Look at books - Irish artists, fiction and history

Prodigals And Geniuses

By Brendan Lynch

The Irish love a good pub within walking reach and Ireland’s most gifted artists and thinkers have been no exception. As Paris has it’s Left Bank and New York has its Upper West Side, for decades Dublin’s bohemian quarter has been centered around Baggot Street and Leeson Street, fringed by the Grand Canal.

Among it’s familiars were four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and nearly every major Irish writer of the 19 century, including Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and even Samuel Beckett.

Along the way Lynch conjures long lost Dublin like a magician. He never forgets how proud the capital city is of its distinguished writers and he never forgets how disdainfully it usually treated them when they actually lived there.

Lynch clearly loves his subjects and this is no more apparent than when he disccuses playwright Brendan Behan. “We’ve a lot to thank the British for,” Behan tells the author one morning in Dublin in 1958. “Did you ever see such handsome houses or squares? As my bardic neighbor John Montague might say, you can feel the rhythm. Look at those railings. And the granite steps dancing in the sun, wouldn’t they make your granny skip?”

Love for the locality and the mad collection of intellectuals, chancers and hangers on that assembled there once, and still assemble there now, animates every page of this deeply affectionate, brilliant and brilliantly gossipy book.

Dufour Editions, $31.95.

Cold Eye Of Heaven

By Christine Dwyer Hickey

In novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey’s new book we meet 75-year-old Dubliner Farley, an old man at the close of his days reflecting over the events that shaped him.

It’s quite a trick to peel away the layers of experience to dig to the root of her subject and reveal what makes him tick, but Dwyer Hickey is equal to it. Along the way she recreates a vanished Dublin, it’s sights and sounds and it’s magical vernacular, in a conjuring trick that will beguile you from the first page. (Christine Dwyer Hickey will read from and sign copies of Cold Eye Of Heaven at The Irish Arts Center at 7:30 PM on Tuesday, September 24).

It’s instructive to watch how regret can grow and take over a life until it’s all that remains of a person, and Dwyer Hickey shows us how loneliness can be the outcome of a poor choice, and one that spreads around a life like fog.

Dwyer Hickey also has the skill to take her time, offering a leisurely portrait of a man in lyrical prose that creates his world and his legacy so vividly you’ll think that all that separates you from him is a page. This is ambitious work, elegantly crafted.

Atlantic Books, $7.99.

Overcoming Violence

By Johnston McMaster

Ireland’s history, even in recent times, has been ferociously violent. Over centuries a cycle of outrage and revenge has characterized the seemingly endless conflict between warring traditions intent on giving no quarter.

What to do in a stalemate that cannot ever be won? And what of Christianity, that promotes peace but has shown itself to be all to quick to add kindling to long simmering resentments? Those questions have exercised minds for centuries.

In Overcoming Violence author McMaster explores the roots of the sectarian violence in Ireland, wresting the message of compassion and love from the destructive theology of the Old Testament.

In particular he laments the Irish myth of redemptive violence, which was all too popular with both sides in the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil war. Nothing good comes from anger and insult and McMaster wants to reminds us of the fact. Bad theology cannot be an excuse for more violence.

So what is strong enough to take the place of a culture of violence centuries in the making? A new value system, McMaster argues, and a new ethics based on non-violence that includes peace and compassion. We don’t just need to demilitarize our society; we need to do the same with our mindsets and spirituality.

Faith offers the most devastating critique of violence, and it can only work when it counters the violent theology and God that has been carefully but erroneously erected in Ireland over four centuries.
Columba Press, $26.95.

Origin Theatre to wow at 1st Irish festival for the fifth time in New York

Jo Kinsella in 'For Love'

It's time to give Origin Theatre its due, because its fifth annual New York festival dedicated to Irish playwrights (the only one in the world, as it happens) is running from September 3 to October 1 in New York.

For Origin it’s been a catalogue of successes because the company is celebrating its 10th anniversary season, and this year the month-long festival features Irish plays and musicals from 11 contemporary Irish playwrights (plus Eugene O’Neill) in productions from Belfast, Dublin, Boston and New York. 

Each of the main stage shows of the 1st Irish, as the festival is called, will be presented at well known venues in the city like the Irish Rep, 59E59, the Irish Arts Center, the Cell and the Drilling Company. 

“Five years and we’ve featured 72 Irish playwrights to date. It’s amazing isn’t it,” Origin’s artistic director George Heslin tells the Irish Voice.

“It’s year five so now we’re getting a huge amount of applications for the festival from Irish companies, so this year we have a broader scope. It’s not just theater -- it’s musicals and other aspects of theater. This year we’ll stage panel discussions and related events too.”

Right on cue to offer his services and his star power is Origin’s newest honorary patron, the Irish and British actor Brendan Coyle (Downton Abbey). Coyle joined the company in May and will appear during the festival to announce an upcoming 1st Irish project in New York.

The Cell on West 23rd Street will be the venue that hosts the premiere of Hard Times, a new musical written by Black 47 front man Larry Kirwan that juxtaposes Irish and African-American folk traditions. Hard Times will run from September 12 to 29.

Other highlights include For Love by the gifted writer, director and performer Laoisa Sexton. It’s a play about three women navigating the choppy waters of Dublin nightlife. The play will have its world premiere at the Drilling Co. and run from September 25 to 30.

New York’s Double Decker Productions will present New York-based playwright Jimmy Kerr’s House Strictly Private, a dark comedy by this searingly funny writer set in rural Northern Ireland, at the Drilling Co. from September 26 to 30.

The Irish Arts Center will present the U.S. premiere of writer and performer (and Irish national treasure) Pat Kinevane’s Silent, one of the most talked-about shows in recent years. Produced by Ireland’s preeminent contemporary playwright theater company Fishamble, the Edinburgh Fringe winner arrives direct from its sold-out run at the Abbey and will play from September 6 to 23.

In another headline show, the critically acclaimed production of Marie Jones’ hilarious comedy Fly Me to the Moon will have its U.S. premiere at 59E59, and run from September 5 to 30. 

Alongside the plays there will be panel events that will include a night called Damn Yeats, We’ll Write Our Own Plays, which will be a guided conversation featuring 1st Irish artists about the unique perspectives, traditions and characters of Northern Ireland’s theatre scene dating back to the early 20th century. 

The talk will be hosted by NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, which is located at 1 Washington Mews off lower Fifth Avenue, on Thursday September 6 at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Another new aspect of the growing festival is an event titled 1st Irish on Film, from Stage to Screen, a new series that explores the challenges of adapting plays to film. 

Hosted by the New York Irish Center in association with the Irish Rep, the special event features the Irish Rep’s award-wining Ciaran O’Reilly, who will perform solo excerpts from Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa before introducing a screening of the 1998 film version starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon. The performance and screening will happen on September 7 and 21, both at 7:30 p.m.

There will also be a reading by author Tony Macaulay from his best-selling memoir Paperboy about growing up in West Belfast in the 1970s, hosted by the W.B. Yeats Society at the National Arts Club on September 17 at 6 p.m.

And for one night only there will be a special performance of celebrated Irish actor Garrett Keogh’s play Setanta Murphy, a drama that addresses themes of life and death, which will be presented by American Irish Historical Society in association with Origin Theatre Company on Tuesday September 11 at 7 p.m.

Visit www.1stIrish.org.

A look at books - Irish gems of short stories, novels and history

The Colours of Man
By Micheal O’Conghaile


Michael O’Conghaile is already a famous short story writer in the Irish language, but this new collection of his most celebrated works translated into English will introduce him to a larger (and I am certain appreciative) new audience.

A typical offering in this brilliantly funny collection of short stories is Death at a Funeral, where O’Conghaile illustrates just why he’s widely revered as an Irish language author. O’Conghaile’s works illustrate what the poet W.B. Yeats called the Irish preference for a swift current in both language and human interaction.

Just look at these opening lines and marvel at their economy and wit: “It would have been ridiculous for Eamon Bartley to stay ensconced in his coffin any longer. He couldn’t anyway. He was far too good to have died.”

O’Conghaile can keep this kind of thing up without ever faltering, and that hilarious streak of black absurdity runs through his best works, disarming you with its sheer good humor and smarts. But for all their surface dazzle, these are deceptively subtle works with quietly subversive intentions.

Possessing an insider’s knowledge of the rhythms of Irish rural life as he simultaneously satirizes them with an outsiders remove, O’Conghaile is one of the most interesting and prodigiously gifted Irish writers I have read in years.

Clo Iar-Chonnacht, $19.

The Absolutist
By John Boyne

Irish novelist John Boyne is already an Irish publishing phenomenon.  Best known for the hauntingly sad New York Times bestselling novel (and then film) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, his new offering The Absolutist is his most satisfying and affecting novel to date.

Set in September 1919, Boyne introduces us to shell shocked 21-year-old Tristan Sadler, who has just taken a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the young man who was his friend (and whom he fought alongside) during the Great War.

But Tristan has secrets, and it turns out the letters are not the real reason for his visit. Breaking down, he tells Will’s sister the true story of his friendship with her brother -- from their first meeting on the army training grounds at Aldershot to the wrenching finale in the trenches of northern France.

Boyne’s control of his material is masterful as he leads us into the smoking no-man’s-land of his hero’s scorched heart and soul.

Betrayal, jealously, pride and the stubborn refusal to embrace what you know will save you are all on display in this tragic and powerfully affecting new Irish novel.

Other Press, $16.95

Where Were You: Dublin Youth Culture & Street Style 1950-2000
By Garry O’Neill

Ravers, emos, goths, rockers, punks, new romantics, mods, skinheads, teddy boys -- depending what decade, Dublin knew them all.

Non-conformity has always had its own dress code, and now at last it has its own judicious chronicler in author Garry O’Neill (who for the record was once a member of one the most exalted underground youth groups of the last century – he was a teenage fan of The Smiths at their peak).

Beginning in 1950, O’Neill has carefully plundered the photo collections of hundreds of Dublin’s former scenesters to create this mammoth, funny and often moving tribute to the twin passions of pop music and street style.

Where Were You doesn’t intend to wallow in nostalgia, although it certainly invokes street styles and attitudes that are long gone. Instead it’s a vivid document of the hopes and aspirations of five generations of Dublin street culture.

Teddy boys are photographed in the grim Dublin landscape of the fifties. The loose-limbed swingers and hippies of the sixties stand in sharp and challenging contrast to the homespun city they parade through.

The seventies are commonly thought of as a lost decade for fashion, but the arresting diversity of style on the streets in those years shines through clearly in O’Neill’s fascinating book. The seventies scene begins with hippie relics and their voluminous flares, but it ends up with skinheads and punks and rockers revitalizing Dublin club land and music.

The eighties, one of the darkest economic decades in recent Irish history, still somehow manages to offer the widest range of alternative scenes in the last five decades, and O’Neill’s book captures the new romantics, the gender benders, the goths, the rockabillys and the newly emerging club kids who would lead the street style into the final decade of the 20th century.

O’Neill’s book is more than simply a record of the styles of each era. He has captured the hopes and dreams of 50 years of Irish teenage life. This book is a must have for anyone who grew up in Ireland between 1950 and 2000.

Hi Tone Books, $40.