January 1st, 2012 – today Joyce’s published works come out of copyright in Europe, which is exciting times for Joyceans. Now hopefully artists and writers will have the freedom to use Joyce’s work to create their own art – for example, Joyce’s play ‘Exiles’ can now be produced without the restrictions or preventions of the notoriously strict Joyce estate. Stage and screen adaptations of Joyce’s work can now be freely produced. And I can copy and paste entire sections of Joyce’s work and publish them on my blog worry free – happy days.

I can’t quite explain why this is my favourite passage from Ulysses, I think it’s the humour and perhaps the lovely turn of phrase, but this always stands out for me whenever I think of Joyce’s blue book of Eccles. It’s a conversation between some men in Barney Kiernan’s pub, just general chit chat, but when they start speaking of a certain Paddy Dignam, confusion ensues:

“So I saw there was going to be bit of a dust. Bob’s a queer chap when the porter’s up in him so says I just to make talk:

– How’s Willy Murray those times, Alf?

– I don’t know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel Street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that.

– You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

– With Dignam, says Alf.

– Is it Paddy? says Joe.

– Yes, says Alf. Why?

– Don’t you know he’s dead? says Joe.

– Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf.

– Ay, says Joe.

– Sure I’m after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

– Who’s dead? says Bob Doran.

– You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

– What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five… What?… and Willie Murray with him, the two of them there near what-doyoucallhim’s… What? Dignam dead?

– What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who’s talking about… ?

– Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are.

– Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

– Paddy? says Alf.

– Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.

– Good Christ! says Alf.

Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.”

Happy New Year!

In saying that though, I would still heartily recommend going to see B for Baby at the Peacock. It’s a really gorgeous play, with fantastic performances from both actors, a great set and the writing is just fabulous. I’ve put the trailer in below, the play runs until November 19th – clickedy click for tickets!

ANYWAYS, you can find out more about Literary Death Match here. It starts at 8.30pm in The Workman’s Club on Thursday, Nov. 3rd, and judging by my experience at the last match I definitely recommend it. Unfortunately I have a friend, who is doing a ‘thing’ at the ICAD Upstarts on Thursday night, so it’s ‘mates before literary death match dates’ I’m afraid.

Following on from this success, Peer Gynt, in a new version by Arthur Riordan, transports the Norweigan tale from the cold environs of late 1800′s Scandinavia to modern Ireland, and this is all done with a great set, and lively performances accompanied by really gorgeous live music by Tarab.

Lasting three hours, the first half of the play was fast paced, full of cheeky humour and lively performances, particularly from Karen Ardiff’s Aase. Closing the first half with a moving scene between mother and son, the relevance of Peer Gynt for an Irish audience became very clear – Irish mothers and their undying love for their sons!

The second half changed in tone, as Rory Nolan’s Peer travels abroad and encounters many strange characters, who ultimately lead him to tackle the question of when he has been himself. While I loved the first half, the second half lost my interest quite a bit – I understand that the plot of Peer Gynt is quite convoluted (in fact the play was originally written to be read and not staged), so it’s not the production’s fault, but the second half is really a let down when compared with the first.

However, the closing scenes were particularly stunning, and I left the theatre feeling like I had experienced something quite special. In my own opinion, the production is extremely creative, Arthur Riordan has done a great job of creating a text that is as relevant as it was to an audience in the late 1800′s, as it is to an audience in Ireland today; the music as I’ve already harped on about (pardon the pun) is absolutely fantastic, and the set design was brilliant.

I think that Rough Magic combining live music with theatre has yet again nailed it when it comes to great theatre. Unfortunately, an overly complicated plot let them down slightly, but the production is still something not to be missed.

Peer Gynt is on until October 16th and tickets can be bought on the Ulster Bank Theatre Festival’s box office.

Anyways, after missing Literary Death Match in June, I made sure to attend the next installment. Held, in the Workman’s Club, the match was less of the geeky and more of the giggles and silliness.

Hosted with much clever humour and lots of aforementioned silliness, by Todd Zuniga, the death match involves three judges – Trevor Byrne, Cathy Davey and Jarleth Regan this time round, and four relatively unheard of, yet very talented, writers – Sarah Maria Griffin, Simon Ashe-Browne, Philip O’Connor and Noel Sweeney. Oddly enough the two poets of the group – Griffin and Sweeney were not pitted against each other – and were instead arranged to contend with two prose writers – Ashe-Browne and O’Connor. This arrangement was left to a bizarre method of throwing pieces of paper bearing each writers names into the audience and letting the audience shout up the names they had caught.

The battles themselves involved each writer reading/performing their work, and then handing over to the judges to decide who should go through to the final. It seems a little unfair to think that writers should be judged on their performance, but actually the judges were very careful not to put too much weight on their performance and did instead judge on their work.

The night was full of laughs and general silliness, including a battle to the death between the two finalists – Griffin and Ashe-Brown, which involved scrunched up paper and a basketball ring.

Griffin did emerge triumphant in the end, and I think that from the get-go the entire audience was behind her. Her performance was very captivating, but her poetry (and I don’t even like poetry that much) was fantastic: funny, quirky and giving great observations on the trials of love. See for yourself.

In all, I’m looking forward to the next death match, whenever that is. I giggled my way through the night and got to experience new writers with fresh material and engaging performances. Clickedy click to see when the next event is on.

Last night’s performance of All That Fall was probably the most unusual piece of theatre I’ve ever been to, not in terms of content, but in terms of its method of deliverance. As I’ve previously mentioned, All That Fall is Beckett’s first ever radio play, and in my opinion, it’s probably one of his most accessible plays. Simply put, it tells the story of Mrs. Rooney who meets a variety of characters along her journey to meet her husband off the train. However, this piece of theatre is told only through the medium of sound. The actors involved have long since finished their performances in recording studios, and the performance comes to the audience through the speakers located around the theatre.

Pan Pan have really tried something new with their production, and the lighting and sound effects were really spectacular, particularly in the closing scenes – that bit really freaked the beans outta me!!

Putting together a production that relies solely on lighting and audio is a massive challenge for any theatre company, and I reckon Pan Pan had it pretty well taken care of. I do feel like the actual recording they played could have done with upping the ante in terms of the ways in which the actors delivered their lines. Nowadays audiences are used to having both audio and visual mediums to entertain them in a theatre production and when there isn’t a physical actor on the stage in front of you, it becomes difficult to tune yourself in completely to the audio in order to fully follow a story.

I spoke to a friend afterwards about this, and he put it pretty well – “they underplayed it in parts”. I think to engage an audience fully when relying on just one main medium – audio, this medium needs to compensate for the lack of the actors’ physical presence, for example stressing words stronger than you would usually or varying the tone a bit more.

My friend will kill me for publishing this, but she fell asleep during it and I spoke to another person afterwards who took a bit of a snooze also. I found closing my eyes helped me to really concentrate on the actors’ voices. I think this was because during theatre productions I’m used to following the actors around the stage with my eyes, so I was looking around too much and not listening to the audio. However, closing your eyes in a darkened room, whilst well settled into a comfy chair is likely to lead you off into the land of nod!

It was also very weird not clapping for a troupe of actors  taking their bows at the close of the performance … I think the audience didn’t really know what to do at the end and just stood around awkwardly and then gradually drifted out.

I’ve seen two of Pan Pan’s other productions, and this one came across as their most polished production to date, there were some stunning effects with the lighting and for the most part the audio was great, I just wish it had been more of an engaging production.

The production runs until Sept 2nd and you can find out more about attending on the Project Arts Centre website.

However, the one play of Beckett’s that I really loved when I first read it is All That Fall. It’s probably one of the most accessible of Beckett’s plays and his first written for radio. I’ve heard a radio recording of it before (by the BBC I think) and it’s excellent, laugh out loud humour. So, needless to say I can’t wait to see Pan Pan’s version of it at the Project pretty soon. I read an article by Eithne Shorthall in the Sunday Times’ Culture magazine last week and it looks like a match made in heaven, with all the darkness of Beckett and the weirdness of Pan Pan. And I have heard from a very unreliable source that they’re installing super comfy chairs in the Project for the “projection performance” of the recording, designed to recreate the experience of family and friends gathering around the radio or wireless years ago.

In direct contrast to that desire for the old fashioned way of life, is the Project’s new marketing technique – discounts by tweets! If you tweet about buying a ticket to the show, you get a 10% discount (and that can even be on top of a student discount) – fantastic stuff! Click here to tweet and book, or just book. Show runs Aug 22 – Sept 2.

Needless to say Cillian Murphy gave a really great performance, his storytelling abilities are fantastic and he was so well able to bring all the different characters in Thomas’ head to life, that in some ways I think if it was just Thomas and his tape recorders on stage, the play would have been more impressive to me. I know I’m definitely in a minority though when I say that. I’m very aware that many have been hugely impressed by the production.

The story itself is quite absorbing – Thomas Magill holds huge resentment for the variety of characters he interacts with from his small home town and details the sinful activities of each in his notebook, in between replaying over and over again interviews he has taped with a whole host of characters – think Krapp’s Last Tape minus the bananas.

However Thomas does not just judge others, he also punishes some, with great violence which reveals a darker and more terrifying side to this otherwise quirky and entertaining character. Predicably Thomas goes too far with his punishments, and his neighbours decide they’ve had enough.

My taste in theatre particularly relishes a stage stripped bare with very little props or special effects (with a few exceptions of course) – for instance I thought the horse was too much of a prop in Sam Shepard’s “Kicking a Dead Horse”, yeah I know, I’m a weirdo. I love a monologue where the actor’s story telling abilities are allowed to ring true. For the most part this is what happened in Misterman but there were a few moments when I thought the production got a little too fussy and distracted from the colourful stories being told by a very animated Thomas. Thomas is such a lively, Walter Mittyesque character that I think he alone could carry the story – for me, I’m not so sure that things falling from the ceiling, rain machines and roll out grass were completely necessary.

As I said, I do know I’m in the minority that thinks that and I was won over by a great story being told by someone with the ability to completely transform themselves into a multitude of characters on stage; it’s just that at that point, everything else was superflous.

Anyways, traumatic pet bereavements aside; I am very much looking forward to tomorrow because I’m taking a trip to Galway to see Landmark Production’s Misterman. I’m going to put my hands up and say I’ve never actually see an Enda Walsh play before (ok go on, shoot me!), however I did see Cillian Murphy in the film version of Disco Pigs and was suitably impressed so that kinda counts doesn’t it?

I have however seen a Landmark Productions’ play before – Knives and Hens which to date is tying with The Peacock’s production of Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow as the best play I’ve ever seen.

I’ve done the mandatory Twitter search for “Misterman” and it seems to be going down a treat, and with the play completely booked out I’m glad I managed to secure a ticket to this production. It’s a pity it’s not coming to Dublin or going abroad – even to London, but I’m guessing Cillian Murphy isn’t exactly stuck for work at the mo’.

Does it ever strike anyone how weird play trailers are? I dunno, there has to be a more creative way of doing a trailer for a play. I’m not criticising Landmark directly, they’re doing exactly what every other production company does – but surely, coming from an industry full of creative people they could come up with something a bit different and more engaging than a montage of quotes and images – I guess budget restrains creativity in this regard.

Anyways, non engaging trailer below:

Literary Death Match – Friday June 24th (doors at 8pm, show at 9.05pm) at the Workman’s Club, and it’s just €7 in.

Judges for the evening include Mark O’Halloran (of Adam & Paul fame), comedian Miriam Elia and actress Kelly Campbell. They will judge the literary ramblings of  poet Niamh MacAlister, writer and director Virginia Gilbert, comedian Gareth Stack, and performer Stephen James Smith.

Unfortunately I can’t go, because fortunately I need to go home and pack for my amazing and fantastic trip to Australia – 3 whole weeks – wahoo!

If anyone’s going, lettuce know how it goes – looks like a super geeky fun thing to do. More details here: http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/upcoming-events/june-24-2011.html

To find out more about what it’s all about or what to expect, watch the video below: