Archives for January 2010

Just to follow on from my last blog, it seems that Belfast playwright Sam Thompson idolised Orson Welles.

So much so that when he heard that Welles was in Dublin at the same time as he was, (Thompson's "Over the Bridge" transferred to Dublin from Belfast in 1960, Welles was playing Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight at the Gaiety) he said he was going to meet his hero.

According to Jimmy Ellis, the two of them got tickets to go to a matinee . Afterwards they asked to see the great man but Welles wouldn't come out of his dressing room.

Cut to a drinking establishment in Dublin later that same night. Thompson and Ellis are there. Welles is there too, with his friend the Irish theatre impressario Hilton Edwards.

Somehow a strong exchange of words between Sam and Orson kicks off, which involves Ellis having to physically force himself between the two. No punches are thrown, but Jimmy said that he and Thompson were pushed across the room by the sheer bulk of the man.

Afterwards Thompson said that even though Welles had really annoyed him he just couldn't bring himself to hit his idol.

Fifty years ago tomorrow on Tuesday the 26th January 1960 a play opened in Belfast which shook the theatre world here to the core.

The play was "Over the Bridge" by former shipyard worker Sam Thompson. He started writing it in 1955, set in the shipyards he had worked in since he was 14. The play was a bald study in the clash of trade union officials faced with sectarian conflict.

It would be nearly four years before Thompson's play was accepted by a theatre. It's said that when Thompson met the actor James Ellis, then the Head of Productions at the Ulster Group Theatre, he remarked that nobody would touch the play with a bargepole.

Ellis had the bargepole. And started rehearsals. But with just a fortnight to go before it opened, the play was banned. It made front page news.

When Ellis heard that the Board of the theatre had withdrawn the play citing that "it is the policy of the Ulster Group Theatre to keep political and religious controversies off our stage", he did what he had to do to keep said controversies on "our stage". He resigned, and left the Group theatre, along with many others, to set up a new company, Over the Bridge Productions, which staged the play in the Empire Theatre Belfast on the 26th January 1960.

Apparently Brendan Behan sent Sam Thompson a congratulatory telegram on the night. Like Behan, Thompson trained as a painter and spoke out passionately against the system before becoming a playwright.

Do you ever wish for a time machine to have been there that night? The closest I can get to it is talking to the people who were. James Ellis is coming over from his home in England to talk to me about this quite extraordinary time in Northern Ireland's cultural history for an Arts Extra special tomorrow. 

And in a kind of time travel, joining him will be Belfast playwright Martin Lynch who has updated the original play for 2010 which will be premiered in the Spring.

By the way, if you're in and around East Belfast tomorrow, to mark the day an Ulster History Circle plaque is being unveiled at the location of the house where Sam Thompson was born. It will take place at 11am at Montrose Street South, Ballymacarett.

And James Ellis is the man doing the unveiling, opening the curtain once again on a local writer who told it as it was when politics and religion clashed.

I was up in my hometown of Derry yesterday to chair a public forum about the city's bid for the UK City of Culture 2013. Now operating under the official unofficial title Derry~Londonderry (not a stroke in sight!), the city is one of 14 in the competition now. Early next month it could be shortlisted to 3, possibly 5, and the winning city will be announced in June.

There was alot of excitement and energy in the room, we were all given a glossy brochure "Cracking the Cultural Code", the forward was a passionately written letter by Seamus Heaney one of the city's cultural champions, "that the omens are encouraging" he writes. There were speeches, Q & A and what were termed break out groups when, for about an hour, the people there were able to air their views on the initial bid.

Derry City Council is leading the bid, along with ILEX (the urban regeneration company and the Strategic Investment Board for Northern Ireland.) But this was the first time a wider arts group of artists, film makers, curators and administrators were consulted.

Some people there seemed genuinely encouraged by the bid. Some not so, they said that they were worried, angry even, that not enough was done at an earlier stage to talk to them.

It has been said that the bid was rushed. That much was admitted yesterday. And while there was a residual feeling of "why talk now, we might not even get shortlisted in a few weeks, what's the point", it was the first time I have ever seen such a group of people come together to talk about a cultural vision.

Derry City Council was criticised after IMPACT 92, the year-long festival of arts and culture in the early nineties, for not keeping the momentum going in the years that followed.

18 years and a new generation later the chance has come again. Even though one of the teenagers at yesterday's event said she had only heard about the City of Culture bid the day before, was told to come along to the workshop and "be positive"! 

Now I don't know if Derry will be shortlisted but, as was said to me yesterday, when Belfast didn't get shortlisted for the European Capital of Culture 2008, it turned out to be the most successful failure ever. Belfast and Northern Ireland got a funding windfall for culture and the arts, and many of the new builds we're seeing today came from that initial desire to be a cultural capital.

I'm not saying let's aim to be a successful failure, nor am I ignoring the voices anxious to see the bid work, but worried that the moment has gone. Maybe we should look at the very powerful lines from Heaney's "The Cure at Troy" quoted on the front cover of the bid 

"So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells"

On tonight's programme I tried to persuade Simon Armitage the chair of the judging panel for the TS Eliot Prize 2009 to reveal the winner ahead of the 7pm announcement.

Armitage is a very funny man, the kind who wears his writing skills lightly. From being a supermarket shelf stacker to a probation officer he has lived. And all, apart from a brief stint in Portsmouth England and Massachusets US of A, he has lived mainly in his native Huddersfield.

This is the man who, with no interest in classical music, wrote a new narration to the Oscar winning animated film "Peter and the Wolf" which played at the Royal Festival Hall last month while three years ago his dreams of being a rock star were finally realised when he and a friend set up the band The Scaremongers. His dad had suggested the name Mid Life Crisis.

So I reckoned if anyone was going to chuck the 7pm embargo out the window along with the rock n roll television etc it would be him.

No.

We started talking at around quarter to 7, he was at the ceremony, worried that he had only another 15 minutes of having 10 friends, ie the 10 poets shortlisted for the great poetry prize. So we talked about the prize, the money (15K), the recession (15K would come in handy), the reality of selling poetry books these days, I mentioned Michael Longley and his annoyance that the major book stores never promote poetry books at the front of the store and he has to rummage through the shelves to find his own. Anyhow, bottom line is I knew Simon knew. He knew the winner's name. He had chosen him. Or her. And I hoped that he would tell.

We were chatting away but secretly I was watching the clock thinking if I just kept him talking to as close to 7 as possible, the time the winner would be announced, he had to let the name slip. I mean what's a few minutes? And come on, we had two Irish poets in the running, Sinead Morrissey and Eileen Ni Chuilleanain. 

And another Irish poet, Derry woman Colette Bryce was on the judging panel. I felt with that trinity of poetesses all Simon had to do was cough and in the cough say the name. Come on. Easy. What's a few minutes on an embargo???

But he didn't. So I find out after we go off air that the winner is Philip Gross for his poetry book The Water Table. Water eh, watertight more like where Simon Armitage is concerned.

If you ever need someone to keep a secret then Simon, this grounded, modest, Huddersfield born and bred writer and lead singer is your man.

Met Bryn Terfel this morning. The internationally renowned Welsh bass baritone is in Belfast for a concert with the Ulster Orchestra tomorrow night.

I was due to interview him at 11.15 this morning for Sunday's Sounds Classical. And with no one to look after the child at 11.14, I rushed in to BBC reception with two-year-old daughter and nappy bag in one arm, Bryn's latest cd "Bad Boys" in the other, which I had just taken out of the car cd player. The two-year-old had just given it a favourable review . "I like that music". But she also loves Aqua's Barbie Girl.

Bryn was sitting in reception, and as I babbled at him, 'hello I'm doing the interview with you, this is my daughter, thank you for coming in, OMG it's Bryn Terfel in front of me, don't panic', I was saved by my phone ringing. As I took the call, Bryn, let's put him in context, oh yes, only one of the world's leading opera singers right now, started entertaining my wee girl with silly voices and animal impressions. 

When he offered to carry the nappy bag upstairs to the studio and continued to entertain her by pulling comedy faces all the way up the three floors, I thought if the New York Met, La Scala and the Royal Opera at Covent Garden no longer wanted his services he could have a big future in children's entertaining.

His album may be called "Bad Boys" but he's really a big softie.

A French film with subtitles set in a prison. I have to say my heart felt as grey and heavy as the leaden Belfast sky above me as I went to a press screening earlier today of "A Prophet". Walking past posters of "It's Complicated" (which yes I really do want to see) I wasn't sure how the next 2 and 1/2 hours (yes 2 & 1/2 hours) were going to pass. How I would rather be watching Meryl Streep and Alex Baldwin kid about in a rom com for an hour or two. Well more fool me. "A Prophet" is stunning. And everything I would normally not warm to. It's violent, bloody, shocking. And beautiful. Move over Michael Corleone. There's a new godfather in town. We're reviewing it on ArtsExtra tonight.

It opens at the Queens Film Theatre on the 22nd January and is there until the 4th February.

After the news that Iris Robinson is suffering from acute depression, I was struck by reading the words of one of my favourite writers about the hell she has been going through these past few weeks because of her own depression. 

Writer Marian Keyes. Her books have helped me through some rubbishy times in my life, made me howl with laughter, cry big fat tears and generally feel better for reading them.

But while Keyes' writing was making me feel better, it seems cruel that she can't do the same for herself. Writing on her website this month she says that she has been "laid low with crippling depression". It's a very candid piece of writing. "I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't write, I can't read, I can't talk to people".

This wasn't the woman I met a few years ago in her house in Dun Laoghaire. I was there to record a major interview with her for the radio arts show. And she was in flying form. Full of anecdotes, the sofa she and I were sitting on was bought from the sales of the first book, she kept saying "thanks a million" every time I said I loved her work, which was, on reflection, a bit too often, and she wasn't fazed when our sound engineer asked could she sign a copy of one of her books for his daughter and proceeded to bring out a rucksack full of her back catalogue!

The response to Marian Keyes' posting has been as expected, a mail box full of hundreds of wellwishers sending her speedy recovery good wishes and the bizarre one saying they wish they could rub her back (!)

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Iris Robinson is now getting acute psychiatric treatment from the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, the revelations about her private life have opened the floodgates to jokes, songs and doctored images of The Graduate.

But the strangest cultural shift has come in the form of an internet campaign to get Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson into the download top 40, Apparently it only takes 1500 sales.

As of writing this it looks like it's working.

While the winners and losers of the Rage against the Machine versus X factor for the Christmas number 1 were obvious, this latest one isn't so clear.

Is it a step too far? A use of cultural democracy that isn't that funny? And will it just be Simon & Garfunkel the only ones really laughing?..... all the way to the bank.