Any Other Business: XXXIII

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 thirty-third portmanteau post on matters of course!

Ancient Aliens: I don’t want to believe

I had the misfortune recently to come across a paean to Erich Von Daniken on the History Channel, a special of their disgraceful Ancient Aliens series. Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods?, was, probably tongue-in-cheek, used by Roland Emmerich as an adviser on his preposterous 10,000 BC. His patented pig-swill has popped up in everything from Battlestar Galactica to Stargate to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Prometheus. And as it doesn’t seem to show any signs of going away it can’t be treated as the joke it is anymore, it’s become harmful. The memorable verdict of the court psychologist looking into Erich von Daniken’s mental status after his epic embezzlement had got him jailed was that the man was a pathological liar and his book was a marvel of nonsense. It is a marvel of nonsense. It should be obvious to anyone who reads it why. There are some very clever Biblical reinterpretations like Lot’s wife being got by the flash of an atom bomb, but there’s the rub. Everything that the ancient aliens do on earth is from the technology of von Daniken’s time. They dress like the Apollo astronauts. They set off atom bombs. But, Erich, we barely made it to the moon at that level of technology, if these bozos travelled here from a far-off galaxy which we can’t detect why did they apparently travel dressed in vintage couture? Could it be that because von Daniken lacked the imagination or understanding for futurism that his aliens only had the available resources of 1968? Odd that they don’t have the internet, or wi-fi, or cell-phones, or quantum devices. Odd that humanity has developed so much since that book was written, and yet people are still, and perhaps increasingly, under its spell; which has the stupefying message that humanity cannot advance without alien assistance.

Worth waiting for? Probably, not.

When you play the game of thrones, you watch or you win: Part II

Previously I compared the reaction to Game of Thrones’ finale to the eerily similar meltdown everyone had in 2010 at LOST. I’d like to tease out the perils of serialisation. I remember reading a piece about LOST which suggested the flashbacks gave just enough of a narrative hit, of a story told within an episode, to keep those plebeians who watch network shows coming back for more; despite the frustrations of a never-ending story that flailed around for 6 years, and ultimately revealed it was always insoluble. I also think of an episode of Boardwalk Empire, where the episode ended with Nucky looking at his footsteps on the carpet, and it occurred to me the episode could have ended at any point in the previous ten minutes and it would have made no difference. But it was bad of me to think that, because there is an almost secular theology at work – the virtue of pointlessness. A story that gets wrapped up in an episode?! That’s for muck savages! The sort of NASCAR-attending mouth-breathing trailer trash who’ve kept NCIS on air since 2003. No, sophisticates only watch serialised shows, where nothing ever gets wrapped up in an episode. They are above needing a narrative hit; they are doing their penance thru endless pointless episodes for their reward in the future of a grand finale that makes it all worthwhile. I think that in serialised television, if there’s no episode by episode hit of story begun and concluded then the stakes get dangerously high that the end of the show must provide the meaning that makes all the perennially delayed narrative gratification worth it. And when everything is in service of a grand ending, there never is a grand ending. People howled at the end of The Sopranos, LOST, Game of Thrones: How many times can this three card trick be played before people get wise to it? It may not even be possible to play that trick, even if you have the ending up your sleeve. Smallville’s ending was clearly something they could’ve done at any point for the preceding number of years because it was an ending that made sense but was totally disconnected from anything immediately leading up to it. LOST and The OC ended with cutesy call back to the pilot imagery which pleased only other TV writers. [LOST writer Brian K Vaughan’s pointless Y: The Last Man ended with an image he said he knew from the beginning, the problem being it was literally an image, and the comic could have ended years earlier with it.] How I Met Your Mother stuck to the original ending, not realising that too much time had gone by with the story under its own impulses to bolt that ending on without enraging everyone. It’s a Kierkegaardean paradox: stick with your original ending and ignore the life the story took on of its own volition, or do not stick with your original ending and do not ignore the life the story took on of its own volition – you will regret it either way. When I think of shows that ended well, they tend to be network or basic cable: Buffy ended with a Mission Accomplished, Angel ended with a screw you cliffhanger and a quip, Veronica Mars ended with a bittersweet exit into uncertainty, Justified ended with a character moment after an episode that wrapped up its plot surprisingly early. Their Whedon X-Files model in common? Every episode a story, every season a bigger story – complete.

Somewhere Else

Gorgeous Theatre returns to the intimate space of Players Theatre with a 21^st century spin on some mid-20^th century influences.

Gene (Noel Cahill) is on a journey, destination unknown. As he says, “I must leave this place. Find another. A different place altogether”. His quest to get somewhere else sees him travel to the archetypal big city; with the help and hindrance of Tonya Swayne’s assorted characters; repeatedly meet and attempt to impress a mysterious woman (Saoirse Sine), and be perpetually annoyed by two manically energetic characters (Emma Brennan, Tanja Abazi) who dog his steps with requests for him to join their fun and just for once stay where they are. (And also annoy him with a door he does not want to see.) It takes a while, and much physical mayhem, before the pieces fall into place, and the guiding maxim might well be Kierkegaard’s aphorism that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Ciaran Treanor’s script and direction doffs its hat at times to Chaplin; Cahill executes delirious pratfalls and turns a mechanical sequence of dishwashing into slapstick chaos. At other times, with the wonderful cardboard props of misbehaving taxis, buses, aeroplanes, and even a raft, we seem to be firmly in Thurber territory; Gene a Walter Mitty with extravagant daydreams to escape a humdrum reality. But that the urban reality conjured by Erin Barclay and Louise Dunne’s inventive set design comprises some 70 boxes that part to reveal the nightlights of a CITY skyscraper, which, when Cahill and Sine dance in front of it recalls the ‘Gotta Dance’ fantasy sequence in Singin’ in the Rain. Not that all these familiar notes get in the way of Treanor’s originality anymore than La La Land’s borrowings prevented it from doing something new and unexpected.

3.5/5

The Gigli Concert

David Grindley directs the first ever production of a Tom Murphy play at the Gate, and it’s one of Murphy’s oddest works that he presents.

JPW King (Declan Conlon) is a hard-drinking Englishman, reduced to sleeping in his office in 1980s Dublin. How he can afford the office itself is a mystery given the non-existent patient list for his practice. But then he is a ‘Dynamatologist’, which can sound oddly like Scientology in some of King’s explanations of it. It would take someone truly desperate to enlist his professional help, someone like The Irishman (Denis Conway), a developer in the midst of a tremendous nervous breakdown who has become obsessed with singing like the Italian tenor Gigli. The Irishman is truculent, uneducated, violent, and, despite King’s belief, as told to his Irish mistress Mona (Dawn Bradfield), that qualified psychiatrists are needed, insistent that his unerring instinct has led him to the right man to solve his problem. But can King rise to the insane challenge?

Grindley has been acclaimed for his revivals of RC Sheriff’s museum-piece Journey’s End, so perhaps it’s inevitable he’d been drawn to Murphy’s 1983 puzzler that immediately precedes Conversations on a Homecoming and Bailegangaire, both recent DruidMurphy revivals. The thankless role of Mona is occasional relief from the intense two-hander in which the identity of patient and therapist is in constant transference from the moment both men end up saying “Christ, how am I going to get thru today?” in the exact same spot. But what is the play’s purpose? The publicity talks of ‘the endurance of the human spirit and our ability to achieve the impossible’, which seems delusional given that every character onstage displays alarming mental health, and the climactic ‘singing like Gigli’ is a drug-fuelled Tony Kushneresque ‘bit of wonderful theatrical illusion’, complete with a rush of red lights by Sinead McKenna for the Mephistophelian bargain being struck.

The acting is assured. Bradfield makes Mona an earthy cousin of Bailegangaire’s female triptych, but it is a minor part, notable only for Mona’s apparent coming to terms with her dire situation in a healthy way. Conway is initially dangerous and latterly assured as the developer regains a burlesque of prosperous wellbeing, but his silent screams and hanging, musical ‘Aaaand’ seem slightly mannered when exploring the Irishman’s emotional vulnerability. Conlon, in a startling change of pace from his urbanity in the just-finished Hedda Gabler, makes King a defeated figure who suddenly finds his heroic possibilities. Staying up all night reading books to try and help the Irishman, he makes Dynamatology akin to Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith in a pivotal speech; and is hilarious in the second act when relaying some actual leaps taken as Murphy amps up the black comedy.

Murphy probes some of the darkest recesses of the 1980s Irish psyche here, with notable asides about planning corruption and political ambition, but his actual conclusions remain eternally unclear.

3/5

The Gigli Concert continues its run at the Gate until June 27^th

‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun’ published in the Irish University Review

In 2010 I delivered my paper ‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun‘ to the Space, Technology & Modernity in Irish Literature & Culture conference in the Humanities Institute of Ireland, UCD. I’ve written about that very stimulating conference in a previous piece on this blog, and now I’m pleased to report that a revised version of my paper has just been published as an article in the 2013 Winter edition of the Irish University Review. The online version can be read here.

This essay takes up the challenge of Joe Cleary’s provocative characterisation of John McGahern’s work as naturalism that retreats into pessimistic fatalism by instead considering Rising Sun as the end-point of a career-long journey fraught with Kierkegaardean implications. Kierkegaard’s concept of infinite resignation in Fear and Trembling is noted in McGahern’s characters Bill Evans and Johnny Murphy, but John Quinn raises ethical problems soluble only by considering the co-existent presence of precepts from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. This Stoicism, it is argued, is Aurelian through the prism of O Criomhthain’s An tOileanach, which McGahern greatly admired, so the characters are religiously Catholic and simultaneously philosophically Stoic in response to the harsh landscapes that order their lives. The inhabitants of this lakeside community lead messy spiritual lives that are Stoic and Kierkegaardean, with the Catholic Church continuing to be an important source of ritual. This eclectic but harmonious combination represents a hopeful new mode of life as play, exemplified by Jamesie, which is worth passing on. Rising Sun can thus be read as the end of a Kierkegaardean transition from infinite resignation to exulting in finitude through a vision of the absurd.

Berkhamsted Revisited

‘Only beggars and gypsies say that one must never return where one has been before’ – Soren Kierkegaard

Prof. Peter Evans and Dr. Fergal Casey

The annual Graham Greene Festival at Greene’s birthplace (Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire) is about to kick off, so I thought I’d cast a belated backward glance at the 2012 Festival. I travelled to Berkhamsted at the end of September to collect two prizes in the Festival’s Creative Writing awards. I won best short screenplay for Sir Joshua’s Macaw, a comedy of bad art criticism, and best prose fiction for my comedy of workplace anxiety, ‘For Whom H.R. Tolls’. I had previously won the best prose thriller category in 2011 for my story of murderous identical brothers ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’.

The festival is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust as Berkhamsted was where two different branches of the extended Greene family lived, and Graham’s father was headmaster of the venerable public school which Graham reluctantly attended; a deeply unhappy experience immortalised in the 1971 autobiography A Sort of Life. Greene mellowed towards his hometown though and returned to it imaginatively in the last decades of his life in books like The Human Factor and The Captain and the Enemy. The four-day festival includes film screenings and gala dinners, and many talks by both academic Greene scholars and film-makers involved in adaptations of his work. It has become a venue for launching new works of Greene scholarship, and having completed a PhD on the Irish influence on GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in 2007 in UCD such a milieu of intense discussion of an English Catholic writer feels very familiar.

I was aware of Greene’s great liking for Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill but had never studied Greene academically, remaining merely an avid reader and fan of works like The Ministry of Fear and The Third Man. I didn’t attend any lectures last year, but in 2011 I had the good fortune to hear Professor Michael Brennan’s lecture on Greene’s creative use of the Manichean heresy, in Brighton Rock and Stamboul Train among others, which was a truly stunning piece of scholarship. His 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 (occasionally mischievous) purposes was one of the most dazzling lectures I’ve ever attended.

A major draw of the festival’s programme for me was a day-long creative writing workshop with two of the judges of the creative writing awards, novelist Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone and screenwriter William Ivory. The creative writing awards emulate Greene’s own range and include screenwriting, travel writing, and two prose categories – for fiction and thriller; much like Greene’s inimitable distinction between his novels and his ‘entertainments’. 2012 saw Lattin-Rawstrone and Ivory focus on Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man and his short story ‘The Basement Room’ to examine the importance of story and character in their talks on how to write convincing characters, who are then sent on meaningful journeys. The importance of tactile detail in communicating emotion was hammered home, as was the equal importance that when an important event befalls a character the reader should also viscerally feel just how important it is. The workshop includes an intense practical component in the afternoon. I did the screenplay option with Made in Dagenham screenwriter Ivory, who is a true disciple of Greene in his use of philosophical and theological concepts in his gritty screenplays. He also throws his pupils in at the deep end, plotting out an original movie scenario and characters from some pictures of actors; and then asking everyone to write a sample scene after some group discussion to fine-tune the characters and plot.

Lee Langley and Fergal Casey

Away from this intensive writing in the basement theatre of Berkhamsted School (irresistibly reminiscent of UCD Dramsoc’s now lost LG1 space), in the Civic Centre I greatly enjoyed seeing on a big screen Lee Langley’s 1980s adaptation of Greene’s lost 1940s ‘scriptment’ into the complex and tense film The Tenth Man starring Anthony Hopkins and Kristin Scott Thomas; not least as Langley had presented me with my Creative Writing prize in 2011 and the exhortation to keep writing. As an added bonus director Jack Gold was on hand to discuss the film, revealing some of Anthony Hopkins’ acting mannerisms along the way. Once all the prizes had been given out, the birthday toast proposed, and the talks concluded it was time for the Gala Dinner in the luxurious surroundings of Berkhamsted’s venerable Public School, with an after-dinner talk by actor Clive Francis. I had the good fortune to be seated for it alongside Cathy Hogan, a previous winner in the writing awards, and Dermot Gilvary, previous director of the Festival.

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?

Space, Technology & Modernity in Irish Literature & Culture

I delivered my paper ‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun’ to the ‘Space, Technology & Modernity in Irish Literature & Culture’ conference held in University College Dublin in May this year. With that paper now revised and submitted as a journal article I thought I’d look back at the proceedings held at the Humanities Institute of Ireland in UCD and organised by Graham Price and Liam Lanigan.

Friday 21 May

Panel 1: Beckettian Aesthetics
Chair: Dr Stanley van der Ziel (University College Dublin)

‘‘‘Antiquarians and Others”: Beckett’s Irish Modernists’
Alan Graham (University College Dublin)

‘The Phenomenology of Pain in Beckett: The Tedium and the Message’
Siobhan Purcell (University College Dublin)

Panel 2: Gender, Culture & Society in Ireland
Chair: Dr Anne Mulhall (University College Dublin)

‘Desire Lost and Found: Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour’
Maggie O’Neill (NUI Maynooth)

‘Kate O’Brien’s Modernism – Selves, Subtexts, “Mixed Media”’
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka (Independent Scholar)

‘“A Sweet Colleen and a Salty Sinner”: Conceptions of Irishness, Catholicism, Homosexuality and Modernity in the Fiction of Emma Donoghue’
Annie Galvin (Trinity College Dublin)

Panel 3: Comparative Modernisms
Chair: Dr Sharae Deckard (University College Dublin)

‘“A Place on the Road to Somewhere Else”: The Fictional Writing of Colm Toibin in the “World Republic of Letters”
Sonia Howell (NUI Maynooth)

This Side of Princeton: Ireland and F Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise’
Gavan Lennon (University College Dublin)

‘Adding “new beauties”: Joyce and Rushdie’s critical works’
Pauric Havlin (University College Dublin)

Keynote Address: Moynagh Sullivan (NUI Maynooth)
‘Space & Interspace: Medbh McGuckian’s Poetics, Maternal Aesthetics, and Matrixial Borderspaces’
Chair: Dr Graham Price (University College Dublin)

Saturday May 22

Panel 4: The Evolution of an Irish Modernist Aesthetic
Chair: Dr Lucy Collins (University College Dublin)

‘Modernism and Modernity in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland’
Stanley van der Ziel (University College Dublin)

‘“Pealing out a living message”: Sean O’Faolain, The Bell and The Artist’s New Ireland’
Muireach Shankey (University College Dublin)

‘“Dear Dirty Dublin” or “The Parable of the [Fair Trade] Plums”: Representing Dublin in Ulysses’
George Legg (Trinity College Dublin)

Panel 5: Consumption, Globalisation and Tradition in Recent Irish Fiction
Chair: Dr Graham Price (University College Dublin)

‘“A Simple and Genuine Sense of Homecoming”: Transition in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer
Eoin Delap (Trinity College Dublin)

‘Binge and Purge: Excess, Ekstasis, and the Celtic Tiger’
Niamh Campbell (Trinity College Dublin)

‘Competing Philosophies in That They May Face the Rising Sun’
Fergal Casey (University College Dublin)

There were a number of universities represented at the proceedings and an even greater number of writers. Beckett finally triumphed over Joyce by getting his own panel which illuminated his off-beat early literary criticism and the philosophy of pain in his mature work. Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Emma Donoghue were usefully placed in a continuum of female writers complicating received notions of gender and sexuality. Joseph O’Neill justified the Gatsby comparisons for Netherland by not feeling out of place after a paper on F Scott which brought out his Irishness to a surprising degree. Moynagh O’Sullivan’s keynote address meanwhile was a suitably dazzling display of theoretical fireworks used to illuminate the dense rich poetry of Medbh McGuckian. My own panel looked at work by Brian Friel, Kevin Power, John McGahern and Paul Murray, proving that not only is Irish literature engaging with modernity, despite the constant complaints by some commentators, but that a hefty reading list of must-read Irish novels of the last decade could be jotted down from texts cited in discussion of any one panel of this conference.

Ireland remains a republic of letters…