reversals culminated in the introduction of a romantic obstacle in the third act which made me groan, and later enraged me when I realised that everything I hated most in the film as cliché was delightfully subverted in the novel. Beaufoy also ‘adapted’ Vikas Swarup’s brutal novel Q & A into the disingenuously feel-good Slumdog Millionaire so I despair at what he’ll do to Catching Fire to make it a ‘well-made-screenplay’. And then Michael Arndt will polish the adaptation… Little Miss Sunshine may have won a screenplay for Best Oscar but I passionately hate it as perhaps the supreme example of the maddeningly cutesy indie clichés that win Oscar nominations needed for marketing purposes; from the quirk by numbers characters, to the complete lack of anything approaching emotionally authentic personal relationships, and the ending that solves absolutely none of the characters’ problems but provides a three-card-trick ‘subversive’ feel-good ending.
 
Jennifer Lawrence will be fantastic again as Katniss Everdeen, but Francis Lawrence can’t fix a screenplay and direct at the same time.

Stage v Page

I’ve noted that I tied myself up in absolute knots over the distinction between plays that really have to be seen rather than read, and plays that really have to be seen because they are the best that have ever been written. Here are some musings on it.
 
Anyone who’s done English at college or been involved in amateur dramatics will have read an awful lot of plays, far more than anyone outside of those little bubbles. But reading a play is not the same thing as experiencing a play. The script is the blueprint, and in most cases the reason a play works, but it needs the efforts of the actors and the crew to come alive and realise its potential. I’ve tried here to isolate three key areas where plays need to be seen on stage rather than just read: ambiguity, physicality, and, um, physicality (meant slightly differently). I’ve been trying to get to Chekhov plays whenever there’s a good production on because in performance the layers of his work are truly amazing. Chekhov thought he was writing uproarious comedy, Stanislavsky thought he was writing heartbreaking tragedy, and it’s a joy to see those two interpretations vie for control of the text. Many great plays can be enjoyed as reads, but in performance are additionally ambiguous. Patrick Marber’s production of Pinter’s The Caretaker received dazzling reviews for bringing out the black comedy of the material to a hilarious degree, while Hamlet can be played almost any way you want by judicious pruning of the unwieldy text. Then there’re the texts that are just deeply unstable. Kander & Ebbs’ Cabaret has had so many songs cut and pasted back and forth with equivalent scenes from Isherwood over the years that a stable version is impossible. The text is so fluid you never know what to expect. Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life deliberately locks in such fluidity by ensuring no two productions will be the same thru ultra-vague directions.
 
I’ve seen Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound twice, and both times the script’s brilliance and precision defeated its own realisation. I saw a cast corpse repeatedly towards the end, having performed After Magritte perfectly, as the jokes just became too funny for them. I then saw a director construct a minimalist set that bore no resemblance to Stoppard’s mirrored theatre and instead appeared to be a small cafe shut for the night with its chairs upside down on top of its tables. The overlapping and interrupting language deployed by Mamet is often impossible to really grasp on the page, so that I didn’t like Speed the Plow when I read it but found it hysterically funny when I saw it performed some years later, while for physicality Jez Butterworth’s live horse on stage in Jerusalem takes some beating. Some plays have to be seen because reading the stage directions alone can’t convey the experience they conjure. How can you properly imagine the farcical chaos of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, in which people act normally in the dark, and then grope around the stage blindly when the lights are turned on? How funny in performance is the notorious stage direction in The Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear?” What precisely do harassed directors do when they stumble upon Peter Shaffer’s simple yet infuriating stage direction in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, “They cross the Andes”? How can you really feel the true Brechtian alienation reading thru The Life of Galileo when you don’t have the disconcerting physical presence of the director in the corner of the stage turning the pages of the script as the actors rattle thru their lines? How can you grasp the mischievous power of Anthony Shaffer’s 1975 play Murderer unless you actually see on stage the paragraph of stage directions which precede the dialogue on the opening page; a paragraph which we’re told takes 20 minutes of playing time as it describes protagonist Norman Bartholomew dismembering his lover’s naked body beside a window before the local police sergeant arrives following a neighbour’s complaint…
 
You can be familiar with a play from reading it, but you don’t really know it until you’ve seen it in performance.

Welcome to Greeneland

I wrote some months ago about an impending trip to Graham Greene’s birthplace (Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire) for the Graham Greene Festival 2011, which took place at the start of October. I thought I’d cast a slightly belated eye back over proceedings.

I had won the thriller category of the creative writing awards for my short story ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’ and was lucky enough to collect my prize from festival guest speaker Lee Langley, who adapted Greene’s lost 1940s ‘scriptment’ The Tenth Man into a complex and tense film starring Anthony Hopkins and Kristin Scott Thomas in the late 1980s. Berkhamsted is only a half-hour train ride from London, and the festival is always worth the attention of any Greene fans in the Home Counties. The interesting line up of talks and screenings this year included rising film director and screenwriter Rowan Joffe introducing his Brighton Rock adaptation, and the launch by Dermot Gilvary and Darren Middleton of their edited book of critical essays Dangerous Edges of Graham Greene. I sadly missed a lot of the festival’s events but what I did catch was most impressive. Professor Joyce Stavick gave an interesting account of how American military college students responded surprisingly positively to Greene’s prescient warnings about Vietnam in The Quiet American, Lee Langley gave a very funny account of how she adapted The Tenth Man for the screen only to watch her most prized original dialogue scene that for her summed up the whole film get thrown onto the cutting room floor by the director as pointless padding, and Professor Steven Chibnall (fresh from excavations in the archives) gave an imposingly detailed examination of the two contrasting film adaptations of Brighton Rock.

I must though single out Professor Michael Brennan’s lecture on Greene’s creative use of the Manichean heresy, in Brighton Rock and Stamboul Train among others, was a truly stunning piece of scholarship. I’d have to rank this patient explanation of the bizarre beliefs of the Manicheans and careful analysis of just how Greene used this good/evil, soul/body, man/woman set of dichotomies for his own purposes as one of the very best lectures I’ve ever heard. On the basis of this talk alone I’d recommend Prof. Brennan’s new book on Greene to all Greene scholars and indeed anyone working in the wider field of English Catholic literature. Once all the prizes had been given out and the talks concluded it was time for the Bourget-Greene Gala Dinner in the luxurious surroundings of Berkhamsted’s venerable Public School. Despite my complete unfamiliarity with ‘Ed Reardon’ I greatly enjoyed the BBC Radio 4 comedy character’s short after dinner talk spuriously linking himself to Greene throughout his own fictional life. I also greatly enjoyed talking with a number of other Greene fans including Cathy Hogan, a fellow Irish winner in the writing awards. Andrew Bourget, Greene’s eldest grandson and the new and very gracious patron of the Festival, has launched a website intended as the primary resource on the web for all things Greene related – http://www.greeneland.com. I think it’s a great idea, using a signature concept, and one that deserves all the support that Greene fans can muster.

I think everyone will find that there is one Graham Greene work that speaks to them. For me it’s The Ministry of Fear, for other people I know I could say The End of the Affair or Twenty One Short Stories. Why not find out which one speaks to you?