Archives for May 2010

In yesterday's Guardian review, authors at this year's Hay-on-Wye festival were asked to come up with questions that journalists never ask them.

They are great questions like "Have you ever been in trouble with the police? (Ian Rankin) "Who do you think you are?" (John Banville) and "Are you fun to go on holiday with?" Andrew O'Hagan.

Roddy Doyle's is my favourite, including "Does your wife love you?" and "the internet says you have 2 children, but you claim to have 3".

It made me smile as I'm interviewing Yann Martel on stage in Belfast's Black Box this Friday at 5 for the Hay Festival in Belfast. I'm juggling reading his new book with Colin Bateman's latest and the Kevin & Sadie series of books, 40 years old this year, (for a BBC Radio Ulster doc I'm fronting in July- yes the 12th of!).

So I'm going to intersperse the interview with questions hopefully he has never been asked before. Maybe, have you ever been on a life raft with a tiger? Have you ever had a restraining order from Stephen Harper? (Martel has been sending books to the Canadian PM to read every two weeks since 2007) And marmite or marmalade on your toast in the morning?

You know what, maybe best to let him choose. Avoid awkwardness and possible libel action!

I've been chatting to Jonathan Allison today. The Derry raised academic, now Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is in Belfast to launch his Letters of Louis MacNeice which is published by Faber next week. 

The book, a mighty 768 page doorstop of a thing, has been silently rebuking me for the past few weeks to open it and read it. But there was a fear factor. A residual memory of school and exams and learning. Well I was wrong. The book is an incredible first hand account of the man behind the poetry. The husband, the father, the lover, the friend.

MacNeice's love of letter writing began as a child. A Thursday afternoon in 1914, the 7 year old MacNeice writes to his dad in the Rectory in Carrickfergus saying "My dear Dad, I got ten for conduct this morning. The kitten is alright...we gathered some apples this morning." Footnotes reveal the 5 year old child who saw the Titanic leave the Port of Belfast standing at the lough shore with his father in Carrickfergus.

The letters continue as he heads to school in Sherbourne in Dorset, onto Marlborough College, onto Oxford, where in a letter to his parents he says that Anthony Blunt, his school friend, had discussed his career with "a master at Marlboro' the other day and they agreed that it was obvious that I should write. This, of course, many people have said of me. Of course, it is a rotten career financially and I suppose one should begin by doing something else".

The "something else" was a career as a BBC producer. One of the most telling letters in the collection comes at the end.

His last letter to his daughter. He apologises for his "straggly handwriting" and says he is in bed with "a mystery temperature". He had been recording sound effects in a cave in Yorkshire for one of his BBC radio programmes when he took ill. The letter is dated the 20th August 1963. Louis MacNeice died on the 3rd September 1963. 

At the end of the book there's a note of a private correspondence between Corinna his daughter and Johnny about how she wasn't allowed in to the hospital to see her father before he died. Her aunt said that if he saw her her father would know it was serious."So I did not get to see him before he took off". 

If you thought you knew Louis MacNeice through his poetry, then read this for the man.

The Letters of Louis MacNeice selected and edited by Jonathan Allison is published in hardback by Faber

The Hay Festival in Belfast continues this year, from the 4th-6th June at the Black Box. It began last year with Hollywood legend Tony Curtis and creator of "The Wire" David Simon. I still get the odd flashback of me and Tony Curtis on the Ulster Hall stage, me not getting a word in for a full 15 minutes!

This year "Life of Pi" Booker winner Yann Martel, the science writer Simon Singh whose book "Fermat's Last Theorem" was the first maths book to be a number one bestseller and Hugh Ambrose the writer of the tv blockbuster "The Pacific".

I'll be in conversation with Yann Martel on Friday the 4th June at 5pm. He's got a new novel out "Beatrice and Virgil". More animals feature in this new book, after the menagerie of animals on that lifeboat in Life of Pi, this time, a donkey and a monkey, a dark allegory on the Holocaust. 

Only got a copy yesterday and aim to start reading it tonight, which means putting aside the new Colin Bateman novel for a week or so. Bateman won't mind. 

One of the most talked about pieces of children's theatre opens at the Belfast Children's Festival tonight. Minor Matters. It's about a homeless man, now living on the streets after he loses everything, his family, his farm and his home.

It's aimed at a 6+ audience but children are used to more difficult issues. Former Children's Laureate Jacqueline Wilson writes about tough subjects, including divorce, adoption and mental illness while another former children's laureate Michael Rosen has written about bereavement aimed, like this theatre piece at aged 6+, after the death of his own son in "Michael Rosen's Sad Book".

In Minor Matters the Swiss actor Peter Rinderknecht asks "what do we need to be happy?" Peter, from Zurich, says he has done this show over 200 times. It's not depressing. It's about telling a story.

It's on in the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday night at 7.30pm. Are you sending your children? If so, let me know what they say about it.

The late Liverpool Irish writer JG Farrell's name is all across the papers today. His novel "Troubles" has won the Lost Booker prize. I'm talking to his brother Richard and one of the judges Rachel Cooke tonight. But I found this while doing some research. An incredible story about a woman called Pauline Foley, who saw him die. She had taken her children out for a walk near their County Cork home in August 1979, when she saw the writer, who was fishing, slip in the water and drown. She only spoke out about it recently and her first hand account is chilling and painful.

I was Ttv'd yesterday. It's a technique the Belfast based visual artist John Baucher aka Moochin Photoman uses. Ttv means Through the Viewfinder. He works with a digital camera and viewfinder from an old medium format camera. So he's holding two cameras when he TtVs.

John came into the Arts Extra studio last night during the live show to talk about a TtV exhibition he's working on which will feature faces from Belfast and Beyond as well as work from ttv'ers from around the world. 

That's me in studio there on the right.

On the left the team, Conor Garrett closest to camera, looking very serious (not like him), Noel Russell my producer in the middle and furthest from camera our audio engineer John Simpson, who every night just before I start the show tells me the web cam is on and not to pick my nose!

If you're interested in being TtV'd too, then you can get in touch with Moochin Photoman for an exhibition he's putting together for the Waterfront Hall in July.

And the big thing about the exhibition is the TtV Takeway on the last night, the 24th July, when people can take their portraits away. They'll all be held up by velcro so you can peel them off the wall and take them home.

The idea behind it is about the sharing nature of the internet. John tells me it's the biggest exhibition he's ever done and the biggest of the TtV technique anywhere in the world.

You can email him at [email protected]. 

This is his blog which gives you an idea of what catches his eye on a daily basis. So if an enthusiastic man with a odd looking contraption (technical name) and a camera asks if he can take your photo, say yes.

 He really is a one off.

Last night the UK City of Culture 2013 presentation bid for Derry~Londonderry came across the Glenshane Pass to Belfast City Hall for a glitzy media presentation. Some have said that the distance between Derry and Belfast is shorter than the distance between Belfast and Derry. Those chips on shoulders may still be there but the message last night was this is a bid for the whole of Northern Ireland, not just the host city.

The Lord Mayor of Belfast Naomi Long, Mayor of Derry Paul Fleming, and the First and Deputy First Ministers Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness were there, and each threw their weight behind the bid. I was mc-ing the event and found myself playing musical chairs on the podium. As each speaker got up I took their seat, (you know where this is going!!!) and when it came to Peter Robinson's turn he thanked everyone for being there and remarked that I was the second woman to take his seat in as many weeks! It got the biggest laugh of the night!

The bid is due in this Friday the 21st May, and for the person taking it over there's a seat booked on the plane and, belt and braces for that ash cloud, a place on the ferry.

It gets a big send off in Derry tomorrow night. It's going to be some party but the work is only just starting. The promise of the bid proves the cultural riches here. Bill Drummond said to me recently that there's an assumption that London is a cultural centre but really in his opinion it gets things handed to it. He's more interested in places outside the metropolis that have created their own culture. That's where the real creativity is at.

For the judges of the City of Culture 2013 they have a hard job as the four bidding cities all believe they have it.

He's known as Bateman now, having lost the Colin after being re branded by his publishers a few years ago. But I can't call him Bateman when he's sitting opposite me, so I opt to call him Colin. 

The Bangor based author and screenwriter was in today to talk to me about his new book "The Day of the Jack Russell", in which Mystery Man, the owner of the fictional No Alibis bookstore (yes there is a real No Alibis Bookstore in Belfast and, no, Mystery Man isn't David Torrans it's owner) combines book selling with solving crimes in the Belfast area.

Anyway Colin, or Bateman, is rightly dubbed "prolific" as he has not only finished the third in the Mystery Man series, also a children's book about ecological adventures, and he has just finished his first stage play. It's called "National Anthem" and will be premiered by Ransom Productions and directed by Rachel O'Riordan at next year's Belfast Festival at Queens 2011.

He didn't want to reveal too much, but I got out of him that it has got a cast of four and the theatre company is working with a composer for bespoke music.

It's the first time he's written for theatre. He's done screenplays, creating Murphy's Law with James Nesbitt but this is his first foray onto the stage. He says he likes David Mamet's plays and is nervously excited to see how this debut will be received.

So yesterday afternoon I checked into the fictional Scarborough Hotel. The location was the very real Ramada Encore in Belfast but I was there for a unique staging of Fiona Evan's play Scarborough by Belfast based theatre company Prime Cut Productions. 

The event literally began from the moment I walked in the hotel door. I had to "check in", was told that I would be in room 241 and could I possibly wait a moment as there was a bit of a delay with housekeeping? As myself and the other "guests" were escorted to the lift, there was a bit of a heated word exchange between the hotel manager and a young woman dusting, a member of staff at the "Scarborough" who was obviously disgruntled about something. But what? I was loving it. (This was, I was told later, Step Up Two, an outreach project directed by Louise Lowe to support Scarborough)

As I stood in the lift with the other members of the audience I wondered what we were all letting ourselves in for? I felt nervous. Then the door of 241 was opened and we were told to enjoy our stay. We walked in and a couple, a man and woman, were sitting on the bed, half dressed, the detritus of a dirty weekend, condom wrappers, underwear, alcopops, scattered around the room.

I admit it was very odd, and I felt a total voyeur, as I carefully manoeuvred my way past actress Kathy Kiera Clarke in her slip and sat down. Kathy was playing Lauren, Brian Markey her boyfriend Daz. As the drama unfolded, Daz turns out to be her pupil, about to turn 16, hence the hotel room and the weekend away and she is his PE teacher Miss Potts. That's Kathy in the picture opposite.

After 45 minutes of watching their relationship fall apart, we're taken back to the lift and to another room. And this is where Prime Cut's unique staging of the play really kicked in for me, as my fellow Scarborugh guets talked and argued about what we had just seen. It was amazing. And as we walked into another room I saw another couple was waiting for us, a mirror image of what we had just seen, with the same text, only this time the pupil is a 15 year school girl Beth played by Lisa Hogg and her PE teacher is a 29 year old man Aidan played by Paul Kennedy. This is Lisa and Paul.

Afterwards in the lift, between floor six and ground floor, my fellow audience members covered some of the biggest issues in life, morality, sex, gender, and how different attitudes are when its a young boy having an affair with an older woman rather than when its the other way around.

I checked out of the "Scarborough" after 90 minutes and came out into the sunshine, exhilarated. It got me thinking about the bravery of such a staging. Set against a background of funding cuts and grants being slashed, and an unpredictable future for all arts groups across the UK and Ireland, there were only 12 audience members per performance. 

Congratulations to Prime Cut and director Emma Jordan for taking the risk to put the play on in this setting, for not the biggest of box office returns.

Just to let you all know about the new BBC Northern Ireland Arts portal. Check it out here. And let me know what you think.

I got into a taxi earlier today to go interview the actress Imogen Stubbs. The taxi driver was listening to Hugo Duncan and I found myself tapping along to the music as I was reading up on Lady Nunn (her official title since her husband Trevor Nunn was made a Lord). I then felt a bit car sick but put this down to reading in the back seat of the taxi rather than Hugo's choice of music!!!!! Honestly I am not a good traveller and usually always go for the front seat so I can scan the horizon!

When I looked up we were on the motorway, heading into the countryside for my first visit to the Theatre at the Mill. I asked the taxi driver could I put the window down, still feeling a bit wobbly, and as the wind blew in, I saw a tattered banner which had one word, Mill, slung haphazardly over the roof of a big pre fab. Are we here?

But he drove past and turned into Newtownabbey's impressive new venue at the back of the restored Mossley Mill. And even better, there was Imogen Stubbs waiting for me outside. She's here to play Amanda Wingfield in a touring production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. She tells me she and the cast just made it here last night in one of the windows of non ash cloud disruption. Not so for the BBC Radio 4 producer she had arranged to meet this morning in Belfast to record interviews for a programme she's fronting on exam pressure on contemporary teenagers. The producer was grounded in London. And while she says she hasn't got the knack right yet for being a presenter, ie asking questions, "I'm too quick jumping in with my own opinion" she says, her passion is utterly engaging. Whether it's A levels, young women and binge drinking, the metropolitan arts world versus regional theatre, "I'm here aren't I?" putting her money where her mouth is, or why there isn't a Play for Today on the BBC any more, has me wishing she doesn't have to go and stand under a light on the stage for the techinical boys to check the cues for later or my taxi isn't waiting outside to take me back into Belfast. And yes Hugo is still on the radio when I get back in. "Uncle Shugo loves you".

You can see Imgoen Stubbs on stage at the Theatre at the Mill from tonight until saturday 9th May.