Almost Planxty

What ‘s in a name? Well. when the names are Donal Lunny, Andy Irvine, Liam O’Flynn and Paddy Glackin it means a full house at the Cathedral Quarter Festival Marquee.

Three quarters of Planxty (two of the hippies and the civil servant) were joined by one of the country’s finest traditional fiddlers for a night that was about more than nostalgia for the 1970s (which would have been remembered by a good many of the audience) but about the music and song that so excited us back then and how it still has the power to entertain and entrance.

We can still marvel at the interplay between the strings of Lunny and Irvine, O’Flynn’s mastery of the pipes and whistle – as authentic as you can get – and the Donegal roots of Dubliner Glackin’s fiddle playing.

Lunny, Irvine, O'Flynn and Glackin at the Cathedral Quarter Arts festival on April 9, 2012.

Amongst the instrumental highlights, there was the two hornpipes from O’Neill’s 1001 Tunes got feet a-tapping, a few of West Clare’s John Kelly-related tunes, and a stirring set of reels to end the night off. See below.

And of course, there were the songs that are imbedded in our psyche –  Arthur McBride and The West Coast of Clare, Donal Lunny’s version of Siubhán Ní Dhuibhir, a song he learned from his Donegal mother, Mary Rogers, to the highlight of the evening, Andy’s ethereal version of a song he learned from Bridget Tunney from Beleek in County Fermanagh. As I Roved Out.

But there was humour too. Irvine’s paean to the heady days of the folk revival in Dublin, O’Donoghue’s, heavily featured references to the recently-deceased Banjo Barney McKenna who would often lead the musical shenanigans at the Merrion Row pub despite downing a skinful of drink.

“They carried him bodily out to the jacks, he emptied his bladder and they carried him back, he swallowed his pint and he was back on track, how the f*** does he do it?!”

Although I would have preferred to hear a slow air from O’Flynn and a livelier audience, this was still a gig to savour.

 

A widening Gulf?

I was very interested to read an article about how google have left the name of the Persian Gulf unnamed on google maps.

Why would they do that? It’s politics, stoopid. Oh, and Arab money.

Given the rapidly warming Cold War between “the West” and its Arab alllies and Iran, propaganda is becomingly increasingly important. If you are going to attack a country, it is vital that you portray that country as being without saving grace and most importantly, without a history.

For Caucasians, African history only began with the arrival of white Europeans man and their grand colonialist enterprises.

Darkest Africa had to be enlightened by the superior military, financial and religious  hegemony of the white man so a clean slate had to be made of the colonised lands.

Put another way, Africans had to be treated like “noble savages” to satisfy the greed, the hunger for power and the racism of developed nations.

We are familiar with this in Ireland. From the writings of early Romans to the anti-Irish jokes of Punch and The Comedians on ITV, the Irish have been labelled as savages, stupid, thick, without a vast supply of myths to make up for the lack of a “real” history.

For instance, how many Irish kings can you name?

The replacing of the Irish language with English was also part of the great colonial scheme from the statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 onwards.

The Ordnance Survey in the 1830s gave every townland in Ireland an official name in English as part of that project. When you brand a place as English rather than Irish, or English rather than Swahili, or French rather than Arabic, it is a way of sweeping away a past native identity with a new counterfeit one, replacing the authentic with the synthetic.

The Anonymous Gulf

The Persian Empire was in the 5th century BC the largest and most powerful empire in human history up until that point.

In a lecture of 1948, Will Durant described how “for the first time in known history an empire almost as extensive as the United States received an orderly government, a competence of administration, a web of swift communications, a security of movement by men and goods on majestic roads, equaled before our time only by the zenith of Imperial Rome.”

But Persian history – and the mind-set that comes with it – cannot be allowed for if you want to emasculate the current regime in Iran, a country with the second largest gas reserves in the world, a commodity becoming more and more important in a developed and developing world learning to depend less of petrol.

That’s what google is up to but they are not alone. The Parisian museum, the Louvre, is reported to have dropped the word Persian from their map guides at a time when they are hoping to open a museum in the Arab state of Abu Dhabi.

Of course, there has been discord became Persians/Iranians and Arabs throughout history and the latest battleground is the stretch of water between the two, with Arabs inventing “the Arabian Gulf” in an attempt at toponymic theft.

That google is willing to play a part in this charade is disgraceful.

CQAF: Alexis Sayle


When I lived in Belfast city centre, I used to walk to work listening to my iPod.

People passing by would stare at the nutcase with the headphones giggling to himself as he walked along.

The reason for the perambulatory mirth was one Mr Alexi Sayle whose collection of short stories, My Lucky Pig, was jostling for favourite status between Snow Patrol and Dolly Parton on the transistor radio’s great grand-child.

Sayle, I always considered a hit and miss standup comedian. Doing comedy is hard enough but doing comedy and whacky and politics is trebly hard to sustain, but the stories in the Liverpudlian’s book of short stories verged on, and then tumbled into, the brilliant.

Inventive and scary and really funny, the stories meandered from the tale of a cross-dresser out to kill a cyclist, a man who has found the cure for death, a dodgy, murderous voice-over and the Only Man Stalin was Afraid of.

The deceased Russian dictator also made an appearance last night too as Sayle read from his autobiography, Stalin Ate My Homework, at the Assembly Rooms in Belfast as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival.

The title refers to the comic’s ultra-Communist upbringing in the sidestreets of Liverpool in the 1950s/60s. This was a family where the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, the USSR was everything any self-respecting country should aspire to be and that meant that Alexei has a somewhat unorthodox upbringing.

Everything other children enjoyed had to go through an ideological dialectic before it was decided whether young Alexei could participate.

Last night he read a chapter from the book, describing the imminent arrival of Walt Disney’s Bambi at the local cinema. As Uncle Walt was a strong supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunt of the 1950s, Alexei was banned from seeing the cartoon but to make up for it, he was taken to see Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, a historical film about the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky.

It was while watching this that Alexei knew he would never be like the other boys!

His father didn’t support Liverpool or Everton, he supported Moscow Dinamo.

Christmas was time to watch the Russian State Circus on TV and a concert usually meant going to listen to the Red Army Ensemble, “a group of KGB torturers who swayed jauntily and sang songs about the Volga.”

In his rebellious teenage years, Alexei became a Maoist to wage ideological battles across the breakfast table, taking up the cudgels for Chairman Mao against his parent’s espousal of Stalin.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, how did his parents feel about Communism now, someone asked during the Q&A session after the reading. Sayle quoted JK Galbraith who said “When the facts change, I change my mind” but in a cult like Communism, it’s almost impossible to change. All his mother would say is “mistakes were made.”

Sayle is obviously a well-read man, and isn’t shy about saying which comedians he thinks are “shit” – Alan Davies, Michael McIntyre – and he seems a little despondent about comedy.

He’s also scathing about news or, as his psychologist friend calls it: “what the personality disorders have been up to today.” S

ayle’s memoirs are hilarious and intelligent and tender. When I got home from the gig, Alan Carr was on TV asking the girls from Made in Chelsea if the liked “a bit of rough”.
The contrast with Sayle was heartbreaking. You have to weep for TV comedy sometimes.

Stalin Ate My Homework by Alexei Sayle is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £8.95 for the paperback (2011)

Snubbed by the Sindo!

This week, for the first time in my life and I expect, for the last time, I wrote a letter to the Sunday Independent.

I know. I shouldn’t have, but hey, I enjoyed writing it and the fact that it wasn’t published doesn’t take away from the pleasure.

It was in response to an article by Declan Lynch, the guy with huge personal “issues” surrounding the Irish language.

His latest missive was in last week’s Sindo wherein he claimed that the 1.77 million people who claimed they could speak Irish in the 2011 census were LIARS.

I thought the article was, em, stupid, so this is what I had to say:

With reference to Declan Lynch’s hyper-ventilating article about the figure for Irish speakers as attested to by the latest census returns, following the headline “Overwhelmingly, we Irish prefer the lie” we are told that Declan says “The one true function of the Irish language is that it shows the vast dishonesty of the Gael.”

It should be pointed out that all those “Gaels” who stated they could speak Irish on the census from were, ipso facto, telling the truth.

It was Ireland’s English-speakers who told the lies as Declan sees it, so the headline should have read “Overwhelmingly, we English-speakers prefer the lie”, which to my mind, is a more accurate reflection of the state of our linguistic affairs.

Now, Deccie does have a point. The 1.77 million figure probably is an exaggeration but Declan bocht didn’t come up with an exhaustive, forensic analysis of the figures, he just ranted and raved and his colleague’s story about speaking Irish to get a drink was roysht out of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.

Take Irish speakers to task, certainly, but do it with at least a cogent argument.

A Titanic play but this time it’s personal

The Titanic being fitted out

If you’re expecting a Julian Fellowes-type history of the Titanic, then you might end up a tad disappointed by Jimmy McAleavey’s new play Titans which has more to do with horror films and video games and Dante’s Inferno than with Downtown Abbey. Personally, I can’t wait to see it.

The hour-long drama will perambulate around the new landmark Titanic building, an approach which posed a number of problems for the Belfast playwright.

“It’s a great discipline,” he says euphemistically, “a really interesting way of doing things but it is difficult.

“The first difficulty was the route. Secondly, the play is an hour long but we have to have four audiences coming in at 25-minute intervals and then it had to be obviously about the Titanic and about the building, I had to respond to the building in some way.”

And if you think that is complicated, you should see the plot.

The Titanic Belfast

Titans is about a slightly deranged man of the cloth who enlists the audience’s help in order to enter a kind of underworld in the  building which will allow him to board the Titanic after the centenary.

The play is full of occult learning to do with ships and Jimmy says it deals with Biblical myth and Irish myth and Belfast myths.

“I think it’s part Hammer House of Horror, part Doctor Who for Adults” he says. “It features a kind of quest so bits of the play might remind you of Dan Brown.

It’s really McAleveyan, then, quite bonkers, I suggest but the supernatural aspect of the play has, of course, its roots in the reality, in the way the Titanic story has been interpreted.

“Indeed,” agrees Jimmy. “I see it as a passage into Hell and through Hell and through Purgatory and they reach a kind of heaven in it.”

“To some, it was God punishing Man for his hubris, for his arrogance in building a ship that was too big, which some people called “unsinkable”.

“The play responds to that, it celebrates the Godly part of Man, the struggle of man against God, it celebrates that.

“Another thing was, after I had written the first draft, I remembered years ago my uncle telling me the story of the serial number on the side of the ship, which, it was said, if you put a mirror to it, said “No Pope Here”.

“It wasn’t the sectarianism that struck me at the time but the idea that occult practices were going on in Harland and Wolff!

“So in my play, I have a clergyman who is a member of the Ancient Hermetic Order of Shipwrights, a secret brotherhood within Harland and Wolff who practiced a kind of occult religion and one of their gods was Vulcan who fashioned souls from fire, the Great Smith.

“Another of their Gods was Noah who saved mankind for God who had grown tired of his creation and another was Adam, the great rebel who eats of the tree of knowledge so, again, it is about this kind of over-reaching the Titanic was criticised for.

Needless to say, the group of “super-masons” didn’t actually exist, but it did occur to Jim that it was the type of club Belfast men got involved in!

Having said that, McAleavey is aware that the Titanic building audience might not be a typical theatre audience, the type who would have gone to the OMAC, and that is why he has created “a genre plot” which he hopes will scare people a little.

“The plot is recognisable, I think, from things like Dante’s Divine Comedy or the Aeneid or the story of Orpheus but all that stuff has been naturalised in video games, with different levels and obstacles and weapons and symbols so the play should be familiar to a lot of people, from those who have played Dungeons and Dragons to those who have read Dante’s Inferno, you know,” says Jimmy.

So if you want history, read a book or watch a documentary. What Jimmy McAleavey has done is to create a play by using his skill and considerable imagination.

As he says himself, you couldn’t rival the exhibition that’s in the new Titanic building nor could you rival some of the images from the movies that have been made about the ill-fated ship, but while Titans is most definitely a work of fiction, McAleavey has a personal, factual interest in the Titanic story, through his mother-in-law.

“One of the characters in my play is my mother-in-law’s grandfather who was on Titanic and this really is his story.

Belfast playwright Jimy McAleavey

“I can’t tell you too much about the story because I don’t want to give too much away, but he was a trades unionist who was a close friend of both Jim Larkin and James Connolly and his name was John Quinn.

“John had been blacklisted after the 1907 Dock Strike but he eventually managed to get a job on Titanic suing false papers. In the play, John Quinn is in Heaven!

So there you have it folks, a typical McAleveyan take on the Titanic, played out by a wonderful cast list of Maggie Cronin, James Doran, Vincent Higgins, Paul Kennedy, Ian McElhinney, Carol Moore and Antoinette Morelli, skillfully put together by Paula McFetridge for Kabosh, which can be seen at Titanic Belfast on these dates:

Sunday 8th April – Wednesday 15th 2012 (excluding Tuesday 14th)

Times: 7.25pm, 8.00pm, 8.40pm and 9.15pm
Duration: 1 hour

Tickets £13 available from the Belfast Welcome Centre on 028 9024 6609 or visit www.gotobelfast.com to book online.

Review: Melmoth the Wanderer

You know you’ve had a great theatrical night out when, the following day, you find yourself singing songs you’d heard the night before. And repeating lines delivered in funny accents that made you laugh. And talking about the scary bits. And the funny bits. And the magical bits. And the couldn’t-quite-grasp bits.

So driving to work singing There’s no Business Like Show Business and All Things Bright and Beautiful this morning transported me back to Big Telly’s production of Melmoth the Wanderer by the Irish author (and great uncle of Oscar Wilde) Charles Maturin.

Maturin wouldn’t recognise his own work, however, – I don’t think Kelis’ Milkshake was mentioned in the original 1820 novel – but he would be equally thrilled and perplexed by what writer Nicola McCartney and director Zoë Seaton have done with his work.

Modern audiences have loved Melmoth on its month-long wandering across Ireland (and Glasgow) and it’s the pity of live drama that is can be so ephemeral, once its done, it’s done, though this production deserves the kind of longevity the central character has.

The play has everything.

Melmoth à la Faust, has sold his soul in exchange for immortality, international roaming and hypnotic charm. (No, it’s not about Cliff Richard).

All Melmoth has to do in return is tempt others to the dark side and there is no shortage of applicants, listed in the programme as “people on the edge of despair, like the sane guy locked up in a madhouse, the illegitimate one hidden in a monastery, the gullible couple promised a huge inheritance,” and then, out of the blue, “he meets an innocent, happy girl, who’s grown up alone on a desert island and believes her father is a tree … only one of them will survive.”

All presented by five eejits who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with different stories unfolding like a Gothic Canterbury Tales, with all kinds of theatre, physical, tragic, absurd, comic with a touch of ballet, all wonderfully intermeshed to tell its moral tale.

The comedy was hilarious, the scary bits were, well, scary while the opening of the second half, where Melmoth meets the wild child, was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.

Everyone involved in this, BIg Telly’s 25 anniversary year, should puff out their chests with pride. from the actors – Shelly Atkinson, Colm Gormley, Dennis Herdman, Claire Lamont and Keith Singleton – to the unseen creative minds behind the masks (John Wright), the life-size puppets, the sound, set and costume design and everyone else. (Buy a programme for the credits, they’re only £1.)

Oh, and there’s some audience involvement.

So there you have it. Melmoth the Wanderer is a night of total theatre and and an unforgettable experience.

 

* Melmoth the Wanderer runs until Sunday 25 March with shows at  7.45pm,  plus two matinee shows at  2.30pm

on Saturday and 3.30pm on Sunday.

You can book tickets by telephoning 028 9038 1081 (Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm)

 

 

 

 

 

McSherry, Rynne, Hennessey and Scanlon

(L-r_ Donogh Hennessey, Pauline Scanlon, John McSherry, Pádraig Rynne

 

What makes An Droichead on the Ormeau Road so special as a music venue?

Firstly, it’s the welcome you get there. The An Droichead bunch are amongst the friendliest you’ll get at any venue in Ireland. Take a bow, Jim, Claire and of course, Úna.

Secondly, it’s BYO. It’s nice – and cheap – to bring your own drink with you, whether it’s 3 for a tenner or one straight from your own cellar, a bottle of Bud or if you choose, a Britvic 55.

Thirdly, it’s the atmosphere. The venue isn’t really suited to music concerts but it works wonderfully well as an intimate space where audience and performers can really relate to each other.

Last, although it should be first, there is the music. An Droichead has an enviable reputation for brining the best of Irish traditional music and singing to the Ormeau Road and last Saturfday was no exception.

Individually John McSherry, Pádraig Rynne, Donogh Hennessey and singer Pauline Scanlon are the best there is while they proved collectively they prove how life-affirming traditional music and song can be.

Belfast piper John McSherry and guitarist Donogh Hennessey are old friends from their Lúnasa days together of course and the boys revisited some of the Lúnasa repertoire with reels and jigs that took the breath away. The third part of the musical trinity was master concertina player Pádraig Rynne, now best known for playing with Guidewires. Expressive or driving as the mood dictated, the concertina was perfectly in harmony with John McSherry’s pipes and low whistle.

John and the band – on this their fist time playing as a trio – played some of John’s own compositions from the Soma and At First Light albums while Donogh’s guitar playing too glided from the percussive to the lyrical depending on the tune and especially when he accompanied Pauline Scanlon’s singing.

I love Pauline’s voice and the way she inhabits a song, be it trad in English or Irish, folk or contemporary, with the ould standard The Foggy Dew going down a treat with the full house on Saturday night.

Also mentioned in dispatches should be the lovely set by Brendan Hendry and former Cat Malojian guitarist, Jonny Toman who opened the night up.  Watch out for their album when it comes out later this year.

So another great night at An Droichead.

Next up is Cran – Sean Corcoran, Ronan Browne and Dezi Wilkinson – on March 9. Get your tickets early.

Ulster Suffragettes

Suffragette City – how Belfast feminists won the vote

Dorothy Evans from England (right) and Madge Muir from Scotland (left) were two Suffragettes who were imprisoned in Belfast Jail. The pic is of them driving throughout the city with the flags of the Suffragette movement after being released from prison (where they were on hunger strike). They were re-arrested soon after the pic was taken.

A century ago, a passionate crowd packed the Ulster Hall to hear the leader of the Suffragette Movement, Emmeline Pankhurst demand votes for women.

This year,  on March 2, leading feminist author Dr Margaret Ward will return to the same venue to deliver a lunchtime lecture on the Ulster Suffragettes, a group of women who risked prison and physical attack in their struggle for equality.

Her talk: ‘Prison, Protests and Hunger Strikes: the Ulster Suffragettes’ will discuss the leading figures in the movement and their attacks on bastions of male power that led to many of them being incarcerated in Belfast Jail on the Crumlin Road.

The lecture is the last in the Anna Eggert Lecture Series which examines the impact of women on Northern Ireland. The series has been organised by the Women’s Resource and Development Agency (WRDA) and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Dr Margaret Ward

Dr Ward, who is Director of the WRDA and a well-known author of Irish women’s history, will discuss the wider political situation at a time when Ireland was on the brink of civil war over the Home Rule crisis. Sir Edward Carson was a major target for the anger of the Suffragettes as he fervently opposed the rights of women to vote, while openly advocating rebellion.

She said: “At this time women were becoming increasingly militant and were furious that they were being imprisoned while the UVF led by Sir Edward Carson were gun-running and preparing for civil war but were unpunished. In response, they burned down Abbeylands House in Whiteabbey, where the UVF were drilling their troops.”

Other places targeted by the Suffragettes included the grandstand at Newtownards Race Course, the teahouse at Bellevue Zoo, Cavehill Bowling and Tennis Club and windows at Lisburn Cathedral. The protestors also poured acid on the greens at Fortwilliam Golf club and Knock Golf Club.

Dr Ward said: “The targets were seen as places of male entertainment or male power. Churches were regarded as one of those places. Several women were arrested and housed at Crumlin Road Gaol. Most of them were English or Scottish women who came over as part of the overall campaign, although three or four Irish women were also imprisoned.”

Among those from Great Britain who ended up in jail were Dorothy Evans from England, sent over by the Pankhursts to be the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) organiser for Ulster. Madge Muir, who was jailed with her, was from Scotland.

During her lecture Dr Ward will talk about some of the key personalities in the Suffragette Movement in Ulster at the time, including Dr Elizabeth Bell, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Ireland. She was a leading suffragette who had been imprisoned in Holloway Women’s Prison when she took part in the WSPU’s campaign in England.

There was also Margaret McCoubrey, a Scot married to an Irish trade unionist from the Ormeau Road; Lilian Metge from Lisburn, a very active local militant who was jailed for her part in the attack on Lisburn Cathedral and Elizabeth Priestley McCracken, a writer from the Lisburn Road married to George McCracken, who acted as solicitor for the suffragettes.

The woman protestors were subjected to physical abuse from groups of males opposed to their activities. In Ulster there were around 1,000 members in 20 different Suffragette organisations.

“They held open air meetings in places like Carlisle Circus, Ormeau Park and outside Methodist College. They filled the Grand Opera House and the Ulster Hall. Despite the Home Rule issue, these crowds were made up of Unionist and Nationalist women united in a common cause,” said Dr Ward.

“They were part of an international movement that spanned the US, Australia and Europe. Proportionally the Suffrage Movement had as many members in Ireland as they had in England.

“They were divided on whether or not to be militant. Some of the groups supported direct action, while others were opposed to attacks on property. It was mainly a middle class movement but they tried to encourage working class women to get involved,” she added.

‘Prison, Protests and Hunger Strikes: the Ulster Suffragettes’, the last lecture on the Anna Eggert Series takes place from 12.30-2pm in the Group Space at the Ulster Hall on March 2. A light lunch will be provided.

The lectures are free but as space is limited they must be booked in advance by contacting the WRDA on info@wrda.net or phoning 02890230212.

(With thanks to Gary and Teri Kelly of kellypr.co.uk)

Adrian Dunbar on Carthaginians

 

Hark: You would have been only a kid, Dido.
Dido: There were no kids after Bloody Sunday.

With this year marking the 40th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, there are a number of arts events happening in the city where British paratroopers shot dead 13 Derry citizens – with another later dying four months later – during a Civil Rights march on 30 January 1972.

In my opinion, the most important of these will be seen at the Millenium Forum this week, when Frank McGuinness’ Carthaginians opens for a 5-day run before it goes on tour the length and breadth of Ireland.

It is important because this is the first time a Milennium production will have gone on tour the length and breadth of Ireland from Cork to Coleraine, Dublin to Galway, but it is important too because, as director Adrian Dunbar points out, the play the drama can play its part in furthering the “closure”’ which the city and especially the kith and kin of the victims saw with the publication of the Saville Report and the apology proffered by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, in June 2010.
­
”There has to be redemption and closure of course, and there has been a certain amount of closure but there are still some things left to do,” he told me after rehearsals during the week.

It’s been more than 18,600 days since Bloody Sunday, a huge period of time for the people who lost a son or a father or a friend on that infamous day and by extension, the whole city and the whole nationalist community in the north.

“It hard to accept the loss of a loved one,” says Dunbar, so how much more harrowing was it for those who had their nearest and dearest maligned for such a long time.

Carthaginians is set in Derry cemetery, where a vigil is being held by a small group of people who survived the killing on Bloody Sunday united in the collective guilt of the survivor

The group have been brought together by a woman mourning her dead daughter and all believe that the dead are about to arise from their graves.

Throughout, the characters talk of loss and struggle of a community that is trying to come to terms with the destruction of their native city.

Today, Adrian Dunbar is well-known as a great actor, director, writer and singer but he was a schoolboy of 13 when Bloody Sunday was flashing across his television screen but he remembers it to this day.

“Yeah, I remember the shock of it at the time,” he told me. “It was a bit like 9/11, You couldn’t really believe what you were seeing and you couldn’t believe that it was only 60 odd miles up the road from where you were living in Enniskillen. It was a shock but then everything became very real.”

And from that brutal reality, the Donegal playwright Frank McGuinness, created his deep, poetic, artistic, funny, thought-provoking play.

What was the connection McGuinness saw between Derry and Carthage, an ancient city in the north of Tunisia which was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC?

“Well, Carthage was a city that was destroyed by something but had to re-invent itself. It became a new city and that is what the name translates as. So as well as being something that has been destroyed, it could also be something that was new, a new city.”

Carthage became a new city and with the City of Culture coming in 2013, the All-Ireland Fleadh and all the other work being done in the city, Derry has also the opportunity to run itself into a “new city” to find some sort of redemption for itself.
But Carthaginians isn’t just about Bloody Sunday. The main character, Dido, is a transvestite, a fact that shows that if Derry is to re-invent itself, then there are other issues to be dealt with too.

There is a play-within-a-play which Dido has written, called The Burning Balaclava. It is the comic centre-piece of Carthaginians but while we are laughing, it raises important questions about the Troubles at the same time.

Like all great drama, it takes something limited to a time and space and turns it into something all-embracing.

So at last, Derry is not just telling itself how great it is, it is going to tell the whole of Ireland, Europe and the world.

You can see Carthaginians at:

22 – 25 February 2012 Millennium Forum

27 February 2012 An Grianan, Letterkenny

28 & 29 February 2012 Market Place, Armagh

1 & 2 March 2012 Hawk’s Well, Sligo

3 March 2012 Town Hall Theatre, Galway

5 & 6 March 2012 Riverside Theatre, Coleraine

8 March 2012 Burnavon Theatre, Cookstown

9 & 10 March 2012 Pavillion Theatre, Dublin

12 – 17 March 2012 Civic Theatre, Dublin

22 – 24 March 2012 Belltable Theatre, Limerick

26 – 31 March 2012 Everyman Palace, Cork

2 – 7 April 2012 Lyric Theatre, Belfast

11 & 12 April 2012 Strule Arts Centre, Omagh

13 & 14 April 2012 Ardowen Theatre, Enniskillen

 

The Máirtín O’Connor band

I thought of the title of the Bothy Band album, Out of the Wind, Into the Sun as Máirtín O’Connor, Cathal Hayden and Seamie O’Dowd struck up the first notes at their Rath Celtair Folk Club gig at Down Arts Centre in Downpatrick last night.

My journey to the venue was hampered by rain, darkness, sleet and high winds but once Máirtín and his band started off with a set of reels, the sunshine in their music instantly made the journey worthwhile.

The trio are consummate musicians. Flann O’Brien wrote in The Third Policeman that, because of a molecular transference – mentioned elsewhere on this blog – a man could turn into a bicycle after a prolonged period in the saddle.

He could have come to the same conclusion watching Máirtín, Cathal and Seamie. The difference between a good and a great musician is that the instrument and the great player seem to become one entity in a performance and such is the skill and understanding of players such as these that you sometimes if it is the instrument playing the man rather than the other way around.

(l-r) Cathal Hayden, Máirtín O'Connor and Seamie O'Dowd
(l-r) Cathal Hayden, Máirtín O'Connor and Seamie O'Dowd

Old tunes and newly-composed ones, the deeply traditional to jazz-inflections and classical adaptations bore testimony to the vastness of each player’s musical comfort zone and the full-house at the newly-refurbished Down Arts Centre were treated to some sublime musicianship.

Among the highlights was Rock the Boat, a tune dedicated to film-making maverick Bob Quinn. I closed my eyes for this piece and I swear I head seagulls and smelt seaweed so evocative of a calm day at sea was the music but you just knew the tempo would rise as the wind got into the sails and so it did.

Seamie O’Dowd is of course a brilliant guitarist, but he has a great voice too, and his version of As I Roved Out would give Andy Irvine’s a run for its money.

Cathal Hayden is equally adept on the fiddle and the banjo as he proved on a set of reels on the banjo but, well, everybody knows what a great fiddler he is too, playing everything from the rousing to the plaintive with equal aplomb.

Most of Máirtín O’Connor’s titles have to do with travel, Perpetual Motion, Getting Places, The  Connachtman’s Rambles, and he of course played The Road West and other standards such as Catwalk, Crossroads and others from his solo albums and his various collaborations with a great mix of head, hand and heart.

For an encore, the trio played the tune I was hoping to hear all night, the magnificent Arrival of the Queen of Sheba by that well-known trad-head, Johann Sebastian Bach, earning the band a final roar of approval.

Then it was time to head back into the wind and the rain outside – but the sunshine still glowed in the memory.